SSI1 149 | Transgressive Bodies

Many art forms reflect and comment on the political and cultural climates of their time. Art may serve as a lens or mirror for sensitive social issues, and act as a catalyst for change. But nowhere, perhaps, can one find artistic expressions of a culture as powerful and uncomfortable as in twentieth-century dance. From the modernist reinvention of ballet by Diaghilev's Ballets Russes and Balanchine's neoclassicism to the explosive experiments of modern dance by Isadore Duncan, Mary Wigman, Merce Cunningham, Martha Graham, and Alvin Ailey, dance becomes a vehicle for social movements: a means of critiquing norms and values, and representing tacit anxieties about gender, race, sexuality, nation, and collectivity. Twentieth-century dance is made more transgressive by its medium: the body. The dancing body has been a site for controversy in academic discourse, as the vestiges of our Kantian mind-body dichotomy linger. By exploring embodiment and social activism in watershed music-dance collaborations of the twentieth Century, this course invites students to face the social issues of today and ask: what can the study of dance mean for us? Affiliate: School of Music.