Results for DANCE

This course introduces students to various approaches to studying dance in a humanities context. We will explore how people create meaning through dance and how dance, in turn, shapes social norms, political institutions, and cultural practices across time and space. The course's structure challenges the Western/non-Western binary that still pervades many academic disciplines by comparing dance forms across the globe on the basis of functional similarities. At the same time, we will keep in mind the unequal power hierarchies shaping our modern world, and therefore we will examine how and why certain forms have become delineated as 'Western' and others as 'world' or 'ethnic,' despite similarities in movement, meaning, or purpose.

This course introduces students to dance as an important cultural force in the African Diaspora. From capoeira in Brazil to dance hall in Jamaica to hip hop in the United States and Ghana, we will analyze dance as a form of resistance to slavery, colonialism, and oppression; as an integral component of community formation; and as a practice that shapes racial, gendered, and national identity. We will explore these topics through readings, film viewings, and movement workshops (no previous dance experience required). Students will have the option to do a creative performance as part of their final project.

Stanford Lecturer and Choreographer Alex Ketley will work with the students on the creation of a new dance for film. The class will consist of a number of rehearsals in the studio where the students will explore Ketley's movement vocabulary. When this movement material is built, the dancers will then take the material throughout the Stanford campus to be filmed with a curiosity about how different contexts and environments effect the quality and presentation of the movement. After the film is shot, Ketley will create the film, but also give all the participating students access to the raw footage in the event that they are interested in making personal edits of the material. Students with a background in ballet, modern, or hip-hop are encouraged to participate. Students with limited dance training are welcome and are encouraged to email the choreographer so that they can have a dialog about what the class will entail. Any questions can be directed to Lecturer Alex Ketley at aketley@stanford.edu.

Stanford Lecturer and Choreographer Alex Ketley has had a long history working on dance pieces integrating dance for people with and without disability. The politics involved in working with dance and performance as it functions in the realm of disability are very potent. Society has inherent prejudices and fears when it comes to disability, and engaging this directly through the creation of dance pieces is a way to challenge assumptions of who can dance, and what a dancing body can look like. The class will function as a studio class, where dancers with and without disability will learn choreography as well as different improvisational and collaborative strategies towards the goal of the creation of a new dance work. Discussions and reading will also be involved around the topic of how the body, in all its different configurations, lends itself and informs artistic exploration and creation. Any questions can be directed to Lecturer Alex Ketley at aketley@stanford.edu.

Students from diverse dance styles (ballet to hip-hop to contemporary) participate in the dance-making/remix process and collaborate with musicians, visual artists, designers and spoken word artists, to co-create multidisciplinary fully produced production and installation. Open to student artists of different genres, styles, disciplines and levels. By audition and/or discussion with the instructor.

Students who participate in the Chocolate Head-Space will engage in a dance and music activities and collaborative crowd-sourced performance on the Stanford campus. A mobile app using GPS data would be implemented to fellow Chocolate Heads students-- prompting them to engage, perform and collaborate with others in that space. Students( and audiences) would be encouraged to learn a piece (or multiple pieces with friends) and record themselves performing in a different places on campus. No prior experience is required.

In this course, students will be given the opportunity to be part of the development of choreography for the Stanford TAPS Spring production of Evita. They will learn about tango, salsa, musical theater dance and waltz as we construct combinations and pieces that will ultimately go into the show. Auditions for Evita will take place in week 1 of winter, but students enrolled in the course need not be in the cast to participate. On the flipside, students hoping to be cast are strongly encouraged to consider enrolling in the course. No previous dance experience is required.

Criticism is art. It therefore must aspire to reach the heights, depths and strange in-betweens it grapples with in the art of others. Yet criticism owes a singular responsibility to these others, and to the wider culture it seeks to interrogate. Our interrogation will be generated by dance and performance criticism, with possible forays into live visual art, theater, hybrid forms and whatever else we think might suit our purposes. Various methodologies will be debated and employed throughout the semester, as students are encouraged to begin (or continue) developing personal philosophies and voices through their writing. Our meetings will be hands-on affairs, guided by student experiments. ¿Experiments¿ is a key word¿this class will function like a laboratory, an introduction to an unruly literary art form that is open to all individuals with an interest in better understanding themselves and their world through words and art.

An introductory class in exploring the different ways of approaching choreography. Bobbi will create an original work on the students through out the term that will focus on the cognitive and emotional experience of movement.nnGuest instructor Bobbi Jene Smith is a former dancer with the internationally acclaimed Batsheva Dance Company, and a principal collaborator in the works of choreographer Ohad Naharin, as well as one of the world's most recognized teachers of GaGa and Naharin repertory.

