Goucher College 2019-2020 Undergraduate Catalogue 
    
    Mar 29, 2024  
Goucher College 2019-2020 Undergraduate Catalogue PLEASE NOTE: This is an archived catalog. Programs are subject to change each academic year.

CPEA 210 - Dancing Places: Creating Site-Specific Performance (4 Cr.)


This course investigates how place and space are interrelated with people’s sense of community. We will focus on the artistic genre of site-specific performance: events created for sites outside the typical spaces of the theatre, studio, concert hall or gallery. You will gain experience creating art of your own: whether as a performer or behind the scenes or through a combination of the two, you will develop and execute events designed to guide audiences into an experience that is both entertaining and thought-provoking. We will look at how site-specific art raises questions about how we experience place–questions about individual experience, social conduct and the politics of space. What brings public, shared spaces to life as places for community? What makes you feel either comfortable or out of place? Whom do you notice, or not? How do your own presence and activity contribute to the dynamics of a place? Who gets to contribute and who is excluded? What are some of the problems, both in society and large and in the immediacy of a given place, that create experiences of social alienation within commons spaces?  As a jumping off point for our investigation of how people share space, we will draw on a variety of different kinds of social dancing–in a broad sense as dancing that’s done mainly for fun and sociability rather than for show. For our class, no previous dance training is necessary, and appearing for an audience as a performer is encouraged but not required. Each class member’s experience, whether as enthusiast or skeptic about taking the dance floor, will contribute to our shared understanding of how places can be in motion. Restricted to first-year through junior students, and others with instructor permission. Rebecca Free.