Dance Department

DANC 100 - Dance Production

Students, faculty, and staff work together to create departmental dance productions. In this class, students learn the different parts of onstage and backstage work that are required to make a dance production. Students also learn the practices of collaborating and producing. Roles available include performer in thesis concerts or work as a dramaturg, designer, or stage manager in thesis and/or biannual departmental concerts. This course is available to majors and nonmajors, regardless of experience, and students are admitted to the course by audition or departmental approval. 

DANC 101 - Dance Technique

Through this course, students may take technique classes in ballet, Argentine tango, hip-hop, or other dance forms; students should consult the schedule of classes for specific techniques and levels offered in a given semester. Technique classes will be accompanied by viewings and discussions that place movement practices in their historical and contemporary contexts.

DANC 111 - Introduction to Contemporary Dance: Mind in Motion

If you've never taken a dance class, this course is for you! This course draws from modern and contemporary dance practices in developing understandings and embodiments of alignment, body mechanics, and locomotion that are foundational for the study of a variety of dance forms. Along with dance technique, our work in the studio will include experiments in improvisation and choreography. We will also consider perspectives from which to view modern and contemporary dance, which developed alongside other twentieth and twenty-first century movements in art and culture that engage philosophical issues about the primacy of the individual in society, the communication of ideas and emotions, and the invention of materials and structures that reflect contemporary understandings of the world. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will undertake additional reading, viewing, and writing assignments. All students will be invited to class excursions to see professional dance performances.

DANC 112 - Introduction to Contemporary Dance: Cross-Cultural Contexts

This course emphasizes the study of modern and contemporary dance technique and introduces elements of movement composition through the creation of collaborative choreography projects. Active work in the studio, along with readings and discussions, is designed to locate modern and contemporary dance within cross-cultural contexts, emphasizing Afro-diasporic influences. This course will examine racial and ethnic dynamics in American concert dance. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will carry out additional projects in choreography and additional written work.

DANC 201 - Introduction to Dance Studies: History and Culture

This course is an introduction to dance studies as an interdisciplinary field within the humanities and social sciences. Broadly defined, dance studies engages in critical analyses of dance practices from historical and cultural perspectives. Throughout the course of the semester, students explore and affirm dance as a vital cultural practice by considering a broad range of concert and social dance practices across time and geographic place. Course material pays particular attention to how dance articulates complex questions around race, gender, sexuality, class, ability, and nation. Written and embodied assignments introduce and explore key methodologies in the field, including movement description and analysis, critical assessment of embodied practice, archival research, and interviews.

DANC 202 - Ballet for All of Us

Ballet classes serve a wide demographic of student, professional, and recreational dancers of diverse backgrounds. However, ballet continues to be among the least racially diverse of the performing arts, one that can reinforce gender stereotypes and unhealthy body images. How might we reenvision the practice of ballet to include our own bodies, histories, and perspectives and to serve our goals as individuals? How might ballet be for all of us? In this course, we will disrupt the hierarchy of ballet as "high art," instead approaching it as "an art" that we can use towards our own agendas. Our primary work will be movement based; we will investigate how ballet class can enhance our own dance practices. We will also draw on our individual embodied histories and movement practices, putting these into dialogue with ballet to deepen our understanding of dance practice more broadly. For those taking the course for full credit, readings on race, gender, and body image in ballet will contextualize our studio work.

DANC 211 - Afro-Contemporary Dance I

An exploration of the rich African and Afrodiasporic influences on modern and contemporary dance techniques and choreography. Beginning with the anthropological research of Katherine Dunham, Black traditions from the Caribbean and North and South America helped shape American concert dance traditions. This course is designed as an intermediate-level technique class in modern and contemporary dance forms from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean with an extensive introduction to movement composition. Work in both areas emphasizes movement invention, design, and development. This class will have a series of compositional assignments to apply choreographic tools. In addition to movement efficiency, strength, flexibility, and alignment, we will work with complex rhythmic structures, torso and hip articulations, and expressivity. This course will examine racial and ethnic dynamics in American concert dance.

DANC 232 - Community Dance and Collective Creation

Community Dance at Reed (2016-present, www.reed.edu/dance/community-dance) aims to bring together members of the Reed College and broader Portland communities through community dance as a form of social intervention and collective creation. Community Dance at Reed welcomes all bodies, with a critical awareness of how race, class, ability, gender, age, and sexuality impact the ways we relate to ourselves and one another. As a community project, the program offers creative movement sessions that are free and open to the public. Practice sessions employ improvisation-based techniques that strive to connect movement with salient social and political questions. Across the semester, we collaboratively create a dance work based on social, cultural, and identity-based themes of shared importance to group members. Enrolled students read and discuss the literature on community dance and performance, consider ethical and practice-based questions, and critically engage with case studies of community performance projects. Students develop and lead community movement sessions, and codirect the creation of the dance work with community members.

DANC 252 - Improvisation

Since the early 1960s, improvisation has played an increasingly sophisticated role in contemporary dance. This course will investigate contemporary improvisational practices that are at once creative, performative, and philosophic. Half of the semester will focus on contact improvisation, a partnering form that explores the exchange of physical support, the practice of which has challenged notions of gender roles, ability and disability, and community structure. The other half of the semester will focus on choreographic improvisation, a constellation of improvisational practices in which movement scores are developed and refined over time, and which has influenced changing views of the function of performance and the relationships between makers, performers, and viewers of dance. Our primary mode of investigation will be moving; this practice-based research will be contextualized by readings and viewings. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will undertake additional readings and studio-based work.

