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Go to Black Presence in American Dance Site
This project addresses the challenge of exposing students to important information
about the history of dance and choreography while giving them movement invention
and manipulation skills that draw on their own inner resources and move them
beyond their comfort zone into an expanded creative range. “Where is Africa
in American Dance?” names the website that fulfills part of a larger proposed
project, Doing a Time Step: Creating Choreography from History and
Poetry, which addresses both challenges—the historical and
the creative—through student research and choreographic projects. With
Doing a Time Step, structured assignments within
two courses—and in connection with a poetry course—enable students
to work collaboratively to combine dance history, dance composition theory,
and aesthetics with poetry, and help them to grow in their ability to utilize
technology.
The project involves The Black Presence in American Dance and Choreography II,
which interfaces with the poetry classes taught by Opal Moore and Sharon Strange.
The Black Presence class, in Fall 2003, provides the initial historical and
theoretical components of the project. Students will conduct interviews of performers,
post photographs, develop research, and create brief entries to a short encyclopedia
of important Africanist aesthetics, vernacular and formal dance traditions,
choreographers, and performers. Choreography II will continue the project by
embodying this historical and theoretical information. The primary form of their
interaction will be collaborative projects with the students in Poetry II, which
will be offered the same semester.