Smith College's Moodle
Search results: 2011
- Instructor: Lester Tomé
This is an intermediate-level contemporary dance course designed to cultivate sensitive, intelligent, powerful dancing. The intention is to expand and refine not only students’ physical capacities but also their perceptual acuity, creativity, and confidence in movement and performance.
This semester, our dancing practice will also be in relationship to Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights. Short selections of his writing will serve as companions to our dance training, as well as starting points for discussions and templates for the course’s written assignments.The content of the course is eclectic. I have developed the movement material I will share with you through my own professional collaborations and ongoing training, which has been primarily within Western, postmodern contemporary dance. Engaging principles from a variety of somatic practices (including Bartenieff Fundamentals, Klein Technique, and Body-Mind Centering) in addition to yoga, release techniques, and Contact Improvisation, the course aims, on a technical level, to sharpen anatomical and kinesthetic awareness and to refine initiation and articulation within spatially complex material. By improving dynamic alignment, increasing strength and range of motion, and refining awareness, we will seek heightened aliveness in our dancing along with efficient, judicious use of energy. The importance of attention, intention, and imagination in movement will be prioritized throughout.
Why delight?
Delight is an integral facet of my ongoing research and interest. For me, a practice of being in delight—or delighting—is a practice of noticing, following, and investigating what enlivens you, awakens you, sparks your curiosity, draws you in, hypes you up, slows you down, moves you, softens you, emboldens you, connects you, distracts you, comforts you, confuses you. Delighting entails attending to details and nuance. It requires an openness to being touched, affected, and changed by what we encounter. The proposition of this class is that a dancing practice may also be a delighting practice—a way of waking up more fully to the world.
This is not to say that everything we do will be delightful—most likely, you will not resonate with everything we cover—nor does it mean we will ignore hardship and struggle. It means only that we will work to remain in relationship to our growing understanding of delight—what it is and what it does—throughout.
- Instructor: Sarah Lass
- Instructor: Nana Adjoa Ansah
- Instructor: Lilly Farah
- Instructor: Susannah Howe
- Instructor: Mike Kinsinger
- Instructor: Hannah Platter
- Instructor: Ysatis Tagle