DANC 253 - Improvisation: Solo Forms and Shared Practices

This course will investigate a variety of solo improvisational practices that enhance holistic experiences of dancing; expand solo movement repertoires artistically, physically, and conceptually; and attend to personal movement aesthetics, philosophies, and intentions. Drawing on a variety of influential dance practices including authentic movement, site dance, improvisational technologies, and others, we will focus on the potential of these practices to expand and deepen our improvisational knowledge as soloists while sharing our solo practices within a community of artists/movers/peers. Students enrolled in the course for one unit will undertake additional reading, viewing, and studio-based work.

DANC 265 - Dances of Africa and the African Diaspora

This course will explore dance practices and cultural traditions of West Africa and this cultural influence on Brazil, Cuba, and the United States. This course will combine geographic, cultural, political, and social studies through the platform of dance. Discussion, readings, and physical practice will frame our investigation of the ways that dance informs social practice and political change and affirms diasporic linkages. Coursework includes studio assignments, readings, guest artists, and dialogue. This course will examine racial and ethnic dynamics in these dance practices.

DANC 270 - Dance, Gender, and Sexuality

How do global dance practices perform and/or contest gender and sexual identities? What is the relationship between quotidian and danced identities? This course introduces and explores the intersections between dance studies and gender, queer, feminist, and transgender studies, with special attention to how these fields intersect with questions of race, class, and nation. It will consider a wide range of practices ranging across concert dance, social practices, club dancing, ballroom culture, and popular forms. Work inside and outside the classroom will focus on readings, viewings, class discussion, and written assignments. Additionally, we will share embodied activities and class visits with leading artists and scholars in the field throughout the course of the semester.

DANC 311 - Contemporary Dance III: Action and Interaction

Designed for high-intermediate- and advanced-level dancers, this course will combine rigorous technical training with work in choreography. Work in contemporary dance technique will include detailed work in alignment and focus on moving with energy and precision. Choreographic work will address compositional elements of dance-including action, space, time, gesture, structure, image, and interaction-as inherently meaningful catalysts for thinking choreographically. Studio work will be supported by video viewings, discussions, and critiques, as well as attendance at professional dance performances. Student work will be performed in the end-of-semester concert.

DANC 313 - Contemporary Dance V: Biography/Autobiography

Designed for high-intermediate- and advanced-level dancers, this course combines rigorous technical training with work in choreography. Contemporary dance vocabularies will provide a platform from which to hone technical facilities and approach nuanced movement material. Work in choreography will investigate biographical and autobiographical sources as source materials for performance. A critical review of significant choreographic works employing biography or autobiography will inform our on-going investigation of ways to approach and develop these source materials. Through the use of movement, text, vocalizations, journal writing, memory games and storytelling, students will create performances based on biographical narratives and real-life experiences. Work in this course will include attendance at professional dance performances, video viewings, discussions, and critiques, and students will perform in the end-of-semester concert.

DANC 321 - Contemporary Performance Ensemble

This course focuses on performance through the development, rehearsal, and production of contemporary dance works. Students will address the technical, stylistic, and interpretive challenges of choreographic material presented as well as develop and manipulate choreographic material of their own. Work in and out of class leading to performance will be supported through small group sessions and movement-based projects, as well as readings, viewings, written responses, and critiques. Requires rehearsal outside of class times.

DANC 335 - Special Projects in Choreography: Political Bodies

Focusing on a specific area of choreographic investigation, this course alternates between topics from year to year.

DANC 362 - Dance Ethnography

This research seminar examines methods and theories that engage in and emerge from cultural analysis of dance practices. It explores the relationship between dance and ethnography through readings, performance, discussion, and independent research. Students read foundational texts in the field as well as recent ethnographies to address the politics of representing and engaging others, situating positionality, accounting for the transnational circulation of performance practices, and serving as advocate and/or witness. Assigned ethnographies emphasize the relationships between dance and race, nation, class, sexuality, and gender.

DANC 365 - Dance and Identity on the Global Stage

This course asks what it means to dance "locally" in a global world. It considers how contemporary global dance practices in historical context challenge neat distinctions between Western and non-Western traditions and serve as active sites that construct and/or critique these classifications. To explore dance as a complex site of cultural negotiation, contestation, and exchange, the course traces transnational dance diasporas across the global north/south axis and across the Atlantic Ocean. Students examine how global dance flows animate the formation of national, racial, ethnic, and gendered (post)colonial identities, chart global migration patterns, mobilize transnational political economies, and complicate facile understandings of cultural authenticity.

DANC 411 - Advanced Technique: Performance Practices

Designed for the advanced dancer, this course offers a rigorous examination of technique, integrating vocabulary from classical and contemporary dance with choreological conceptions of the body in motion. Emphasis will be placed on understanding and embodying the conceptual framework of movement material and the ways in which that understanding is integrated in performance. Focused assignments will center on how varying approaches to dance performance relate to genre and conceptions of the performative. With permission of the instructor, the course may be repeated as an advanced practicum.

DANC 470 - Thesis

DANC 481 - Independent Study