Dance History: Why Dance Matters investigates myriad social, political, and historical events that have impelled performers and choreographers to create dances that broadcast their personal concerns to society in powerful ways. Artistic movements, choreographers, and dancers examined will include the aristocratic Imperial Russian Ballet; gender fluidity in Nijinsky's roles in Diaghilev's Les Ballets Russes; the microcosm of immigrant and black performers in vaudeville; dance and the Harlem Renaissance; the rejection of ballet by Löie Fuller, Isadora Duncan, and Ruth St. Denis; the political work of early modern dancers Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, and Charles Weidman; war's aftermath in the German Ausdruckstanz of Mary Wigman and Kurt Jooss and Japanese butoh; the anthropological research of black choreographers Katherine Dunham and Pearl Primus; the psychological dance-theater of Antony Tudor and Pina Bausch; democracy within the postmodern rebellion of the Judson Dance Theater; Civil Rights-era social activist choreographers; and the response of choreographers and performance artists to the culture wars of the 1990s and the AIDS crisis. Students will pursue extended research, view performance videos and documentaries, and be expected to write and talk about dance. |