DANCE TECHNIQUE COURSES:

Intensive technique studies are essential to a serious dance student’s training. Intending and current dance majors must register for two credits of dance technique each semester of their four years at Bard.

 

Introductory Dance Courses:

Classes in modern dance and ballet intended for the beginner; no previous dance experience necessary. Open to all students. New students with previous dance experience should speak with the dance professors before registration.

 

12246

DAN 104 PF  Beginning I Ballet

Peggy Florin

M  W     10:10 am-11:30 am

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(1 Credit) Class size: 25

 

12274

DAN 104 SB  Intro: Contemporary African Dance

Souleymane Badolo

T  Th     3:10 pm-4:30 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(1 Credit) Cross-listed: Africana Studies.   Rooted in contemporary African Dance, using Badolo’s own movement style, this course explores movement over/under/inside and outside the tradition. The class begins with a warm-up that involves both physical and mental preparation. By listening to internal rhythms of the body and the beat of the music, dancers can discover their own musicality and their own movement language. Students will be exposed to the skills of improvisation starting with simple forms.

Class size: 25

 

12275

DAN 118      Beginning Composition I

Jillian Pena

Th          1:30 pm-2:50 pm F            11:50 am-1:10 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

 (3 Credits) This course will start with our accepted notions of what dance is and how to make it. Transforming the location and context of our work, we will expand outward to broaden our notion of what dance and performance can be and include. The course will not focus on technical skill building, but instead on conceptual creativity. We will consider traditional ways of viewing and understand why we may choose that for certain works, but also open that up to see what else is possible. How can dance be something other than what we know it to be? How can we show it to a new audience in a new way? What does that do to the meaning and the experience of a dance? The journey will allow room to be driven by your interests, which will then be placed within a larger context of what is happening in the field of dance and art. This course is designed to increase the choices available to you formally and conceptually. By seeing your work within a larger field, you will see more clearly what is uniquely “yours” in your work. Students are encouraged to create more work than they know what to do with and to experiment placing in in different contexts: the stage, the field, YouTube, Broadway, or the trash. Emphasis is not placed on quality or quantity of work produced, but instead on the depth of engagement and curiosity through processes.

Class size: 12

 

12276

DAN 124      Movement as Deep Listening

EmmaGrace Skove-Epes

T  Th    10:10 am-11:30 am

CAMPUS MPR

PA

PART

(2 credits) This course will explore movement improvisation as a practice for deeply listening to and engaging individual and collective perception, imagination, expression, and presence. We will learn practices that enable us to spontaneously move from our physical sensations, impulses, desires, individual and collective histories, and in conversation with sound, silence, gravity, texture, and all of the other elements that make up the environments we move with and through. We will challenge the premise that improvisation requires individuals to invent movement and will instead foster our ability to skillfully use the movement that is always already happening in and through our bodies as a valuable source of creative expression. We will explore various structured and unstructured improvisational practices and develop skills that enable us to improvise alone, as well as in duet and ensemble configurations. As the course progresses, students will employ improvisation as a compositional tool and will generate their own improvisational scores. This course will require some work outside of class including readings focusing on how improvisation is used in various dance forms, reflective writing, and attendance at dance performances. No prior movement experience required. This course occurs as part of the Bard Dance Program/American Dance Festival partnership.  Email Leah Cox at lcox@bard.edu with any questions.

Class size: 25

 

 

 

Intermediate and Advanced Dance Technique:

Intensive technique studies are essential to a serious dance student’s training. Intending and current dance majors must register for two credits of dance technique each semester.   Also open to non-majors with experience, inclination, and permission of the instructor. 

 

12278

DAN 212 ADF  Intermediate Modern Dance

EmmaGrace Skove-Epes

T  Th    11:50 am-1:10 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

 (2 Credits) This course will enable students to deepen and expand their physical explorations, anatomical awareness, and technical skills in order to realize dance as a mode of rich, nuanced, and expansive communication and expression. Students will learn specific skills, such as moving in and out of the floor, finding balance between suspension and release, and enlisting gravity, muscular force, imagery, and breath to direct and redirect the flow of energy within the body in order to move through space. We will engage sensibilities of moving informed by functional anatomy, Bartenieff Fundamentals, postmodern dance forms, African diasporic forms, and Flamenco. Students are encouraged to bring their own dance backgrounds and movement sensibilities into class in order to honor and expand these histories with new expressive potential.  We will privilege dancing together over getting anything right and cultivate our ability to feed our energy back into the community of the dance class instead of into individual measures of success. This course will require regular reading assignments and/or written reflections outside of class each week in addition to attendance at several performances throughout the semester. Prerequisites: Students should be intermediate level and have taken a modern technique course in the fall semester, or have equivalent experience.  This course occurs as part of the Bard Dance Program/American Dance Festival partnership.  Email Leah Cox at lcox@bard.edu with any questions.

