Introduction to Dance Studies

This course approaches dance and dancing bodies as active sites of meaning-making—places where history, identity, politics, and imagination are negotiated through movement. Drawing on dance studies, dance history, performance studies, and ethnographic approaches, students will develop tools for observing, analyzing, and interpreting dance both as an art form and as a social practice that circulates onstage, in everyday life, and across media. Alongside reading scholarly texts and viewing live and recorded performances, students will engage in guided movement practices that treat the body as a mode of inquiry rather than simply an object of study. Through these embodied experiments, students will explore how knowledge is produced through sensation, repetition, gesture, and kinesthetic awareness. The course examines how dance participates in broader conversations around race, gender, sexuality, class, and power, and how specific dance forms emerge from distinct cultural and historical conditions. No prior dance training is required, but students should expect to move regularly and to reflect critically on their own embodied experiences. The course culminates in a final movement-based project that integrates analytical and creative work.