This module is not currently running in 2024 to 2025.
Over recent decades, dance in its various forms has established itself at the forefront of theatrical experimentation: from Contemporary Ballet to Post-Modern Dance, from Tanztheater to New Body Performances, dance invents, maps out and tests radical theatre and performance concepts, including thorough interrogations both of the performer's body and of the most fundamental parameters of theatrical presentation. Dance has thus, not the least, become a laboratory to investigate and meditate on the place of theatrical live performance within a mediatised sociocultural environment. This module studies some of the dramaturgic strategies employed in these new forms of choreography and dance performance.
A series of introductory lectures surveys the history and contexts of dance as a theatre genre and of choreography as creative method, while also addressing methodologies of analysing dance and its dramaturgic strategies. This will then be substantiated by an exploration of the works of selected choreographers, presenting a variety of styles and traditions from ballet to live art, in works by artists such as William Forsythe, Jiri Kylian, Lloyd Newson, Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Ohad Naharin, Jerome Bel, and others.
Total contact hours: 50
Private study hours: 250
Total study hours: 300
Essay 1 Performance Analysis (2000 words) (30%)
Essay 2 Dramaturgic Study (4000 words) (50%)
Seminar Presentation (20%)
Bremser, M. (ed.) (2004) Fifty Contemporary Choreographers. London & New York: Routledge.
Craine, D. and J. Mackrell (eds.) (2004) The Oxford Dictionary of Dance, Oxford: Oxford UP.
Carter, A. and J. O'Shea (eds.) (2010) The Routledge Dance Studies Reader. 2nd edition. Abingdon & New York: Routledge 2010
Hanson, P. and Callison, D. (eds.) (2015) Dance Dramaturgy: Modes of Agency, Awareness, and Engagement. London: Pagrave.
Jowitt, D. (1989) Time and the Dancing Image, Berkeley: University of California Press.
Profeta, K. (2015) Dramaturgy in Motion: At Work on Dance and Movement Performance. Madison: U Wisconsin Press.
Trenscenyi, K. et al. (eds.) (2014) New Dramaturgy: International Perspectives on Theory and Practice, London: Bloomsbury.
See the library reading list for this module (Canterbury)
On successfully completing the module students will be able to:
demonstrate their systematic understanding of key practitioners, practices, theorists, and contexts of dance theatre from ballet to contemporary dance performance;
understand the non-discursive medium of the body and movement by looking at a range of performance texts, as wells as writings about dance, and analyse bodies, movement, and corporeal dramaturgies;
appreciate the (post-)dramatic and narrative potential of dance and physical theatre;
understanding the place of dramaturgy as key critical practice in the profession, operating in a context where theory and practice intersect.
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