Lailye Weidman

This course invites dancers and movers of all experience levels to dive into the bold work of moving together. Over the semester, students will learn techniques from contact improvisation, contemporary partnering, and ensemble improvisation. We will engage with dance artists who utilize these practices and view choreographic works generated through related inquiries. In dialogue with readings and audio materials (podcasts), we will ask how dancing together relates to community organizing, collective work, and building coalitions. While harmony and shared affinity may arise in our dancing, this course acknowledges that dancing together requires active-and sometimes difficult-negotiations between one's own aims and those of one's collaborators. Drawing on Bernice Johnson Reagon's theorization of coalition, we will cultivate spaces for discomfort, difference, and conflicting needs within our group practices. Personal practices for grounding in one's own body and environment will also be an essential component. keywords:dance, care, coalition, organizing, improvisation

This course is for educators, artists, dance and theater makers, and anyone interested in embodied modes of learning, gathering, and facilitation. With a focus on dance practices and dance pedagogy, we will read about and discuss anti-racist pedagogy, trauma-informed facilitation, universal design, addressing and undoing ableism in the classroom, and approaches to working with children and other age groups. On Thursdays, the class will stretch an extra hour, which enrolled students will run as a class series for the second half of the semester. This series will be open to the entire HC community-students, staff, faculty. Hands-on teaching experience will help students deepen their skills at leading and facilitating embodied activities. Writing assignments throughout will ask student to reflect on their experience as teachers and learners. Keywords:Dance, Education, Pedagogy, Movement, Teaching

This course is for Div II students who are ready to design, develop, and present a creative project in dance or interdisciplinary performance. Students should enter with a specific project in mind or underway. We will meet weekly to discuss and share tools for multiple stages of the creative process: goal-setting, planning, research, development, revising, and production/presentation. Accompanying materials and discussions will emphasize praxis-how ideas, theories, and politics meet the world through artmaking. Students will voice emerging ideas and share elements of works-in-process at each session. We will activate co-working methods and explore structures for offering and receiving feedback. While some students in this course will be working toward a specific concert, enrollment in this course does not guarantee a slot in dance program productions. Self-producing and other opportunities will be discussed. Prerequisite: Students should have taken a dance, theatre, or visual arts course in which they created embodied performance-related projects Keywords:Dance, Performance, Theater, Production, Praxis

This course invites students to explore dance as a vehicle for dialogue with the world around us including the land, environmental systems, architecture/ built environment, human and non-human communities, and the histories and politics that shape both where we dwell and how we dwell there. Desire lines are the pathways etched on a landscape by people following their preference rather than a proscribed route. Building from this term, we will acknowledge and investigate the physical and affective imprints that we make as we move. Students will engage dance and movement practices all over campus, while employing choreography and performance as modes of research that contribute to and learn from other disciplines and systems of knowledge. We will also look at dance works that delve into notions of place, environment, and community. Students will work both solo and in collaboration to create original projects that emerge from course themes

In this course, students engage in an in-depth rehearsal process toward a final performance that will be performed in the FCD Faculty Concert at Hampshire in November. The proposed investigation centers dance as a practice of listening. We will explore our ears for their anatomical wonder and metaphorical power. We will also inquire beyond auditory perception. Dance is a vehicle for listening-to music, the environment, each other, the body's impulses, and more! Rehearsals involve collaboration, movement creation, improvisation, writing, and dialogue. Occasional readings and viewings will accompany our investigations. Vocalization, contact improvisation, and partnering principles may be engaged in addition to solo and ensemble dancing. Prior study of dance at the intermediate or advanced levels is suggested. Students must be invested in creating live performance and able to commit to the entire semester including tech and performance. To enroll, please sign up for the workshop/information session on May 6. Students can also enter through the FCD audition held on September 7. For more information, please email lmwHA@hampshire.edu. Keywords:Dance, repertory, performance, choreography, improvisation

In this course, students will enter dance and dance making as vehicles for embodied research and interdisciplinary dialogue. Over the course of the semester, we will make dances that move alongside and beyond other disciplines-developing choreography and movement practices while studying narrative and poetic forms, learning from visual artists and musicians, exploring intersections with architecture and environmental studies. Visits with guest artists, scholars, and students in other courses will help us launch these inquiries. Throughout the semester, we will reflect on what dance can offer back to other fields and the particular power of movement as "a way of knowing." The creation of choreography is an integral aspect of this course, yet rather than privilege only the final product, we will invest in dancing as a medium for research, discovery, and collaboration. This course is open to anyone who wants to jump into embodied learning and making Keywords:Dance, choreography, research, movement, art

n Queer Dance: Meanings and Makings, Clare Croft proposes queer dance as a space of radical difference, where multiple identities, subjectivities, and politics collide, propelling artists and audiences into world-making action. This course will begin with Croft's text and expand into other creative and scholarly frameworks for considering the power and potential of queer + dance. Rather than treating "queer" as a monolith, we will examine queer dance through various and intersectional lenses, centering queer artists of color, disabled artists, trans and gender non-conforming artists, and others who resist dominant cultural narratives through dance. In addition to readings, we will engage with dance performances both live and on video. And, we will dance, move, and create choreography in dialogue with class materials and our group conversations. This course emphasizes the relationship between theory and practice as a key place for creating one's own queer methodologies. All levels of experience and identities welcome. Keywords:Queer, dance, theory, choreography, trans The content of this course deals with issues of race and power.

This beginning-level course invites students to develop movement, making, and performance practices as vehicles for thinking about and supporting new beginnings. The course will function as dance class, rehearsal, and research seminar where we will examine assumptions about whose bodies are afforded the opportunity to be expressive, and learn to trust what our bodies already know. We will also work to expand our capacities for embodied play, experimentation, meaning-making, physical and intellectual rigor, and employ a range of creative modalities (including use of the written word, video and digital media) to contextualize and process embodied experience. Our work will be bolstered by the study of theoretical underpinnings of contemporary dance, art-making and performance practices. We will share our work in a collaborative all-day performance event at the midterm, with a possible informal showing at the end of the semester. No previous dance experience is necessary. KEYWORDS:Dance, theatre, performance, movement, art

In this course, students engage in an in-depth rehearsal process toward a final performance that will be performed in the Five College Dance Concert hosted by UMass in the first week of December. The proposed investigation centers bodily negotiation of proximity, connection, contact, and vulnerability during this time of the lingering-pandemic. Together we ask: How has the risk of contagion registered in our bodies, shaped our movement, brought us together and pushed us apart? Can we return to togetherness without embracing denial and amnesia? How might we honor the power of our shared breath? Rehearsals will involve collaboration, movement creation, improvisation, writing, and dialogue. A few shared readings and viewings will accompany our physical investigations. Some contact improvisation and partnering principles will be engaged in our shared work, Prior study of any dance practice at the intermediate or advanced level suggested. Students must be invested in the process of creating live performance. Instructor permission/Audition required. KEYWORDS:Dance, repertory, performance, choreography, improvisation