Knowing Dance (DNCE20035)

This subject focuses on critical thinking in the context of local and international contemporary practices in dance.

Through critical investigations of dances within their contexts, traditions and cultures, dance histories are addressed and explored.

Developing students’ historical knowledge of dance and contexts of performance, this subject expands awareness of the intercultural foundations of modern dance, and of the impact of colonialism and settler culture in shaping Australian dance history. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander dance knowledge as Australia’s enduring choreographed past is acknowledged and reflected upon in relation to contemporary Indigenous dance practice.

Students will gain skills in historical referencing, understanding of sources and how the past influences the present. They will engage in revitalising dance archives and, working in groups, explore the archival impulse in relation to contemporary discourses on dance reenactment and recovery.

Through historiography, dancers engage in the study and embodiment of dances through diverse sources including ancestral memories, texts, images, embodied memories and inter-corporeal transmission gaining an appreciation and understanding of dance’s histories.