DANC 111. Choreography Seminar

How does research inform and deepen the process of dance-making, allowing choreographers to articulate and advocate an artistic vision with clarity?

This seminar provides students the environment to cultivate an individualized creative process centered upon critical inquiry and research.

Within this process, students interrogate and explore implications of concepts and terms such as ‘tradition/contemporaneity’, ‘abstraction/representation’, ‘practice-as-research’, ‘production’ – and ‘choreography’ itself – in turn situating their respective processes within social and cultural contexts. Through this examination of dance works and creative methodologies, students are encouraged to self-reflectively and purposefully consider how they might want to work.

Each student can approach the course through diverse points of interest - whether focusing on a specific dance form or choreographer; or dance’s interdisciplinary intersections with theater, text, music, visual art, media, or technology; somatic practices; site-specificity; or sociocultural and identity studies.

Meeting in both the classroom and studio, students engage in assigned and self-directed reading and viewings, peer feedback and discussion, and written assignments. Emphasis is placed on editing and revision as essential to both choreography and writing.
How does research inform and deepen the process of dance-making, allowing choreographers to articulate and advocate an artistic vision with clarity?

This seminar provides students the environment to cultivate an individualized creative process centered upon critical inquiry and research.

Within this process, students interrogate and explore implications of concepts and terms such as ‘tradition/contemporaneity’, ‘abstraction/representation’, ‘practice-as-research’, ‘production’ – and ‘choreography’ itself – in turn situating their respective processes within social and cultural contexts. Through this examination of dance works and creative methodologies, students are encouraged to self-reflectively and purposefully consider how they might want to work.

Each student can approach the course through diverse points of interest - whether focusing on a specific dance form or choreographer; or dance’s interdisciplinary intersections with theater, text, music, visual art, media, or technology; somatic practices; site-specificity; or sociocultural and identity studies.

Meeting in both the classroom and studio, students engage in assigned and self-directed reading and viewings, peer feedback and discussion, and written assignments. Emphasis is placed on editing and revision as essential to both choreography and writing.

Double-graded seminar. Registration for BOTH SECTIONS, A and B, is required for Honors students. Non-Honors students may elect to sign up for 1 section.
Prerequisite: DANC012 Dance Lab II and at least one dance studies course.
Humanities.
2 credits.
Fall 2025. Small.
Catalog chapter: Dance
Department website: https://www.swarthmore.edu/dance

Access the class schedule to search for sections.