Dance Studies Courses

Dance is art, but it is also play, ritual, social practice, community, courtship, culture, politics, and more. The Dance Program offers a selection of dance studies courses that introduce students to this multi-layered notion of dance and engage a variety of approaches ranging from the analytic to the experiential. These courses explore the creative, critical, and conceptual processes of dance and help students understand how dance can be the focus of research and inquiry.

The Dance Program generally offers one or two dance studies courses per semester. Dance studies courses have included:

• Approaches to Dance: Themes and Perspectives
• Performing the Political Body: Dance and Power 
• Sacred Activism: Dancing Altars, Radical Moves
• Diasporic Bodies, Continual Revivals
• Dance History: A History of Contemporary Western Theater Dance 
• Dance: Close Reading 
• Anthropology of Dance
• Practical Anatomy: Muscles, Bones, Movement

Bryn Mawr also engages visiting professors who teach dance studies courses with a specialized topics. Courses have included Dance, Migration and Exile and Performing the City: Theorizing Bodies in Space. In addition, students can utilize an independent study option in dance. Past student work has included a variety of final projects ranging from field research to scholarly papers.

Dance Courses and Schedule