This singular performance opportunity and workshop is inspired by the stunning abstract expressionist art found in the Anderson Collection at Stanford opening in fall 2014 that includes Robert Frank¿s photography at the Cantor, and the special Anderson Collection of abstract expressionist paintings shown in the brand new Anderson building at Stanford. n nThe period between the 1950¿s and early 1960's was a rich time for painting, dance, music, conceptual and interdisciplinary art movements. Through this course we will consider how contemporary dancers/musicians/models/performers might express these ideas as a direct response the impulses seen and felt in the art of this period.n nThe objective is to consider and integrate historical and contemporary ideas into the choreography, music and fashion performance.n nCulminating performance installation will be presented during the fall quarter 2 nights -- October 29th and October 30th, 2014 at the Cantor Arts Center and at the Anderson Collection -- in celebration and commemoration of the openings of the Robert Frank exhibition and the Abstract Expressionists art collection.

Beginning Modern Dance appeals to the beginning mover with little or no experience in dance and will focus on developing a coordinated and technical dancer. We will use exercises from Limon, Cunningham, and Ballet techniques in training, but will not focus on any one-dance form. . This class deals with the notion of movement as a mode of expression. We will try to find ways through movement to render as clearly as possible concepts central to the human experience.

This introductory dance course combines the fundamentals of contemporary dance technique and exercises from various movement practices, such as yoga and Tai chi. Liquid Flow implies the continuum from the dance of the everyday to the studio to the stage. Students will develop articulation, flexibility and "grace", learn contemporary, popular and classic dance vocabulary, and gain freedom dancing with others. Designed for beginners, we welcome student movers from diverse dance traditions, non-dancers, athletes, and more advanced dancers, who desire fluidity in their daily life, from thought to action.

By learning various dance improvisation forms across cultures, students will develop techniques to gain a deep understanding of generating movement from the inside-out, inspired by conceptual strategies from master improvisors while harnessing that potential for creating dances. Guest dancer/choreographer workshops and Dance Jams enhance the learning experience. All Levels welcome.

Introduction to non-competitive social ballroom dance. The partner dances found in today's popular culture include 3 kinds of swing, 3 forms of waltz, tango, salsa, cha-cha and nightclub two-step. The course also includes tips for great partnering, enhancing creativity, developing personal style, stress reduction, musicality, and the ability to adapt to changing situations. The emphasis on comfort, partnering and flexibility enables students to dance with partners whose experience comes from any dance tradition.

Fundametals of ballet technique including posture, placement, the foundation steps, and ballet terms; emphasis on the development of coordination, balance, flexibility, sense of lines, and sensitivity to rhythm and music. May be repeated for credit.

Choreographer Hope Mohr/Denae Hannah will set contemporary work from her company repertory as part of an alumni commission initiative . Rehearsal Autumn Quarter. Culminate in performance on Winter Quarter concert. Participation by audition and/or invitation (Rehearsal Director: Diane Frank)

Steps and styling in one of America's 21st-century vernacular dance forms. May be repeated for credit.

Steps and styling in one of America's 21st-century vernacular dance forms. May be repeated for credit.

Students develop their own choreographic projects-from initial concept, though rehearsal phase, to culminating performance - under close faculty guidance. The course focuses on choreographic process, with no restrictions on movement vocabulary or movement style. Dancer/choreographers of all forms and genres are strongly encouraged to participate. This course is required for students working towards performance on Divisional concerts. Work includes individual mentoring within rehearsal setting as well as outside of rehearsal. May be repeated for credit.

What happens when Hip Hop meets "Fosse", "Aida", "Dream Girls" and "In the Heights"?nThe most amazing collaboration of Hip Hop styles adapted to some of the most memorable Broadway Productions.nThis class will explore the realm between Hip Hop Dance and the Broadway Stage. Infusing Acting thru dance movement and exploring the Art of Lip Sync thru Hip Hop Dance styles.

Developing Creativity In Dance Robert Moses Course description: This introductory course explores the creative process in dance. There are many effective ways to approach creative expression, and this course will utilize multiple approaches, both in series and in parallel. Parallel processing and multitasking will become the dominant mode as rational, intuitive and physical skills merge. Processes will include changing perception, design by analogy, quick adaptation to changing situations, musicality, overcoming creative blocks, and stress reduction to relax into a more creative state of mind. Class sessions will be primarially practice, with two-thirds of the class time spent in the dance studio, creating ways of moving, to embody the concepts that will be detailed in the discussion sessions. Previous dance experience will not be required to take this course. Rationale: Dance in the University plays a vital role in the experience of self-definition. The opportunity to create dance offers students the means to experience the body in new ways through diverse forms of movement. Students come to understand dance as a conduit for impression and expression in society. It becomes a means of giving physical voice to the most private and powerful aspects of an individual's understanding of himself in relation to the world.

