LAUNCHING DANCE: CURRENT STRATEGIES FOR PRODUCING DANCE
Launching Dance: Current Strategies for Producing Dance is a course specifically designed to prepare undergraduate and graduate students for producing their work in a professional setting. Topics include artistic, logistical, marketing, financial, fundraising, and organizational considerations, strategies and skills that are needed in order to successfully present art in today’s climate. Students will gain critical thinking and problem-solving skills, resources and cultivate independence and self-motivation as it relates to getting their work professionally produced today. While the course is focused on producing dance, these skills can also be applicable to a myriad of other art disciplines (or any general event), proving its value and potential reach beyond the course, the university and the art form. Students will discover new ideas and have the opportunity to individualize the class by focusing their research and work based on their own personal goals and needs. By the end of the semester, students will have experienced all the programming, logistical planning, grant writing and fundraising, creating a financial plan, creating and distributing marketing materials in the digital age, and researching, collecting, comparing and contrasting affecting data that contributes to producing a dance performance. After this course, students will be ready to propel full speed into the professional dance field, with knowledge, skills and experience that will set them up for a more likely chance of success.
In today’s shifting climate, more is expected and required of professional dance artists. It is necessary for them to be more than simply performers or choreographers; they must be marketers, accountants, fundraisers, writers, advocates, researchers, and administrators. Launching Dance is directly inspired by my own experiences as a director, producer and artist. Rather than having a course like this that could serve as a catalyst for my career, I spent years slowly gaining experiences through trial and error, without any formal resources or guidance. Launching Dance has the potential for lasting impact. Based on their own goals, the class will approach the production of dance performance from every angle so that students gain a clear understanding of the possibilities available. I feel passionately that it is important to prepare and educate students from a practical and realistic perspective in addition to the theoretical and physical. While there is always a sense of struggle, conflict, and learning inherent in every production process, it is important for students to have the confidence and skills to confront these hurdles, which this class will prepare them for. It is in this long-term resiliency where they will ultimately achieve their successes as artists.
SHE-RO: Physicalizing the Female Superhero
The superhero genre is one of the leading staples of popular culture. To some, a dancer’s virtuosity may seem superhuman. But these skills are built through training. Likewise, superheroes discover their purposes through tests and practice. Because superhero stories are such an ingrained part of current popular culture, they have the ability to shape our culture by disseminating discourses that reflect values about femininity, autonomy, capacity and morality. This course will allow students to research and embody representations of aspirational female empowerment in which identity is developed in conjunction with creativity, physicality and theory.
SHE-RO: Physicalizing the Superheroine is a theoretical and studio-based course that connects ideas relating to feminism, popular culture and movement through the superhero genre. Analyses will include theoretical research into historical, conceptual and physical representations of a variety of film and television characters, such as Wonder Woman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Captain Marvel and many more. This course aims to find the intersection points of movement, feminism, and popular culture, specifically where they intersect at the superhero genre. Topics include: mythology, concepts relating to a superheroine’s body, violence, sexuality, power, gender roles and stereotypes, feminism, equality, fantasy, intersectionality and psychology into physically creative form with their bodies. Through movement exploration, students will also hone skills in creative problem-solving, improvisation, choreographic form, and developing a distinct researched movement language.
The purpose of this course is not to simply recreate superheroine narratives, images, and ideas through movement and dance. The goal of this course is to use fictional bodies and their narratives to expand the students’ creative and expressive capacities of the real body.