The dance history discipline at Sarah Lawrence provides opportunities for students to examine critical aspects of dance as a separate, credit-bearing seminar or lecture course rather than a component within a performing-arts study. Encompassing political, cultural, creative, and embodied practices at the intersection of the arts, humanities, and social sciences, these courses serve as hubs for interdisciplinary inquiry. All courses within the dance history discipline are open to the entire College community. No previous knowledge of dance is required.
Dance History 2025-2026 Courses
First-Year Studies: Intersections of Dance and Culture: Moving Between the Lines
First-Year Studies—Year | 10 credits
DNHS 1121
When we encounter dancing, what are we seeing, experiencing, and understanding? How do current representations of dance reflect, perpetuate, and/or disrupt familiar assumptions about personal and social realities? Embedded historical ideas and enforcements based on race, economic class, gender, social/sexual orientation, nationality/regional affiliation, and more are threaded through our daily lives. Performing arts inside and outside of popular culture often reinforce dominant cultural ideas and feelings. Can they also propose or inspire alternatives? In fall, we will view samples of dancing in film, video, digital media, television programs, and commercials, as well as live performance. These viewings—along with reading selected texts from the fields of dance and performance, literary criticism, feminist theory, queer theory, and cultural studies—will form the basis of class discussions and exercises. In spring, we will shift focus to viewing still images and live action with readings from additional fields, including art criticism and neuroscience, as well as fine-tuning approaches to writing about our subject matter. Students will complete several class assignments each semester, as well as develop one or more substantial lines of inquiry for conference work. Conference projects may draw upon multiple disciplines, including those within humanities and creative arts. The central aim of this course will be to cultivate informed discussion and to produce new knowledge, increasing both individual and collective capabilities. We will use academic research, along with personal experience, to advance our recognition of dance as an elemental art form and as a potentially important orientation in adjacent studies. In both fall and spring, students will meet weekly with the instructor for individual conferences.