Dance History and Cultural Context
Dance History and Cultural Context tests dance as a historical and cultural practice: major periods, artists, works, institutions, and the social functions of movement. It also tests whether you can teach context accurately and respectfully, distinguishing appreciation from appropriation.
Lineages to know
- Ballet: Louis XIV established the Académie Royale de Danse in 1661. Romantic ballet brought pointe work and supernatural heroines (La Sylphide, 1832; Giselle, 1841; Taglioni). Imperial Russian ballet codified classics (Petipa and Ivanov's Swan Lake, 1895). Diaghilev's Ballets Russes reshaped the art; Balanchine's neoclassicism centered on New York City Ballet (1948).
- American modern: Duncan's free movement; Denishawn (St. Denis and Shawn); Graham's contraction and release; Humphrey-Limón's fall and recovery; Cunningham's chance and collaboration with John Cage; Dunham's research-based technique; Ailey's Revelations (1960).
- Postmodern and beyond: Judson Dance Theater (1962) embraced pedestrian movement and task; contact improvisation emerged with Steve Paxton (1972); site-specific and dance-theater practices (Bausch) followed.
- Global and diasporic forms: Bharatanatyam, Kathak, and Odissi; Japanese Noh, Kabuki, and Butoh; flamenco; West African and diasporic dance; tap, jazz, hip-hop. Treat these as living practices with specific histories, not decorative "styles."
Worked example
Why did the 1913 premiere of The Rite of Spring provoke a riot? Reason across three layers: Nijinsky's choreography rejected ballet's turned-out, lifted line for turned-in legs, flexed feet, weighted drops, and angular group masses; Stravinsky's score used shifting meter, dissonance, and percussive repetition; the Ballets Russes audience expected a certain Parisian ballet aesthetic. The collision of vocabulary and expectation explains the response better than "the music was loud."
Traps
- Misattributing artists or periods (Graham is modern, not postmodern; Judson is 1962, not Denishawn).
- Treating "modern dance" as one style.
- Using non-Western forms only as "folk" examples.
- Ignoring issues of colonization, appropriation, and who tells the history.