List of 8 items.

• Advanced Dance Technique

  Students with considerable proficiency in dance technique will be placed in this fast paced, dynamic, and physically challenging course.

• All That Jazz

  This course is a jazz dance class taught to live music provided by CSW’s jazz ensemble. Students will expand their knowledge of jazz, America’s first art form, through the integrated study of movement and music composition. Dancers will focus on the rhythmic patterns that are created through the influence of such jazz genres as swing, blues, bebop, and jazz-fusion, among others. Such terms as syncopated rhythms, body isolations, improvisation, high level of energy, and low center of gravity will be practiced as movement qualities that are direct derivatives of jazz music. Jazz ensemble will learn to perform jazz standards in a group setting. Emphasis will be on establishing a repertoire, building skills in improvisation, and performance.

• Caribbean Dance

  This course offers an introduction to the popular dances performed throughout the Caribbean. The focus of the class is to understand the indigenous people who dance the rhythms of the New World islands, including Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Trinidad, and Puerto Rico. We begin with an anthropological approach to the dances using the research footage conducted by the late dance anthropologist Katherine Dunham. Students will learn both traditional/ceremonial and social dances of the countries mentioned above. Students will dance the Yanvalou from Haiti, and the Bomba of Puerto Rico, and the most popular movements such as the Rumba, Salsa, and the Bachata that come from the clave rhythm. This course awards credit toward the social justice requirement.

• Dance Media and Technology

  The integration of dance, media, and technology extends the language of choreography and performance, enabling artists to express themselves in new contexts. Through both theory and practice, this class introduces the emergence of new trends in the world of dance having to do with new technologies. We focus on “screen dance,” an experimental art genre started in the 1950s, which is burgeoning today with the proliferation of digital technology (lowcost cameras, editing software) and populist broadcast/distribution vehicles (YouTube). A “screen dance” is a dance that exists on the screen alone, and nowhere else. We also explore the integration of media with live dance performance using new technologies (video manipulation programs, 3D motion tracking/capture programs, the internet, and communication devices). Class time is split between the computer lab and the dance studio.

• Experiments in Movement

  This course offers an active, laboratory approach to experimenting with movement in todays digital age. We will experiment with use of social media, the Internet, cameras, messaging, and other devices to invent street dances, dance videos, alternative flash mobs, participatory events, and installations having to do with movement and/or dance. The first half of the course is focused on specific problem-solving assignments, and then it opens up to become a guided independent study, where students design and implement their own movement experiments.

• Hip Hop Dance

  Explore the history, evolution, and physicality of hip hop dance styles. This course will raise awareness of the roots of hip hop dance and its transformation over the years through high energy, expressive movement, and the cultural impact it has had on the 20th and 21st centuries.

• One-on-One Project

  The One-on-One project is an opportunity for students to be creative while exploring new ways of moving with someone they may not be familiar with. Students will work closely through collaboration. Once they have been assigned a partner, it will be up to the students to establish rehearsal times.

• West African Dance

  The content of this course gives an introduction to basic West African movement, rhythms, and songs. Each class begins with a warm-up to prepare the body for this particular style of movement, followed by movements across the floor, and finally work on specific dances. Students will learn several dances from West Africa, primarily from Nigeria, Mali, Guinea, and the Senegambia regions. Classes are accompanied by live drumming, giving students the opportunity to understand the unique connection between polyrhythmic timing and the body in motion. While the class focuses on the dances of West Africa, it is also a means for understanding the culture of the people. This course awards credit toward the social justice requirement.