Class size: 20

 

12277

DAN 212 MS  Intermediate Ballet

Maria Simpson

M  W     11:50 am-1:10 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(1 Credit) Class size: 20

 

12279

DAN 232      African Contemporary Dance

Souleymane Badolo

M  W      3:10 pm-4:30 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(1 Credit) Cross-listed: Africana Studies In this course, students are guided through a series of isolations, progressions, and concepts that are found in African dance styles.  Emphasis is placed on the principal of polyrhythm, the positions of the head, torso, legs and arms, as well as articulation. Cultural, philosophical and aesthetic concepts will help the dancers to embody the technique; at the same time, the dance elements are also examined out of context, in order to facilitate a contemporary movement practice. In addition to the exposition  of a fundamental dance vocabulary, the central work of this class is the development of a body awareness and an understanding of the self as a performer. Open to intermediate and advanced dancers; other students should consult with professor Badolo prior to registration.

Class size: 20

 

12280

DAN 240      Moving Consciously II

Peggy Florin

M  W      1:30 pm-2:50 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(1 Credit)  In this class students will engage in improvisation, exploring opportunities for clarity, efficiency and honesty in movement, both in relation to oneself and to others. We will move from sensory/somatic warm-ups to engage in improvisational scores or structures, investigating relationships of weight, breath, momentum, intention and timing. Students will develop their improvisational skills: listening, responding, waiting, following impulse into movement. Guidance in the development of solo practice will lead into duet and trio scoring. Moving from the assumption that each student is part of the “mind” of the group, improvisation will pose the question: how can each individual’s presence support the whole?

Class size: 15

 

12281

DAN 312      Advanced Ballet

Lindsay Clark

T  Th    10:10 am-11:30 am

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(1 Credit) Class size: 15

 

12282

DAN 316      Dance Repertory

Th      4:40 pm-6:40 pm     F        1:30 pm-3:30 pm

FISH THORNE STU

PA

PART

(3 Credits) In this repertory course, Ivy Baldwin will engage students in a collaborative creative process culminating in a piece to be performed on the 2020 Faculty Dance Concert. The work will include a commissioned score by Baldwin’s frequent composer collaborator, and students in this process will gain a deeper understanding of a composer/choreographer collaborative process. Students should be available to rehearse the weekend before the start of the semester as well as on some weekends during the semester.  Dancers will be selected for the class based on an audition process in the fall and should be enrolled in at least one intermediate level dance course in the spring. This course is part of the Bard / American Dance Festival partnership.  Please direct questions to Leah Cox: lcox@bard.edu

Class size: 10

 

 

 

12283

DAN 360      Dance History:Right to Dance

Jillian Pena

F     9:00 am-11:20 am

FISH CONFERENCE

AA

AART

Cross-listed: Theater & Performance; Human Rights

(4 Credits) Dance is perhaps the most basic form of art - needing only the body for its creation. Through the ages, it has been used as a display of nationalistic pride for cultural celebrations. While some types of dancing are praised as superior and a display of good judgement, other types have been regulated and perceived to be dangerous. Tracing dance through history, we will look to Western court dances, folk dances across different continents, and Native American cultural celebrations, acknowledging that historical documentation only goes so far and is a privileged and subjective medium.  We will land in 2017, with the repeal of New York City's Cabaret Law that prohibited dancing, and the release of the tv show The OA, in which "Five Movements" save the characters from violent situations. Looking at theatrical, social, and folk dance, we will investigate how dance both represents and creates culture. We will see how dance can reflect its context explicitly through representation or implicitly through form. Dance is a language which unites communities and distinguishes them from each other. Dance has been passed down like an oral tradition, from body to body, surviving regulation. As a form of diasporic language, dance is easiest to conceal and the hardest to erase. Students are encouraged to write their own dance history – drawing connections across times and spaces through both formal essays and creative projects.

Class size: 15

 

12284

DAN WKSHP      Dance Workshop

Maria Simpson

PA

PART

Dance Workshop is a once-weekly community gathering during which students/attendees engage in both watching and giving feedback to anyone presenting choreographic works in progress. A non-hierarchical structure offers choreographers at all levels a system of critical feedback from both peers and faculty. All dance majors and composition students are required to attend. Anyone wanting to receive credit (1) for this class may be asked to do minimal outside work - read or write as assigned by faculty instructor. All participants are required to attend the semester’s Dance Program concerts. Non-dance majors and students not registered for composition courses can register for Dance Workshop for 1 credit.  Interested students should contact Prof. Simpson prior to registration (msimpson@bard.edu)

Class size: Open

 

Cross-listed courses:

 

12467

ARTS 130      Being Seen

Lindsay Clark            LAB/Lessons            LAB/Lessons

M        10:10 am-11:30 am W           8:30 am-11:30 am F            8:30 am-11:30 am

FISH NUREYEV ST

PA

Cross-listed: Dance Class size: 12

 

12385

FILM 362      Movement/Activating Character

Jean Churchill Aymara Moreno

W         1:30 pm-4:30 pm   W         1:30 pm-4:30 pm

FISH CONFERENCE FISH NUREYEV ST

PA

Cross-listed: Dance Class size: 12