From Kick Line to Krumping: 20th Century Dance in America THEA 1392-24780, TTh 1-2:15

Instructor: Ariel Nereson

Course Description This course is designed to develop the students awareness of dance as an area of artistic practice and cultural production in the United States during the twentieth century. Students will be introduced to basic movement analysis terminology and basic categorizations of dance forms based on genre distinction and anthropological study. While these distinctions may help us talk about different kinds of dance, it is a foundational assumption of this course that generic distinctions are not fixed, but rather in constant negotiation in performance. The course will focus on the intersections between dance and theater, visual art, film and music as these forms developed alongside one another during the modernist and postmodernist movements of the twentieth century. Students will also learn how to contextualize dance within broader cultural movements of its historical time and place. A persistent question we will be asking is how different schools of dance technique embodied specific views on racial, gender, sexual, and class identities, and how dancing as a practice and individual dancers themselves confront(ed) and contest(ed) these views. Additionally, a major thread of inquiry throughout the course will be the contributions of African-Americans to twentieth-century dance and their historical (in)visibility.