Structured studio practice reviewing the basics of ballet technique including posture, placement, the foundation steps and ballet terms, and progressing to more complex positions and combination of steps. Emphasis is placed on improving forms, developing coordination and connectivity, securing balance, increasing strength, flexibility, sense of lines, and sensitivity to rhythm and music.

Rigorous daily practice that will challenge and expand students¿ understanding of and perspective on the art form. Focus on strengthening technique, exploring ballet as an expressive form and performing art, and developing an artistic voice.

This intermediate studio dance practice class is primarily grounded in training practices of Merce Cunningham, with additional technical work drawn from other major modern dance training techniques. Participation in this class will increase strength, speed, line, amplitude and rhythmic acuity/musicality. Dance technique will be supplemented by other studio experiences that will increase awareness of dance as an art form. Studio work will be supplemented by readings, video viewings, concert attendance, and lively participation in classes with guest artists. Students must be ready to work at an intermediate level.

This advanced dance technique class is grounded in the technical training, aesthetic sensibilities, and choreographic processes of Merce Cunningham, American dancer/master choreographer. This studio work at an advanced level will build technical strength, speed, line, and rhythmic acuity/musicality and amplitude in dancing. The class will provides solid technical training useful and applicable to other forms of dancing. Dancers must be ready to work at an high intermediate/advanced level to enroll. Studio practice will be supplemented by readings, video viewing, concert attendance, and participation in special workshops with guest artists. Cunningham-based technique is particularly well-suited to dancers with prior training in ballet technique; dancers with prior training in any form are welcome. May be repeated for credit.

Intermediate non-competitive social ballroom dance. The partner dances found in today's popular culture include Lindy hop, Viennese waltz, hustle, traveling foxtrot, plus intermediate/advanced levels of cross-step waltz and nightclub two-step. The course continues further tips for great partnering, enhancing creativity, developing personal style, stress reduction, musicality, and the ability to adapt to changing situations. Prerequisite: Dance 46.

Swing dancing: the early Lindy of the 1920s; 6- and 8-count Lindy hop, Shag, Big Apple, 1950s Rock 'n' Roll swing, disco Hustle and West Coast Swing. Partnering and improvisation. Swing's crosscultural influences and personal creativity. May be repeated for credit.

Intermediate Ballet at Stanford is designed for students who have done ballet in their past, but maybe have stepped away from the form for awhile. The class focuses on technique, musicality, vocabulary, coordination and artistic choice. The class looks at ballet as an enduring and vibrant movement system that can be used for classical purposes or as a way to strengthen and diversify the movement vocabulary inherent in other dance forms like modern, hip-hop, or social dancing. Any questions can be directed to Lecturer Alex Ketley at aketley@stanford.edu.

Advanced Ballet at Stanford is offered for students who are interested in rigorous, complex, and artistically compelling ballet training. The class focuses on technique, but in the broad sense of how ballet as a movement system can be used for a wide range of dance disciplines. The class honors the historical training legacy that defines classical ballet, but is in no way shackled to that history in an antiquated fashion. The students are encouraged to explore the form as artists, to question its foundations, and find their own sense of agency within classical dance. Students with a strong background in ballet are encouraged to come, but also students with less ballet training are welcome as long as they have an email dialog with the lecturer beforehand. Any questions can be directed to Lecturer Alex Ketley at aketley@stanford.edu

Interested in putting your hands in the clay? In this hands-on course, dancers will investigate and re-choreograph some of Robert Moses' signature works. Robert and long-term dancers in his company, Robert Moses' Kin, will collaboratively guide students in intensive studio sessions as they revisit the significant issues, techniques, and directions in such seminal works as Word of Mouth, The Soft Sweet Smell of Firm Warm Things, and Helen. Elements used to create the works will be re-investigated and re-framed through the lens of the students' experience and perspective. Students will coordinate a showcase of excerpts of their remolded choreography.nnThis class will utilize the language of Robert Moses' repertory to train dancers in the basics of Moses' movement vocabulary. Students will improve and reinforce technical proficiency, artistic range, and performance skills. In addition, students will expand their movement range and vocabulary in a manner that demonstrates an increase in strength, agility, flexibility, and endurance through classical ballet and contemporary modern dance techniques.

