Theater and Dance 232: Modern Dance Lecture: Critical Moves

This companion lecture course for modern dance practicums engages modern dance's complex history which embraces resistance and diasporic form yet draws heavily from orientalist practices and has been complicit in state propaganda. The course will engage modern dance as a radical solo practice, including tensions between narrative and abstraction throughout the twentieth century. Artists covered may include Ruth St. Denis, Mary Wigman, Martha Graham, Katherine Dunham, José Limón, Alvin Ailey, Merce Cunningham, and Judson Dance Theater, as well as current contemporary concert dance artists. This course is taken concurrently with a two-credit modern dance practicum.