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Studies in Dance (465-0-20)

Instructors

Susan A Manning

Meeting Info

Wirtz 235 Seminar Room 1: Wed 9:30AM - 11:50AM

Overview of class

This course examines how artists and scholars have theorized dance modernisms. Starting with choreographers long canonized for their abstract aesthetics—Vaslav Nijinsky, George Balanchine, and Martha Graham—the class asks how their aesthetics negotiated the social identities of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and nationality. The course then turns to alternate embodiments of modernism and social identity in the dances of Katherine Dunham, Waldeen, Ramiro Guerra, Rex Nettleford, Saddayakko, Michio Ito, Takaya Eguchi, Rukmini Devi, and Uday Shankar. In the end, this course proposes an understanding of dance modernisms as intersecting networks across the Global South and Global North. Open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students. This course fulfills a core requirement for the new graduate cluster in Critical Dance Studies.