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.

Unit(s): Variable: 0.5 - 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Studio
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 2 times for credit.
Notes: Recommended: Previous experience in choreographed movement (any form of dance, martial arts, etc.).This course may be applied toward dance studio requirements.
Not offered: 2024-25
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).