New Dance Course: Dancing Histories/Writing Dance

New Dance Program faculty member Elizabeth Bergman invites students interested in dance, history, art history, anthropology, or psychology to explore the cultural, social, and political contexts from which dance forms and styles emerged and into which they are practiced in Dancing Histories/Writing Dance. Newly imagined for fall 2020, the hybrid in-person and remote course is offered by the dance studies branch of the Dance Program and and carries both Critical Interpretation and Inquiry into the Past designations.

Dancing Histories/Writing Dance examines concert dance histories and the processes of historiography, illustrating the dynamic and evolving nature of historical canons, values, and ideological premises. Throughout the semester, the class will explore a range of concert/art dance genres as they emerged across Europe, the U.S., and Japan; these sites exemplify how concert dance draws from both Western and non-Western dance forms and aesthetics, often pointing to larger paradigms of sociocultural and political inequity. Moving from 16th-century court ballet through 20th-century modern and postmodern dance to international "contemporary" stages, students will develop a strong methodological framework to evaluate source material, the effects of cultural competence and critical bias, and the ways in which the writing of history is a creative, political, and ideological process.

Elizabeth Bergman is a dancer, scholar, and educator currently based in Philadelphia who joins the Dance Program faculty in fall 2020. Bergman recently earned a Ph.D. in dance from Temple University (2019) and also holds an M.F.A. in dance performance from The University of Iowa (2009) and a B.A. in dance from DeSales University (2004). Her areas of research include histories of U.S. concert, vernacular, and commercial dance, and the racial politics and ideologies of the commercial dance industry in the late twentieth century. Bergman has more than a decade of experience teaching ballet, modern/contemporary, and improvisational forms and has taught a variety of undergraduate dance theory/history courses at both The University of Iowa and Temple University and has been an invited guest lecturer on topics including American social dance, Hollywood film and music videos, and the history of modern yoga.