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.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Studio-conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Notes: No previous dance experience necessary. This course may be applied toward either the dance studio or studies requirements.
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).