Courses
Theater Courses
THEA 105: Introduction to Performance Studies
In this course students explore the question "what is performance?" and how this informs their understanding of an increasingly mediated and globalized world. They examine the broad spectrum of performance in its many forms including theater, dance, visual art, performance art, everyday life, folklore, rituals and celebrations, and protests as well as the processes of each. Students apply readings on performance theory to performance events and sites on campus and beyond. In addition, they engage in an in-depth exploration of both global and intercultural performances and the growing international importance of this field.
THEA 130: Introduction to Design
The creation of theater is a synthesis of text, performance, and visual imagery. This course explores how the visual aspect of theatrical design affects the way an audience perceives, feels, and responds to text and action. Students learn to use line, mass, color, and texture to communicate metaphoric and thematic ideas as they relate to the overall theatrical experience. They examine how forms of art, architecture, and music use these tools to influence and transform the audience, and build on this foundation to create a design vocabulary for theater. Students discuss how clothing, adornment, and body language influence the way individuals perceive others and present themselves. As a culminating project, students learn the fundamentals of collaborative creation, and design scenery and costumes for a work of dramatic literature. Required of all majors. No previous art or theater training is required.
THEA 132: Theater Technology
An introduction to the technical aspects of live theater, exploring both traditional and modern approaches, this course provides a look "behind the curtain" to reveal the secrets of theater magic. Topics include the stage and its equipment, materials, and construction of scenic and property items, lighting, sound, projections, rigging, and backstage organization. All students participate in the preparation and presentation of theater and dance productions. Due to the hands-on nature of this course, 30 hours of outside class time are required and scheduled individually.
THEA 170: Introduction to Digital Media
This introductory course explores the ever-evolving world of digital media in the performing arts, where technology, creativity, and communities converge. Students will be trained on the holistic and collaborative process from storyboarding to technical execution, specifically as it relates to live entertainment. We’ll examine the history, current landscape, and emerging technologies in projection and video design.
THEA 202: Introduction to Devising Performance
Devising is a contemporary performance-making practice that declines the traditional single author/choreographer/director/script model of theater in favor of a collaborative approach to generating themes, content, forms, and aesthetics for creating performance. In this hybrid course students learn about devising practices, histories, theories, and politics, and explore devising techniques to practice these methodologies in action.
THEA 211: Refugee Theatre and Performances
This course examines the representation of refugees in a range of performances. It further considers how theatre might represent mobility, liminality, trauma, and belonging. If some narratives of refugees (in Hollywood films and other popular media) often highlight an ultimate sense of resolution and a nation’s ability to "save" a refugee, how might performances also work to challenge narratives that spotlight the gratitude of refugees? In this class, we will work to consider how wars, military interventions, and forced displacement are remembered, as well as how and why aspects of such events might be forgotten and disavowed. We will examine who has the right to represent refugeedom, and further attend to how refugeedom might affect the representation of time and space in theatre.
THEA 217: Theatrical Things: Material Culture and Performance
This course considers the intertwining of theatre and performance with things. Theatre productions often rely on and make deft use of objects. Costumes and scenery can transform actors and stages, conjuring other times and places. Props can drive the action of the play or reveal the nuances of a character. Performances can also leave material traces as numerous theatre scrapbooks, souvenirs, fan mail, and reviews might attest. Objects can disclose their makers’ and users’ values, relationships, and the memories that haunt and hold onto them. We will explore how theatrical things – the material culture of theatre and performance — can offer important perspectives on queerness, race, disability, migration, displacement, collectivity, care, and memory. We will also examine how theatre and performances can use objects to shape spectatorship, to recall histories of objectification and exhibition, and to work toward preservation, repair, and worldmaking.
THEA 223: Play Analysis in Action
A dramaturg contributes a wide variety of theatrical knowledge—literary, historical, critical, and practical—to the process of producing a play. The dramaturg’s function in a theater company is to ask and answer questions, small and large, about everything from the meaning of a single word in a text, to the meanings of the text as a whole. The dramaturg must also understand the requirements of production such as acting, directing, and design. This class will examine how dramaturgs can synthesize and communicate this knowledge and understanding to the artists producing the play and to the audiences watching it.
