School of Dance

Colleges & Divisions > College of Performing Arts
Overview Facilities Program Blueprint

Programs

Donna Faye Burchfield \ dburchfield@uarts.edu \ 215.717.6580
Director

School of Dance Office
Terra Building 3rd Floor | 215.717.6110 | School of Dance Website

Overview

The new dance curriculum’s course of study takes the depth and rigor of a discipline-based dance conservatory while engaging students in open discussions within their own practice, valuing their voices as capable of developing new and critical perspectives in dance.

Facilities

The main studios of the School of Dance are located in the Terra Building at 211 South Broad Street. These spacious, bright, and well-lit studios are fully equipped with barres and mirrors, huge windows, pianos, and audio consoles. Their floors are constructed with four-inch, state-of-the-art suspension for the safest and most comfortable dancing surface available. The University has completely restored its historic Merriam Theater, which serves as the institution’s major performance hall for students, as well as “home” to a number of regional performing arts organizations, including the Pennsylvania Ballet. The UArts Dance Theater, a 180-seat theater, is used exclusively for student dance performances. The Albert M. Greenfield Library contains books, journals, DVDs, and videotapes devoted to dance, which are available to students for research and coursework.

Program Blueprint

The dance curriculum is designed to balance a great range of experiences with small learning communities. It is divided into two parts: Foundation Series (freshmen and sophomore) and Research Series (junior and seniors).

Studio Practice

These courses range in disciplines specific to the expertise of both faculty and visiting guest artists.

All Studio Practice courses provide anatomically sound models for technical training in dance that consistently weave and reference both the historical and the emerging techniques, forms and styles through informed somatic practices. These studio courses begin with proper warm-up exercises to prepare the dancer for more complex movement expression. Material develops in space and time as the class progresses. Relationships of movement material to effort, shape, dynamics, time, motivation, articulation and intention are introduced and reinforced through repetition and sequencing. Most classes involve accompaniment of live music and simultaneously focus on the relationships of the moving body to sound, silence and rhythm. Extended Practice Labs introduce students to notions of ensemble dancing, classical and contemporary partnering, as well as contact improvisation.

Within the Foundation Series, five-week module courses are designed to provide the time for in depth study of techniques and approaches to dance training and to allow for possible new pathways to emerge through the sequencing of training.

Within the Research Series, the Studio Practice courses are taught twice a week for the semester. Students are advised to selected at least 3 pairs of these courses to satisfy requirements.

The central questions are: How do dancers today prepare themselves for a field that is consistently changing and expanding? What is the relationship of technical training to a student’s creative work whether choreographing or performing? And, most importantly… How do dancers find a technique through their studio practice that can support the demands of varied choreographic approaches?

Thinking, Making, Doing (TMD)

All TMD courses happen in a studio and are structured in a workshop setting where assignments are made and time is spent making, viewing and discussing work. Ideas and concepts that shape forms of expression are referenced and illuminated through classroom viewings, listenings, and readings as well as attendance at live performances.

Within the TMD courses, students will research and discuss how works of art get made, how motivations are discovered, explore intentions and directions, and make work of their own. Students will compose, improvise, discuss, write artist statements, and keep artist journals in an environment that encourages experimentation and risk taking. Material is developed both within and outside the assigned class time.

The central questions of these courses are: How might we approach artmaking holistically? What is aesthetic intent and how does aesthetic movement imagery get made? All of these forms of knowing how are forms of bodily lived (experiential) knowledge. How do we research a creative work? and…How do we demonstrate (make visible) and verbalize this research?

Body Pathways

Body Pathways is a year long core course in the Foundation Series designed to introduce students to the following: conditioning & assessment; awareness for alignment, placement and strength; experiential anatomy; and varying somatic practices for sustaining the body in dance. The course provides students with ongoing and consistent body assessment tools that will keep them dancing in a healthier, stronger way throughout their careers in dance.

Sophomore Project

This capstone course is designed to be the culmination of the Foundation Series. The course gives students the opportunity to learn and perform both historical and new works from varied disciplines with an emphasis on the vast approaches to staging, learning and performing. It includes curatorial conversations, imaginative studies and project rehearsals.

Pedagogies of Dance (PODS)

These classes in the Research/Portfolio Series utilize the workshop studio setting for the imagining, discussing, improvising, rehearsing, and eventual public presentation of work. These public presentations happen in formal settings such as the University’s Merriam Theater, or extend out to include different locations and communities.

PODS offer students the opportunity to make connections through multiple access points. An interdisciplinary system, PODS are designed to help students recognize the tools and methodologies used in creative and performance work. Structurally each POD is identified by a unique topic (special topic). Students and faculty work with this topic to make connections as it relates to one of five POD labs: ethics & politics (activism, community based art), mediated forms (virtual space, digital languages), visualities (visual studies, visual perspectives) , documentation forms (travel log, story telling, curatorial practices) , and hybridity/wildcard.

Senior Project

This capstone course is designed to be the culmination of the Research/Portfolio Series. It is designed to assist seniors in the development and presentation of their senior projects. Each student will hone their artist statements, research ideas, propose a project, and create a website. They will also participate in rehearsals, performance, and technical aspects of the project presentations.

History, Theory & Criticism

Through coursework in Contemporary Practices, History, and Expanded Field Labs students work to explore and engage with dance’s history alongside ideas within the expanding fields of contemporary art. Students work to employ diverse modes of thinking, both verbally and in writing, to communicate ideas.

A wide range of electives in dance are offered each semester.