300-400 level courses are on special topics and are more advanced. They often presuppose some basic knowledge in the field and should be more difficult courses than courses at the 1-199 levels. The department is trying to insure that some 400 level courses, although substantially more difficult, are also small in size; they thus may be suitable for graduate students.
HIST 491 Topics in Dance History - Frontier and Fantasy: American Modern Dance in the Twentieth Century
Kant
Taught as schedule allows (consult the Course Directory)
SEM
This course traces the history of modern American dance culture through a series of case studies of the greatest American choreographers and dancers from Isadora Duncan at the beginning of the twentieth century through Martha Graham to Alvin Ailey, Jose Limon and Bill T. Jones at its end. These dancers and their creations express fundamental assumptions about the special character of American life and culture (the influence of the 'frontier', the nature of personal religion, the importance of race and the meaning of democracy, the response to AIDS).
Through these case studies we shall understand the evolution of modern dance in the U.S.A. and the highly relevant question of modernity. This course will use poems, excerpts from novels and plays, music and the visual arts to set the stage and provide the context. The turbulent environments of war and post-war, of economic crises and political change will provide the core framework, into which the dance forms studied can be set. They demonstrate beginning and change within an artistic movement and they show under which circumstances new ideas emerge and how they are then put in to practice. The course will show that history, dance history, is about processes and that there are many different perspectives through which to look at historical phenomena.
