Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

An introduction to aesthetic theory as it applies to dance. Lectures will address, among other things, the nature of aesthetic experience, as well as issues pertaining to critical judgment, communication, taste, and high and low art. Students with credit for FPA 228W may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

This course explores the social work of dance, examining questions that complement practice-based technique and composition classes while also holding relevance for students from a range of other disciplines. Here, you will have the chance to think, read, and talk about the role of dance in public life. We will examine how particular expressions of dance are valued, how and what they communicate, how they transfer knowledge, and how they activate the public sphere. Because aesthetic value is context-specific (i.e., the where, what, who, when, and why determines how we experience), we will attend to how the particulars of site, embodiment, and audience-engagement shape the value attributed to various expressions of dance. To address these questions, we will survey the field of dance studies, drawing from leading international scholars and from local performance practitioners alike to explore the cultural work that dancing enacts. In order to understand the place of dance, we will contextualize the form within the wider fields of art and performance, with special attention to site-based practices that seek either to expose or to generate a direct link between the aesthetic and the everyday.

Throughout, we will query long-held understandings of high and low art, exploring the classed, raced, gendered, and other investments that underpin these formulations. Attending to the troubling politics of the Western theatrical canon even as we learn about significant moments and movements within it, will look to the aesthetics enacted in choreographies generated by Indigenous, Black, mixed-ability, and queer artists, among others—as well as the dynamic circulations of dance in the digital realm.

Our class will benefit from exposure to live performance, video footage, embodied experiments with dancing theory, and site-walks through the neighbourhood. We will devote a significant amount of time and energy to developing and getting comfortable with the verbal and written expression of dance-based ideas. Taking seriously the etymology of “choreography” (loosely: choreo = dance, graphy = to write), we will challenge the notion that dance is “ephemeral”—a fleeting form that leaves no trace—by honing our skills in movement description, dance analysis, and writing-as-thinking.

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

• To understand the basic history and development of aesthetic theory as it relates to dance
• To observe links between formal choreographic choices, aesthetic value, and meaningmaking
• To understand dance practices as culturally-specific
• To practice translating movement into words through thick description and critical analysis
• To read, summarize, and analyze dance scholarship, including accurate identification of key concepts, assertions, and interventions in the work
• To develop research questions and thesis statements
• To make use of the SFU Library resources specific to a given topic
• To translate research into writing in a variety of different scholarly forms: performance review, critical responses, summary, argumentative essay, blog post

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: