ARTD 250 002 Performing the Political Body: Dance and Power

Course Description:
This course explores how artists, activists, and intellectuals have used dance and performance to support political goals and ideologies or to perform cultural interventions in the public sphere according to particular expectations of social and political responsibilities. From a wide range of possibilities we will focus on how dance as an embodied practice is a useful medium for analyzing ideologies and practices of power particularly with reference to gender, class, and etnicity. Students will also investigate the body as an active agent of social change and political action.

Throughout the course we will read excerpts from seminal and contemporary theoreticians of performing bodiedness, ethnicity, and gender such as Mauss, Boal, Said, DeLauretis, and others. We will also read theoreticians and practitioners more specifically engaged with dance and performance.

Works, performances, and practices that we will likely consider, among others are:
16th-17th century European court ballets as metaphors and enactments of power and as strategies for disciplining the body politic; the role and efficacy of dancing in the socio-political actions of African women, e.g. that of Igbo women (Nigeria) in the 1929 Women’s ‘War’ (Nigeria) or that of Wolof women (Senegal) in the late 1970s-80s; the implications of the contemporary commodification of Belly Dance/Oriental Dance; Ballet as a political instrument in Mao’s china; the political, social, cultural implications of Hip-hop as a global phenomenon; Orientalism and the Asian body in performance from Madama Butterfly to M. Butterfly; Latin American Dance-negotiating the social and the political.

The course uses literary, historical, and political texts as well as various media and includes an in-class mini-performance project.

Requirements:
•Class participation in discussion of readings and performance exercises
•Three analyses and commentaries on texts (2-3 pages) selected by student from required readings (one each in February, March, April)
•Attendance at performance and/or master class for Urban Bush Women/Acogny/ Pape Ibrahima (Friday afternoon, Saturday evening, February 12/13) and commentary or critique (2-3 pages)
•In-class performance project (small groups) –plan/design/implement an art/performance project. Written work that accompanies this project (3-4 pages) can take the form of analytic research, grant/project proposal, or extended program notes.(these will take place end of March)
• Final project or paper – research paper (6-8 pages) or project (can be a significant revision/extension of the in-class group project) plus analysis of process (3-4 pages)