Orienting ourselves away from the traditional performance/audience relationship of Western European dance lineages, particularly the human-centric relationships through which performance is typically produced and shared, this course proposes an attunement toward another, expanded audience or web of relations through which to perform. With a critical eye towards what anthropologist Natasha Myers calls “the colonial ecological sensorium” – modes of perception and ways of being in relation shaped by colonial violence, extractive capitalism and human exceptionalism – we will explore the role of creative embodied inquiry in extending ourselves beyond anthropocentric ways of being together and performing in the world across a multiplicity of non/human relationships, desires, energies and agencies. Our investigation will be framed and supported by critical contributions from scholars and artists thinking/moving at the intersections of indigenous rights, sovereignty and kincentric ecologies; crip theory; transqueer ecologies; critical race theory; animacy and new materialism; posthumanism; animal rights; environmental justice, etc. Throughout the course we will talk/feel/move/observe our way through radical reimaginings of ecology in the face of ecological collapse and unravel ontological binaries such as human/non-human, animate/inanimate, living/dead, alive/inert in order to expose the porosity of these terms and what they reveal about governmentality and the management of lands and bodies.
This course welcomes students from all disciplines whose research and interests overlap with the subject matter. Please be prepared to participate in movement practices and group dialogue with equal rigor. In addition to reading 1-3 articles per week, students will be asked to develop performance scores, practices and other creative methodologies towards a final shared event or happening; submit one 3-5 page paper and one 5-7 page paper; and collectively assemble a zine of work compiled by the class.
Learning Outcomes:
Exposure to a survey of artists and scholars from a variety of fields whose work reimagines how we think about ecology.
Deepened experiential and critical understanding of the politics of the moving body and the entwinement of creative embodied practice, dance & other forms of performance with sociopolitical forces.
Practice exploring the development of artistic work outside traditional performance paradigms.
Development of writing practices alongside the creative process.
Delivery Method: Fully in-person
Prerequisites: Determination will be given based on a statement of interest in the course. Please submit a statement of interest to levigonzalez@bennington.edu by November 28th.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 4
M/Th 10:00AM - 11:50AM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 20
Course Frequency: One time only
Categories: 4000 , All courses , Dance , Four Credit , Fully In-Person
Tags: dance , Ecology , performance studies