The Art of Film Dance: Gender, Race, and Difference

Catalog description

Dance on film has a rich and prolific history. From the 1930s musicals of master cinematographer Busby Berkeley to the art films of revered avant-garde director Chantal Akerman —as in her 1989 documentary One Day Pina Asked about the German modern dance choreographer Pina Bausch–the cinema has become a mesmerizing canvas for dance of varying styles and genres. “The Art of Film Dance,” a two-credit interdisciplinary seminar, will focus on the ideological underpinnings of the films and the way they employ dance to enhance and influence our perceptions of gender, race, social class, age, and ethnicity. Drawing on a particularly rich and diverse period of dance-film styles, from the 1980s to the present, the course will analyze selected feature-length films and documentaries depicting a variety of dance genres from tango and hip hop to modern dance and ballet. The course will also examine several key issues and topics germane to the specific genre at hand; these include the role of dance in serving the film’s narrative arc and the cinematic strategies used to enhance the spectator’s kinesthetic experience of the dance. Each week a different film will be explored representing the romantic drama; the romantic comedy; the musical drama; the film documentary; the psychological thriller, and the art film. Among those films will be Emile Ardolino’s Dirty Dancing (1987); Baz Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (1992); Carlos Saura’s Tango (1998); Chantal Akerman’s One Day Pina Asked (mentioned above); David LaChappelle’s Rize (2005), about Los Angeles’ hip hop-styled krump dancers, and Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan (2010). In each case, the course will consider the ways in which dance shapes our understanding of individual and group identities.