Christopher Salango

This studio-based course with a seminar component offers an overview of the formal practices and contemporary trends that shape dance as an art form. The class is designed for students who seek to gain a working knowledge of dance and deepen their physical skills. A range of contemporary dance forms and practices will be covered. Topics may include modern dance, hip hop, partnering techniques, social dance forms, improvisation, somatic practices, dance composition, and more. Lectures, viewings, and discussion will support experiential practice components. No previous experience with dance or performance is required. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

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.

This studio-based course with a seminar component offers an overview of the formal practices and contemporary trends that shape dance as an art form. The class is designed for students who seek to gain a working knowledge of dance and deepen their physical skills. A range of contemporary dance forms and practices will be covered. Topics may include modern dance, hip hop, partnering techniques, social dance forms, improvisation, somatic practices, dance composition, and more. Lectures, viewings, and discussion will support experiential practice components. No previous experience with dance or performance is required. This course meets the general education requirement in the arts.

This course traces the creative, political, and scholarly legacies of Katherine Dunham (1909-2006), exploring the immeasurable impact of her career as a dancer, choreographer, anthropologist, activist, and creator of the Dunham Technique. Students will merge embodied practice with in-class discussions of theoretical texts, questioning the role of Black dance traditions of the 20th century in helping shape transnational and Black diaspora studies. In keeping with the geographic scope of Dunham’s practice and research, we will engage Black dance and social movements of the Caribbean, Latin America, the United States, and beyond. Central concepts of performance ethnography, Caribbean studies, and Black feminisms will anchor an investigation of dance as an intellectual process and as social action. We will contemplate the methods of artist-activists and artist-scholars in traversing disciplines and foregrounding new fields of thought. This course will balance training in Dunham Technique with field studies, archival research, and short choreographic experiments while taking advantage of concurrent city-wide events celebrating Dunham’s legacy. No previous dance experience is required, and students should be prepared to engage through the body as well as intellectually in each class.