THEA 229: Advanced Design Studio
This course presents an in-depth study of the creative and practical tools used by designers to visually enrich and shape the theatrical experience. Building on the foundations created in THEA 130: Intro to Design, this course is crafted to deepen and refine principles and practices of both scenic and costume design. Projects will be crafted to allow students to explore one or both design disciplines. Class time will involve a mix of technique development, in-class creative sessions, and presentation of design work. This course is recommended for students with an interest in the visual and emotional impact of effective design on drama and performance. This course may be repeated twice for credit. Recommended background: Interested students who have not taken the prerequisite course are encouraged to contact the instructor to discuss their previous art training and experience. Prerequisite(s): THEA 130, or an individual portfolio review.
THEA 232: Lighting Design
This course introduces the practical and artistic elements of theatrical lighting design. Through hands-on experience, students will become familiar with the tools and equipment typically used in contemporary stage lighting. As they engage in the creative process, students will explore color theory, form, movement, and composition. Prerequisite(s) or corequisite(s): THEA 105, 130, or 132.
THEA 235: Fashion: A Survey of Western Culture
The history of dress and human adornment includes political, sexual, economic, and cultural factors, often entwined in subtle or ephemeral ways with the aesthetics of what we consider fashion. This course, which is conducted in a survey format, begins with early Greek culture and continues into the current era, examining not just physical appearance, but these other factors that have driven the myriad changes in the history of dress throughout Western culture.
THEA 237: Acting and the Camera
This course focuses on the craft and artistry of acting in television, film, and various media platforms. The emphasis of this class is on adapting the performance to the special needs of the camera. Students will learn fundamental techniques in concentration, discovery, eye line, physical movement, listening, and the importance of experience in the moment. They will analyze texts and apply a specific technical approach of intention and given circumstances, helping them learn how to make beat-by-beat analysis and active choices from their character’s point of view. Individual exercises in how to self-tape, working with a variety of film equipment, and sense memory are also explored. Examples of film and television work will be used to support all techniques. Prerequisite(s): THEA 261.
THEA 238: Race and Ethnicity in Modern and Contemporary American Drama
This course looks at the significant and constitutive role of modern and contemporary American drama in American cultural history. The class will particularly focus on how these plays explore race and ethnicity. We will look at these plays in their cultural contexts, noting how they examine settler colonialism, immigration, and racism, while also working toward preservation, repair, and worldmaking. Playwrights whose work we will examine include James Ijames, Lorraine Hansberry, Mary Kathryn Nagle and Lloyd Suh.
THEA 240: Introduction to Playwriting
In this course, students will learn how to write plays by…writing plays. The goal is for students to write boldly, quickly, and theatrically, and to begin to understand and manage their creative process. Students will read and discuss contemporary plays to understand the choices playwrights make about character, setting, plot, and theme. Time will be spent on learning how to give and receive feedback following the Liz Lerman critical response process. Students will turn in new pages of dialogue nearly every week, and over the course of the semester will structure their own revision process, resulting in a written piece of dramatic work. Previous playwriting experience is not required.
THEA 250: Introduction to Directing
An introduction to the art of directing, with an emphasis on creative and aesthetic problems and their solutions. Students learn the essential processes used by a director and deepen their awareness of contemporary directors and practices. The course offers a basic understanding of fundamental directorial technique: script analysis, staging, collaboration with performers, and approaches to contemporary drama. The course is both theoretical and practical, involving readings, rehearsal observation, theater exercises and directing scenes.
THEA 261: Introduction to Acting
This experiential course offers an in-depth exploration of the craft of acting. Using several different acting techniques, students undertake exercises to strengthen connection, relaxation, objective, emotional openness, and moment-to-moment availability. The course emphasizes ensemble-building techniques to deepen cooperative skills. Students explore various methodologies and apply them to the preparation of their contemporary scene work.
THEA 263: Introduction to Voice and Speech
Students examine the nature and working of the human voice. They explore ways to develop the voice’s potential for expressive communication with exercises and the analysis of breathing, vocal relaxation, pitch, resonance, articulation, audibility, and text performance. This is a dynamic and highly experimental performance-based course. No previous experience is required. Recommended background: one course in acting, performance, or public speaking.
THEA 267: European Drama after 1989
This course examines contemporary drama and theater, focusing on the post-communist transition and experience. Students will explore how playwrights, directors, and theater companies responded to political transition, social upheaval, economic transformation, and the reconfiguration of national identities. By analyzing theatrical texts and performances, students learn how theater functions as a space for reflection, political critique, and cultural dialogue as they gain tools to interpret dramatic works within their historical and cultural contexts. The course aims to identify common post-communist themes and stylistic features across countries while introducing key concepts such as memory, censorship, nationalism, globalization, and post-socialist identity.