Intermediate non-competitive social ballroom dance: intermediate/advanced waltz, redowa, Bohemian National Polka, intermediate/advanced tango, cha-cha, and salsa. The course continues further tips for great partnering, enhancing creativity, developing personal style, stress reduction, musicality, and the ability to adapt to changing situations.Prerequisite: Dance 46. Dance 156 may immediately follow Dance 46.

What is physical intelligence? How could we cultivate it? What technologies can extend sensory awareness, and which can suppress it? How can better understanding of human movement impact a creative/design process? The term 'hybrid action¿ introduces the notion of movement, expressed in both the physical and virtual worlds. Through interactive technologies, such as the Kinect and camera tracking, and literature from multiple fields, this class takes human movement as a practice-based, creative, theoretical, historical, and philosophical realm of study. The course introduces basic principles and practices of body awareness as a way to extend one¿s 'physical intelligence¿ and asks how studying movement can inform creative practices from computer programming to engineering to choreography, as well as applications in health and rehabilitation, cognitive and neuroscience, philosophy and literature. The class emphasizes hands-on, individual and collaborative projects through research and prototyping.

The ballerina occupies a unique place in popular imagination as an object of over-determined femininity as well as an emblem of extreme physical accomplishment for the female dancer. This seminar is designed as an investigation into histories of the ballerina as an iconographic symbol and cultural reference point for challenges to political and gender ideals. Through readings, videos, discussions and viewings of live performances this class investigates pivotal works, artists and eras in the global histories of ballet from its origins as a symbol of patronage and power in the 15th century through to its radical experiments as a site of cultural obedience and disobedience in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Topics related to the discipline of dance. May be repeated for credit.

Individual supervision of off-campus internship. Prerequisite: consent of instructor.

This class works collaboratively with a local juvenile hall to use civic engagement and performance to explore the aesthetic, cultural and legal issues in the lives of incarcerated youth. In the process students gain an understanding of incarceration on an immediate and personal scale. Taught jointly by a Dance Studies scholar and a lawyer specializing in Juvenile Justice, we will consider what unique understandings are possible if we position the arts as central to an exploration of punishment, rehabilitation and recidivism in America. The course will examine case studies, historical and contemporary narratives about the social, imaginative and behavioral change possible through arts programs in prison.Half of the class meetings will be in Hillcrest Juvenile Hall in San Mateo, where our class will join with a group of 13-18 year old youths currently detained there. Dance will be used to help shape their individual expressive voices, and ours, through collaborative hip hop dance classes. Books to be read are Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson, and Last Chance in Texas by John Hubner.

Individual project on the work of any choreographer, period, genre, or dance-related topic. May be repeated for credit.

Gaga is a movement language created by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. It is the main mode of training for the Batsheva Dance Company in Tel Aviv, Israel, which is directed by Naharin. Gaga provides the person with an experience of freedom and pleasure while emphasizing sensation through a wide variety of multi-textured movements. The Gaga language is dynamic, fluid, and continually evolving. It connects you to your groove, passion, and physicality.nnGuest instructor Bobbi Jene Smith is a former dancer with the internationally acclaimed Batsheva Dance Company, and a principal collaborator in the works of choreographer Ohad Naharin, as well as one of the world's most recognized teachers of GaGa and Naharin repertory.

Lyric Contemporary appeals to the creative mover with little or no experience in dance and will focus on developing a fluid coordinated dancer. The work in this course does not assume a technical or conceptual proficiency in any dance form. It does presume you have some interest in dance forms including Jazz, Hip Hop, Ballet, and Modern or at least have a strong interest in one or more of the arts. This class deals with the notion of movement as a mode of expression. We will try to find ways through movement to render as clearly as possible concepts central to the human experience.

Series of directed studio practices focusing on the creation of a formal choreography to be integrated in the Dance Division repertory and performed during the Division Winter Concert. The course is designed to engage students in acquiring interpretive and expressive skills working one on one with a choreographer, increase adaptability of artistic technique and style, develop knowledge of movement possibilities and artistic voices, and cultivate presence and authority as performers. The new work, Swan Lake Recalibrated, will be a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional ballet, created by choreographer Alex Ketley. Students recruited via audition.nnContact: aketley@stanford.edu

The repertory of Hip Hop history through steps and choreography. May be repeated for credit.

