Dance 394CI - Emerging Choreographers

Through meetings weekly with various professors and professionals in the field, each student will be guided in drawing from their studies in various fields at the university. Emphasis is in integrating the student?s body of knowledge with their experience and community in the five college dance department. Workshops and presentations in lighting, staging, videotaping, creativity, collaboration, and production to help each student prepare the most exciting work possible for the concert stage. Each week students will have a seminar in a different area affecting choreography and choreographic choices, with reading, writing, and journaling assignments, that will help students reflect on their own artistic process, and discover the many resources on and off-campus. Students will use knowledge from previous courses taken across campus, from music and art classes, to writing, science, and analytical reasoning courses. Oral communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and interdisciplinary perspective-taking at a more advanced level will be part of the weekly workshops. Satisfies the Integrative Experience requirement for BA-Dance and BFA-Dance majors.

Open to DANCE and BFA-DANCE majors only. For this semester, we will embrace Sondra Fraleigh?s text, Dancing Identity; Metaphysics in Motion to guide us through a journey of becoming, possibility and presence. Metaphysics as a branch of philosophy, studies the nature of being - existence, time, space movement and causality. Using these principles we will ask questions about how we continue to define ourselves as artists and people while coming back to our larger experiences in the University, weaving the pieces together to craft the whole. Not unlike the practice of making dances, these questions reference the philosophical, compositional and the practical. How do you create your philosophy for both process and finished product? How do you set up an environment for both rehearsal and stage? How do you develop tools to know your own creative voice and express it with truth, honesty, thought and conviction?

Intensive seminars will be held sporatically throughout the semester.