Global Dance Studies

Catalog description

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. The first part of the course introduces students to different methodological approaches to studying dance. The second part explores religious, social, artistic, and political dance practices. The final third of the course will look at dance as an expression of identity. Throughout the course, we will investigate issues of race, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, tradition/innovation, authenticity/creativity, agency/resistance, borrowing/appropriation, and cultural hierarchies (low/high, vernacular/artistic, primitive/modern), among other topics.