Latin American Dance Cultures

Catalog description

This course examines issues of Latin American race, class, gender, nationality and global belonging through dance cultures. Students will learn how chosen dances, songs and rhythms are conveyors of cultural tenets, regional variations, and national trends.Since culture is made visible to us through its representations, students will learn to read and analyze Latin America through ethnographic texts about performance. Over the semester, students will learn through both theory and practice the techniques and philosophies of dance in selected Latin American performance circles. We will analyze Latin American festivals, stage/commercial performance and everyday cultural performance. As part of student training in ethnographic participant observation, students will also learn the basic steps of these studied dances and contextualize their work within the cultures of Latin American dance communities in New Orleans. In doing so, students will learn to think critically about the relation between text, ethnography and the body by paying attention to the demands that performance places on us as participants, spectators, scholars and commentators where we may be/act, see/hear, feel/sense, and think/evaluate within a world different from our own and understand its implications in governance, policy, and practice.No dance experience required!!!