41 - 50 of 57 results for: DANCE

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

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 social dancing as a political practice, and the dance floor as a place where race, ethnicity, class status, and sexuality are formed and contested. While many students may be familiar with salsa, and can imagine how it produces particular kinds of Latin/a feminities, this course asks students to expand the notion of social dancing beyond partner-dancing spheres. Course materials will focus on dance practices from the late-nineteenth century to present-day, ranging from rural Louisiana dancehalls to NYC nightclubs to Iranian backyards. We will examine how dances become racially coded (e.g., what makes a dance black or Latin@?), and understand how categories such as gender, class, and regionality intersect with such racializations. Students will engage in a range of activities, including reading, viewing films, and participating in occasional movement workshops (no previous dance experience required). Each student¿s final project will require independent, sustained, ethnographic research in a social dance setting of choice (e.g., student dance club, yoga studio, aerobics class, or YouTube).

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.

This course will introduce students to the ways in which the Middle East has been represented and performed by/in the 'West' through dance, performance, and popular culture in both historical and contemporary contexts. A brief look through today's media sources exposes a wide range of racialized and gendered representations of the Middle East that shape the way the world imagines the Middle East to be. As postcolonial theorist Edward Said explains, the framework we call Orientalism establishes the ontological character of the Orient and the Oriental as inherently `Other'. Starting with 19th century colonialism and continuing into the post-9/11 era, this course will trace the Western production, circulation, and consumption of representations of the Middle East as 'Other' in relation to global geopolitics. We will further examine dance forms produced in mid-twentieth century Iran and Egypt, with particular attention to nation-state building and constructions of gender. Finally, we will examine artistic productions and practices from the Middle East and Middle Eastern diasporic communities that respond to colonialism, war, displacement, secularism, and Euro-American Empire. Using dance studies, postcolonial feminist, and critical race theoretical frameworks, we will consider the gender, racial, political, and cultural implications of selected performance works and practices in order to analyze how bodies produce meaning in dance, performance art, theater, film, photography, and new media. Students will engage in multiple modes of learning; the course will include lectures, engaged group discussions, viewing of live and recorded performance, embodied participation in dance practice, student oral presentations, and a variety of writing exercises. Course assignments will culminate in a final research project related to class themes and methods.

Dance on the Move is an introductory-level course that considers dance performance and practice as sites for examining the mobilities/immobilities that shape transnational migration and citizenship. We examine how (im)migrant bodies as subjects constructed through political-economic relations of race, gender, sexuality, class, nationality, and religion negotiate, contest, and affirm experiences of belonging/unbelonging in daily life and artistic practice across diverse geographical sites. Students will conduct a small ethnographic project with a dance community that relates to the theme, such as social dance events or student dance groups. Students will produce either a written- or a hybrid written/performance- ethnography as their final project.

This course explores the cultural and historical unfolding of the genre of contemporary performance known as postmodern dance over the past six decades. It begins with the formative influence of the émigré Bauhaus artists of the 1930s, then the postwar experiments of the Beat artists in the 1950s, to Merce Cunningham, the Judson Dance Theatre, postmodern formalism, neo-expressionism, dance theatre and through to the global, spectacle-rich, cross-genre dance work of the early 21st century as the most recent extended legacy of this history. This course uses dance history to trace with special emphasis the effects of these visual art and movement experimentalists on gender representation and nationalist identity construction in the negotiation of boundaries between dance and life.