Twentieth-Century American Dance: Sixties Vangard to Nineties Hip Hop

Twentieth-Century American Dance: Sixties Vangard to Nineties Hip Hop is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Constance Valis Hill.

Course Description
This survey of twentieth century American dance moves from the sixties-- a decade of revolt and redefinition in American modern dance that provoked new ideas about dance, the dancer's body and a radically changed dance aesthetic-- to the radical postmodernism of the nineties when the body continued to be the site for debates about the nature of gender, ethnicity and sexuality. We will investigate how the political and social environment of the sixties, particularly the Black Power Movement and the Women's Movement, informed the work of succeeding generations of dance artists and yielded new theories about the relationship between cultural forms and the construction of identities. We will question how the effervescent experiments and anarchic expressions of the sixties continued to be embodied in the works of contemporary American dance artists; and how works by contemporary American dance artists can collectively be seen as embodied forms of protest expression, as "activist" works that have continued to challenge and negotiate the social positions and contradictory identities of everyday life.