Dance and Diplomacy

By Anna Beatrice Scott Categories: Arts
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About Course

Dance & Diplomacy introduces students to the cultural impact of the dancing body on the construction and maintenance of various types of identities. Students will learn how patterned movements create specialized knowledge and therefore, generalized power to create a collective reality that can and often does challenge political regimes. With robust use of YouTube and other self-archiving video platforms (Instagram, TikTok, Facebook), students will investigate in real time how dance communities can become integrated components of international diplomacy, public policy and state violence while simultaneously serving as sites of validation, reverence and ingenuity.

What Will You Learn?

  • Upon completion of this course, students will be able to:
  • Debate (and dissolve) the false binary between folk and concert dance using present practitioner-derived archival footage
  • Discuss and analyze state-sanctioned choreography versus community-driven international festivals by reviewing major state-sponsored dance festivals internationally
  • Articulate a practical understanding of the role and import of “style” in the formation of cultural identities
  • Learn about the politics of curation and selection in dance festivals
  • Identify and articulate more nuanced conversations around: cultural appropriation, cultural appreciation, cultural differentiation, and cultural validation via dance.
  • As the final, students will create a dance festival on paper. The curation will investigate themes and theories encountered across the term. Those desiring to actually launch their festivals in their community will receive additional support via a smaller cohort.

Course Content

Week 1: What is Dance? When is Dance?
Introduction and Welcome Week About me How the class will function Components Assignment days Acquisition days Discussion days Implementation days When assignments are due Why so much watching of video Why assignments will vary in form and tools Assessment quiz–what do you see in the video; analyze these paragraphs; prompting an AI; what do you consider your home movement form Where does dance reside/Can dance be owned? Definitions Import of memory and math Discursive properties of dance Archival properties of dance Coherence and practical side of dance Dance cultures, but do we conflate culture with race? Culture with producing?

Week 2: The People’s Dance vs Choreography, a false dichotomy
This week we start to think about the differences between designing a dance for performance/consumption and a dance arising in a community for a special need, identified or not.

Week 3: Understanding Geopolitics and Dance
This week we investigate the concept of "nation" to understand how politics impact dance communities when policy makers and autocrats seek to create a narrative to define and distinguish the nation state and its territories from "others."

Week 4: Dancing up a Festival
The state-sanctioned dance festival often behaves quite differently from one that the homies put together to enjoy themselves. It's also different from the festival that has brought the community together for generations.

Week 5: How to put together your festival
Producing Change or Producing Archive? Applying theories we have learned, analyze the format and function of the festival. What might be some of the outcomes from its structure, both intended and unintended? What would you shift, if anything, to achieve a different outcome? Why or why not?

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