Thank you for registering for "Jazz Dance Is...: A Conversation with Melanie George".   Friday, September 16, 2022 at 12:00 p.m. in the A.E. Hotchner Studio Theatre, Mallinckrodt Center - Washington University in St. Louis.

Experiential Design for Immersive Media

DRAMA 4053

What possibilities and pitfalls do immersive practices create for live storytelling? How do the affordances of a digital tool amplify or suppress aspects of a source story? What new insights into familiar stories can we generate with radical adaptation? To engage these questions, this studio seminar blends humanistic inquiry with practice. Through an examination of different contexts that are live, immersive, and theatricalized, students envision how the tools utilized therein might illuminate latent aspects of familiar stories. Topics include theatre, AR, VR, and theme parks. Additionally, this course utilizes "critical making" as an epistemology, wherein the site of knowledge creation is the process of devising an object, tool, performance, or installation in conversation with a discipline's critical apparatus. Course-long projects* will find students selecting and using immersive tools-digital, analog, or both-to radically adapt a familiar story. Importantly, while technological skills are welcome, they are not required. Students are encouraged to envision gloriously and scope effectively as they design a hypothetical or prototyped research project and complementary critical engagement. *For Fall 2022, students may choose to work on Professor Hunter's mobile AR app Wretched Excess: An Augmented Reality Trip to Early MTV or an original project.
Course Attributes: BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM; FA VC; EN H

Drama Audition Workshop

Introduction to Dance of West Africa

DANCE AND SOMATIC MOVEMENT STUDIES 227

This course entails the study of West African Dances and the Music that accompanies them. Special emphasis will be placed on the dance, music, culture, language and arts of the Ivory Coast. This course will address the relationship between music and dance and their social and cultural significance. The class will consist of lecture and demonstration followed by active participation by students, primarily dancing and drumming. Outside of class students will build technique and develop an appreciation and understanding of the relevant resources available and how to research them. May be repeated one time.
Course Attributes:

Theories of the Body in Performance

DANCE 530

Over the past twenty years, "the body" has become a popular subject of study across multiple disciplines, including anthropology, philosophy, women's/gender/sexuality studies, religious studies, and the growing field of performance studies. This graduate seminar pairs critical theory readings about embodiment (and its attendant phenomena, including corporeality, kinesthesia, emotions, the senses, etc) with investigation into how specific artists work out such ideas in performance. Identity categories often marked by the body, including race, gender, and sexuality, will be particularly important. For example, we will wrestle with how "the black dancing body" as a conceptual framework maps (and not) onto the material realities of African American dancers. In addition to discussion of texts, in-class work includes embodied and creative exercises as a way for students to apply theory to practice. Assignments deepen students' artistry, help them develop analytical writing and presenting skills, and prepare them for professional work in both performative and academic arenas.
Course Attributes:

Pointe Technique

DANCE 423

Designed for dancers with a basic foundation in pointe work. Variable content; may be repeated for credit in a subsequent semester. Prerequisite: Dance 415, 416 and permission of instructor.
Course Attributes: AS HUM; EN H

Advanced Stage Lighting

DANCE 414

This course is an advanced, continuation of Drama 310 Stage Lighting. Emphasis is placed on cultivating design aesthetics and a further exploration of controlling light in a laboratory and live setting. Students will dive deeper into color theory, light plot development, and ultimately into advanced lighting console programming. The course objectives will cover a wide range of production styles and performance venues within a series of challenging design projects. Prerequisite: L15 310 or permission of instructor.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM

Histories of Theatrical and Concert Dance

DANCE 316

This course is a survey of dance on the stage. It examines the interrelated histories of ballet, modern, jazz, hip hop, and musical theatre dance, and it discusses how these forms have converged in today's contemporary dance scene. It offers an overview of key artistic movements, both mainstream and avant-garde, while examining selected dances through a combination of formal analysis and a consideration of the social and political contexts that contributed to their meaning. Students will learn how to analyze dance using a variety of sources, such as visual art, photographs, film, and written texts. The classroom format will emphasize discussion. Throughout the course, we will interrogate the categories of "theatrical dance" and "concert dance," seeing how the definitions have changed over time to include or exclude certain types of dancing.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; AS HUM; FA HUM; AR HUM

Dance Improvisation: Spontaneous Composition & Performance Techniques

DANCE 3101

Dance improvisation is a cumulative, integrative practice, applying every skill the performer can bring to the spontaneous present in which creative process and performance is simultaneously one and the same. In this course, students learn and create processes for improvising dance/performance art, with an aim toward developing integrated skill in: dance technique, intuitive movement invention, partnered dancing, collaborative process, performance presence/expressivity, and compositional form. Applications include improvising compositions for theatrical stage, site-specific venues and for camera-based artistic mediums. Meets requirement for dance major. Prerequisite: students must be qualified at 300 level in any genre of dance technique, or obtain special permission of instructor. This course is optimal for students who have previously taken Dance Composition (L29 203/208/303/309), and/or Contact Improvisation (U31 212), though they are not prerequisites. May be repeated once for credit.
Course Attributes: EN H; AS HUM

Ampersand: A Performative Perspective on Chinese Culture and Identity

DANCE 107

This course examines the diversified and rich history of Chinese visual and performance cultures from the Chinese mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and throughout the Chinese diaspora. A collaboration between the East Asian Languages and Cultures and Performing Arts departments, this course explores Chinese cultural narratives in relation to how they have been performed -- on stage in traditional forms of dance-drama, on screen in film, and as lived in the practice of everyday life -- from the late Imperial period to the present. It includes a practice component that introduces the students to movement disciplines such as Tai' Chi and opera, and it allows students to pursue creative assignments such as interview, stage plays, and filmmaking that demonstrate their developing knowledge of historical and contemporary Chinese culture. Building bridges of understanding between the United States and the Republic of China in Taiwan, the course will culminate in a spring break trip to Taiwan. This course is only for first-year, non-transfer students in the Ampersand: Encountering China program.
Course Attributes: EN H; BU Hum; BU IS; AS LCD; AS SC; AMP
Load more