Dance 377 - ADV STUD HIST & AESTHETICS DAN

This course will explore a specific idea, concept, period, person, or event important in the history and/or aesthetics of dance. Topics will vary depending on the instructor?s research and expertise. This course looks at the vast and diverse cultural and aesthetic landscape of dance in the millennium and the new breed of self-conscious and socially-conscious dance artists who insist on speaking directly to their own generation. Tracing the roots of new-age dance back to the political and social environment of the 1960s, we will investigate how new-age postmodernists pursued radically different methods, materials, and strategies for provoking new ideas about dance, the body and corporeal aesthetics, and produced new theories about the relationship between cultural forms and the construction of identities. As we look at the freshest cutting-edge dance works, we will query how non-narrative dance focuses on the body as an instrument with unlimited possibilities; heterosexuality, homosexuality, and androgyny constitute a revised gender spectrum; site-specific works illuminate various spaces for the viewer; works from culturally-specific traditions can be watched and evaluated; people move with each other in space when there is no clear beginning, middle, or end; and how dance theater and content not within our own sphere of experience can instigate new frames and viewing positions.

Topic: New Millennium Choreography: Themes/Questions/ Dialogue.