This Choreography course is designed to expose students to fundamental techniques and approaches used in the creation of dance. All of the basic elements of dance composition will be creatively touched upon including: style, form, theme and variation, narrative versus abstract methods of expression, elements of time, quality and use of space, motif and repetition. These different tools will be illustrated and the options and restrictions of each will be explored. Practical assignments will culminate in a performance of work generated and arranged by the instructor and students. The course is recommended for all students interested in the artistic process in a creative situation.

This movement-based introductory course to site-specific dance/performance art investigates one of humanity's basic drives: to build and express relationship to the external environment. Using their bodies as sensory information-gathering tools , student will examine the qualitative aspects of various sites, indoor and outdoor. Using skills/knowledge acquired through studio work supplemented by readings/ concerts/videos & films of site specific works, students will create short culminating projects/works in physical conversation with campus sites, building upon both the concrete and imaginative dimensions of place.

In everyday life we are constantly moving from the subjects of the public, to its objects--from seeing to being seen. This performance- creation, interactive seminar explores everyday/pedestrian movement as articulated through the language of dance. Looking through the interpretive lenses of fashion, dance and visual representation, we critically consider how we observe others and ourselves in the world, and how we respond performatively or unconsciously. In addition to seminars and rehearsals, we will host guest lectures by curators, artists and professors: incorporate fieldwork research in museums as sites of display, and discuss scholarly texts and films. A performance installation with dance, fashion and visual display will ensue in the galleries at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford, in conjunction with the Fall 2013 exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: Three Decades of Photography and Video.

This course provides instruction in the fundamentals of the goal-oriented body in the artistic practice. Emphasis will be placed on suing sports movement as a base for training in dance.

Students practice, compose and combine the languages of dance, gestural movement, music and text, to render complete expression in performance. Suitable for dancers, actors, spoken word artists and triple threat performers to devise original performance, dance and theater, culminating in an end of quarter showing.

Two hundred years of waltzing: Regency era waltz (1816), Vienna in the 1830s, redowa and mazurka waltz variations, waltz in 5/4 time, the Russian Mazurka Quadrille, pivots, 20th-century hesitation waltz, tango waltz, Parisian valse musette, 1930s Boston, 1950s Bandstand-style waltz, swing waltz. Each form is explored for possible adaptation to today's non-competitive social dancing. May be repeated for credit two times.

A quarter-long exploration of improvisation in relationship to identity and race in the 21st century in which students investigate new dynamics of doing and thinking identities through the arts. Panel discussions, performances, and talks that engage critically with the theme, concept, and practice of improvising identity across a variety of contexts and genres such as jazz music, modern dance, contemporary art, race comedy, food, and hip-hop poetry/freestyle. Strategies that artists/scholars have used to overturn essentializing notions of identity in theory and practice.

This seminar investigates how moving bodies are compelling agents of social, cultural, and political change.Through readings, videos, discussions and viewings of live performances this class questions the impact of social conflict and war on selected 20th and 21st century dances and dance practices. This class asks to what extent dance, in its history as well as contemporary development, is linked to concepts of the political and conflict.

What do seventeenth-century choreography and dramaturgy contribute to (mean to) choreographic and theatrical modernity? How can we explain the recurrent baroque phenomenon across the twentieth century -- becoming particularly prominent in the 1980s -- beyond the historicist accounts of theatrical reconstruction? How does the baroque locate itself within cultural modernity?nnThis seminar asks this question of choreography at several junctures: The analysis of seventeenth century baroque spectacle that fashioned dance and theatre into political tools of monarchical sovereignty; Twentieth-century literature on the Baroque that destabilizes received notions of subjectivity and political sovereignty; Twentieth-century choreography and film that deploys baroque figures and techniques.nnThus, our material shall range from seventeenth-century dance and theater to contemporary dance, film and literature.

Explores how indigeneity is expressed and embodied through performance on the global stage.

The course will examine and engage with dance cultures from around the world. Through historical and theoretical readings, film screenings, and viewing performances, this course aims to introduce students to a number of theoretical issues central to the study of dance across various disciplines. As a class we set out to explore how dance is more than a set of organized bodily movements, pleasurable to both do and watch. We will consider what cultural work dance performance accomplishes in the world.

A quarter-long exploration of improvisation in relationship to identity and race in the 21st century in which students investigate new dynamics of doing and thinking identities through the arts. Panel discussions, performances, and talks that engage critically with the theme, concept, and practice of improvising identity across a variety of contexts and genres such as jazz music, modern dance, contemporary art, race comedy, food, and hip-hop poetry/freestyle. Strategies that artists/scholars have used to overturn essentializing notions of identity in theory and practice.