Theatre and Dance
Dance
Explore the Dance Program
Dance at 海角社区 combines technical training, creative exploration, and interdisciplinary learning in a supportive and collaborative environment. Students study movement through a variety of styles and perspectives while developing their own artistic voice as performers, choreographers, and creative thinkers. Small class sizes and the Block Plan create opportunities to work closely with faculty and visiting artists while fully immersing yourself in the creative process.
Our curriculum includes traditional dance technique alongside contemporary approaches to movement, improvisation, composition, somatic practices, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Whether you have years of training or are stepping into a dance studio for the first time, you'll find opportunities to grow, perform, create, and connect with a vibrant artistic community.
海角社区's Block Plan allows students to focus on one course at a time, creating opportunities for immersive studio work, rehearsals, choreography, and performance. This focused approach encourages artistic growth while allowing students to fully engage in the creative process.
Yes. Students from across campus are encouraged to participate in dance courses, performances, and many department activities. Whether you're an experienced dancer or looking to explore movement for the first time, there are opportunities to get involved.
Dance students perform in a variety of productions throughout the academic year, giving them opportunities to collaborate with faculty, guest artists, and fellow students while gaining valuable performance experience.
Students explore a variety of movement practices, choreography, performance, and dance studies through courses taught by faculty and visiting artists. Course offerings vary throughout the year and encourage both technical development and creative exploration.
The department regularly welcomes guest artists and instructors who bring new perspectives and professional experience to campus. Workshops, master classes, performances, and special projects provide additional opportunities for students to expand their artistic practice.
Small class sizes allow students to receive individualized instruction and mentorship throughout their academic experience. Faculty work closely with students in the studio and performance spaces, supporting both artistic and personal growth.
Dance graduates pursue careers in performance, choreography, education, arts administration, health and wellness, and many other fields. The collaborative, creative, and communication skills developed through dance prepare students for a wide range of professional paths.
The Dance program fosters a collaborative and supportive environment where students learn from one another while working closely with faculty and guest artists. Through rehearsals, performances, and creative projects, students build lasting relationships and develop as both artists and collaborators.
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Performances
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The Body in Motion
An introductory dance course taught through explorations based in the body. Employing basic kinesiology and anatomy, somatic practices, dance composition, and movement improvisation, it broadly investigates the interconnection between body and mind. How might our bodies be a source of knowing? How does movement communicate? Both experiential and theoretical, students will explore their movement potential, move extemporaneously, analyze movement and arrange movement using choreographic procedures. No previous dance experience is necessary to enjoy this course.
Choreography
A theoretical and practical investigation of contemporary dance composition.
Video Dance
Introduction to creating dance specifically for the video medium, also known as video dance. Investigates ways that choreographers might use video technology as a creative tool. Aspects include production of video, audio, and choreography with the aim of fusing these elements.
Relations Across Oceans: Critical and Creative Methods
This course focuses on South & Southeast Asia, the Gulf, South Africa, and beyond as worlds connected by oceans and waterways. These are both old and new pathways and relations – moving, unstable, and enduring. Here, oceans are environment, imaginary, historical pathway, and process of understanding relations beyond modern western conceptions of nation and region. We will explore a number of critical conceptual frameworks to help us – from the idea of amphibious lifeworlds, archipelagic thinking, and ecologies, to radical solidarities from critical performance scholars, poets, and other thinkers. We will learn from a number of contemporary artists working across visual, poetic, sonic, and performance spheres. In doing so, we move to understand both the shape and the ‘how’ (processes) of relational realities (tension, conflict, hierarchies, solidarity, coalition) that hold worlds together. This course will involve critical and creative work and methods for engaging these questions. Prior creative work is not necessary but some prior knowledge of global south histories will likely be.
The Nakedness of Being
The Nakedness of Being is an experiential and experimental performance course taught by distinguished guest artist, Eiko Otake, a New York-based movement artist. This course combines Eiko’s embodied creative practice with the study of postwar Japanese arts. Through the study of movement, readings, videos, and films students learn that space/time is not a white canvas that stands alone and empty. Here and now are continuous parts of a larger geography (space) and history (time) and as such are dense with memories, shadows, and possibilities. Viewings of art works and films from postwar Japan serve as examples of artistic representations of despair and perseverance. What is it to forget, remember, mourn, and pray? How do we transcend violence and loss? How does being or becoming a mover or dancer affect our emotional rigor, seeing/learning, and creativity? These are some of the many questions the class explores. This is not a dance class, nor is it geared only toward performers. The course encourages students to think about movement as a method of accessing human experiences and building knowledge, a way to explore sensations, thoughts, and reactions to a particular space.
Philosophies of the Body: Bodies and Power
Comparative (and connected) exploration of philosophies of the body and questions of power. In the west, we have inherited a model of the body as object, opposite to the mind - reinforced by a variety of everyday discourses including medical and health discourses as well as those around beauty, capability, and culpability. This course historicizes continental European theories of mind-body duality, and dives into several global traditions – embodied as well as textual – which offer different models for the thinking-feeling-subjective body. By addressing bodies (in motion), perception/cognition, and epistemology we ask the following: 1) How are our bodies navigating but also subverting or intervening in multiple matrices of power dynamics or knowledge systems through the ways in which we move through the world and 2) what radical possibilities open in the process. Ultimately, these various approaches force us to question what it means to even talk about “a body”.
Encountering Global Dance
In this course, we will be watching dance works by a number of artists, both from the US and international contexts working with a range of forms, aesthetics, and questions. Alongside watching these works, we will be reading key theorists from social theory, dance/performance studies and postcolonial studies alongside poetry and literary texts. These offer different frameworks or sets of questions, allowing us to think through dance works as kaleidoscopes - situated and shifting in significance given our perspective. Questions will include those around narrative, realism, abstraction, space, and utopia. We will focus on the elements of bodies, time, and space.
Embodied Politics: Gesture, Movement, and the Construction of Power
In this course, we will use dance and political science to study the critical role of movement and gesture in politics. From the symbolic use of body language (e.g., gesturing) during speeches to protest marches, physical expression can shape public perception, galvanize support, and challenge authority. Movement and gesture in politics conveys power, solidarity, and emotion in ways that words alone cannot. In this creative-focused and interdisciplinary course, we will center five core principles of liberal learning in this endeavor, each studied through the lens of dance and the lens of political science: collaboration, deconstruction, repetition, reaction, and listening. For example, in centering the principle of deconstruction, we will both use choreographic compositional devices to understand how one’s embodied knowledge can be deconstructed and creative process approaches to deconstruct critical complementary arguments and theories of political science research.
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