THEA 269: Hamilton and Beyond: Theater and History, and Theater Histories
“History has its eyes on you,” George Washington warns Hamilton in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2015 musical. Hamilton is profoundly concerned with narrating history and shaping one’s legacy. It also implicitly suggests that theater is an important medium for transmitting and transforming histories. This class looks at the interlinked relationship between history and theater. Together we will trace the contexts, origins, development, and circulation of major genres and types of theater such as pageants, tragedy, comedy, and melodrama. We will also focus in particular on history plays and historical musicals; we will consider how these works negotiate with the representation of trauma, disappointment, and joy, giving historical moments and figures a textured complexity exceeding reductive ways of remembering “heroes” or “victims.” We will also attend to how theatre works with and against other forms of remembering (and forgetting) such as national monuments and museums.
THEA 287: Chinese Drama and Storytelling
This course provides an introduction to the vibrant traditions of Chinese drama and storytelling. What can stories and plays tell us about the worlds from which they came? How do retellings and adaptations make new meaning? While learning to read the texts as literary works, we will also pay attention to their lives in performance. The first half of the course is devoted to traditional Chinese storytelling and dramatic literature of the 14th to 19th centuries and the social, historical, and cultural contexts in which they arose; the second half focuses on their continued reimagings in the 20th century and the intertwined lives of literature, stage and screen.
THEA 290: Practicum
Working under faculty direction, students perform major roles in departmental productions as a performer (290A); stage manager, associate stage manager, technician (290B); designer, dramaturg, assistant director (290C). One-half credit is earned. May be repeated.
THEA 295: Stage Management for the Performing Arts
A stage manager’s role and responsibility is to ensure clear communications, logistics, and safety throughout the entire production process, from pre-rehearsal preparation to post-performance breakdown. This fundamental course investigates theater making from the point of view of a stage manager while focusing on three essential roles: communication within a production team, facilitating a space that allows for creative exploration, and maintaining the artistic integrity of the show. Students will explore the best practice strategies or the “how to” lead an authentic equitable theatrical process. Recommended background: DANC/THEA 105, THEA 130, or 132.
THEA 299: Process & Production
Process & Production is an experiential course that offers an in-depth exploration into the process of creating departmental productions directed by faculty or guest artists which occur each semester. Students will deepen their understanding of collaboration and have the opportunity to participate in a variety of theater-making roles such as acting, choreography, design, devising, directing, dramaturgy, stage management or technical theater. This course allows students to learn about innovative theater practices and to apply techniques from other curricular work. In addition to daily rehearsals the creative team of students will meet weekly to discuss their process, reflect on readings and participate in workshops on topics related to the field such as intimacy/consent-based practices, anti-racist practices, safety and cultural competency. Students will complete a written reflection and portfolio about their process and production experience.
THEA 310: Immersive Media Installation
Immersive Media Installation is an advanced interdisciplinary creative production course that guides students through theoretical and technical frameworks for combining sound, video, and live performance in the conceptualization of an artwork. Students will exhibit their work in Bates’ new Immersive Media Studio (“IMStudio”) located in Coram. This studio allows for artwork to be exhibited utilizing multiple projections and speakers to create immersive media architectures. Readings/viewings and discussion support students’ understanding of intermedia creative practices in varied contexts. Weekly workshops support technical learning. Students will create two major creative projects through the term: one as a class collaboration, and one in small teams. Students will also learn about the process of media installation, media exhibition, will document their work and write a short artist statement, offering tools for professional artistic development.
THEA 339: Advanced Playwriting
In Advanced Playwriting, students will refine their writing and revision skills, offer and receive feedback through the Liz Lerman critical response process, read and respond to critical essays, and begin the transition to live performance. This writing- and discussion-driven course will also deepen students’ understanding of Aristotelian plot structure and its derivatives, as well as non-Western narrative structures by challenging students to explore and create bold, imaginative work. The basic elements of playwriting will be supplemented by explorations of form, language, character, structure, and space as innovated by contemporary playwrights. Students will complete a written body of dramatic work. Recommended background: THEA 240.
THEA 350: Advanced Directing
Students deepen their craft of directing by experimenting with a variety of storytelling techniques for the stage. Class work focuses on the study and practice of the directing process, in which students expand their ability to develop an approach to a dramatic text, work with designers and actors, and explore generative theater making. Throughout the course there is a sustained focus on the collaborative process and examination of contemporary directors and their work. Students direct a ten-minute play to conclude the semester. Recommended background: THEA 250.
THEA 360: Independent Study
Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department and permission of the chair are required. Working under faculty direction, students may select: THEA 360 A Stage Management; THEA 360 B Assistant Director; THEA 360 C Dramaturgy; THEA 360 D Directing; THEA 360 E Assistant Design in the Area of Focus; THEA 360 F Design.
THEA 362: Advanced Acting
Students deepen their craft of acting by exploring the techniques of Constantin Stanislavski, Michael Chekhov, Lloyd Richards and various other acting practitioners. Class work focuses on a psycho-physical acting approach, in which students expand their imagination, explore their impulses, and creatively integrate their bodies and voices. The course emphasizes ensemble-building techniques to strengthen cooperative skills. Throughout the course there is a sustained focus on text analysis; this practice is used to identify actions, given circumstances and objectives, ultimately leading to options and choices for the actor. Learned techniques are to be applied in all studio performances: an assigned scene and a student chosen monologue. Prerequisite(s): THEA 261.
THEA 457: Senior Thesis
Theater Makers students who elect this option structure their written work or website/portfolio around a creative project designated by the department in acting, design, directing, dramaturgy, playwriting, stage management, or technical theater. Theater Studies/Dramaturgy students who elect this option focus on scholarly research and writing. It offers them the opportunity to explore topics in theater and performance studies, dramatic literature, theater history, the theoretical and social dimensions of performance, or other appropriate areas of scholarly interest.
THEA 458: Senior Thesis
Theater Makers students who elect this option structure their written work or website/portfolio around a creative project designated by the department in acting, design, directing, dramaturgy, playwriting, stage management, or technical theater. Theater Studies/Dramaturgy students who elect this option, focus on scholarly research and writing. It offers them the opportunity to explore topics in theater and performance studies, dramatic literature, theater history, the theoretical and social dimensions of performance, or other appropriate areas of scholarly interest.
THEA S19: From Kimono to Indigo: Japanese Textiles, Cultural Appropriation, and Sustainability
The course will cover historical dress, (cross)gendered dressing, the levels of formality and seasonal patterns using a selection of vintage kimono. We will engage in kimono dressing, the visible mending technique sashiko, and the practice of preserving textiles with indigo dye. In addition, the course will address the issues related to Orientalism, cultural appropriation, and sustainability.
THEA S21: Puppets: Theory, Practice, and Play
This interdisciplinary course examines the questions, concepts, and potential surrounding puppets through a combination of hands-on work and play with puppets, discussion, readings, and viewings of puppet performances. Readings and other materials offer perspectives on what puppets are, how they interact with audiences, and what makes puppet performance a distinct forum for exploring questions about bodies and identities. Students test these ideas together using actual puppets to see how theory and practice collide. The course concludes with a collective project using puppets to engage with the community at Bates and beyond. Conducted in English.
THEA S27: Scenic Painting
Scene painting relies on visual illusion to achieve realism, and scenic painters must master creating two-dimensional works on a large scale that are seen at great distances. In this course students are introduced to a broad array of tools and techniques to turn paint and canvas visually into wood, marble, ornate stone carving, trompe l’oeil-virtually anything that exists in three dimensions. Projects are designed to be cumulative, building skills that can be incorporated into individually chosen final projects.
THEA S33: Central European Theater and Film
A study of Hungarian and German history, politics, theater, and film since about 1945. Our focus is on the impact on theater and film of the cataclysmic social and political changes in Central Europe since the post-WW2 division of Germany and the Hungarian uprisings of 1956. Other seminal events bearing on this study are the collapse of the Soviet bloc in 1989, the reunification of Germany, and the subsequent rebuilding of politics and culture in the region up until today. In conjunction with our study of history, politics, drama, and film, students read an array of secondary sources on the social and cultural history of post-war Central Europe. Classes will be conducted as discussions, led by the Bates instructors and Hungarian, German, and other Central European artists and scholars. Students maintain a journal describing and analyzing the plays, readings, films, and other academic materials studied. Recommended background: one course in European studies, theater, politics, or German studies.
THEA S50: Independent Study
Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study during a Short Term.
Dance Courses
DANC 105: Introduction to Performance Studies
In this course students explore the question "what is performance?" and how this informs their understanding of an increasingly mediated and globalized world. They examine the broad spectrum of performance in its many forms including theater, dance, visual art, performance art, everyday life, folklore, rituals and celebrations, and protests as well as the processes of each. Students apply readings on performance theory to performance events and sites on campus and beyond. In addition, they engage in an in-depth exploration of both global and intercultural performances and the growing international importance of this field.
DANC 151: Making Dances
Dive into making dances: Students explore how dances get made by creating, shaping, and revising movement in solo and group studies. Hands-on activities, reading, writing, and viewing assignments all spark and support creative work in choreography and improvisation. No prior dance experience required. Open to first-year students.
DANC 202: Introduction to Devising Performance
Devising is a contemporary performance-making practice that declines the traditional single author/choreographer/director/script model of theater in favor of a collaborative approach to generating themes, content, forms, and aesthetics for creating performance. In this hybrid course students learn about devising practices, histories, theories, and politics, and explore devising techniques to practice these methodologies in action.
DANC 240: Embodied Anatomy and Kinesthetics
This course develops an understanding of foundational human anatomy and kinesthetics as applied to bodies in motion. Topics include an introductory study of anatomy; the mechanics of movement; sustainable approaches to functional training and injury prevention in creative and athletic movement modalities. Recommended background: previous dance or movement training. Open to first-year students.
DANC 250: Dance Histories of the United States
Dance Histories of the United States invites students into creative and critical engagement with history and historiography by examining dance and performance topics and theories. This course encourages students to research contemporary and historical choreographies, dance artists, and pop-culture trends through research into the aesthetic, technical, and conceptual lineages that shape concert, commercial, and social dance forms in the United States. In exploring various histories of modern, jazz, street and club styles, ballet, and folkloric forms, students will gain insight into a multitude of embodied expressions in africanist, europeanist, and indigenous traditions. Students will be asked to engage their curiosity and question the role that dance history plays in developing collective and individual creativity and ingenuity, as well as in resisting and/or reifying notions of power, hierarchy, and privilege in contemporary societies. Course content will include regular reading, writing, personal reflection, viewing assignments, and presentations.
DANC 251: Making Dances II
This course offers students opportunities to deepen and refine their approach to making dance through solo and group works. Students will approach making dances through theoretical inquiry and creative play, regularly engaging with readings, informal showings, structured peer feedback, and discussion. The course will culminate in a public studio concert of final projects. Prerequisite(s): DANC 151, 253, 270I, DN/TH 202, or significant choreography for Bates performance clubs.
DANC 252: Contemporary Issues in Dance
This course focuses on contemporary dance performance and practices that center, celebrate, and problematize theories of race, gender, sexuality, art, and politics. Course readings, discussions, and creative assignments center Black performance theories and methodologies, including dance, theater, poetry, music, and visual art. Students will also encounter concepts of transnational feminisms and queer fabulation across a variety of dance styles and practices. Course assignments develop students’ abilities in understanding and demonstrating their own positionality, as well as writing and researching across lines of cultural difference. Open to first-year students.
DANC 253: Dance Repertory
Students experience a variety of approaches to making and performing dance through intensive choreographic residencies with professional guest choreographers, all artists-in-residence at the Bates Dance Festival. The course culminates in the Marcy Plavin Dance Concert at the end of the semester. Recommended background: previous dance experience. This course may be repeated for credit. DANC 253 can be taken multiple times for credit, however can only be attributed to one major requirement per time taken. For example, if a student completes DANC 253 once, it will fulfill either the Creative Process or the Performance and Production requirement. If a student takes DANC 253 twice, one of the completed courses will fulfill Creative Process, and one will fulfill Performance and Production. Co-requisite(s): DANC 270D.
DANC 270: Studio
This series of studio courses provides instruction in a variety of dance styles and performing practices. DANC 270 may be repeated for credit without limit. One-half credit is earned for each course completed.
DANC 270A: Studio: Contemporary Modern
In this entry and open level modern technique course, students address performance, practice, style, and form in order to build strong technique and enhanced artistry and understanding. No prior dance experience required. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270B: Studio: Ballet I
In this beginner-level ballet technique course, students explore the traditional practice, style, vocabulary and form of classical ballet. No prior dance experience required. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270C: Studio: Modern Partnering
Contemporary partnering skills, including contact improvisation skills, weight sharing, spatial and physical relationships, and personal responsibility, are combined with contemporary modern dance techniques. Recommended background: previous dance experience. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270D: Studio: Repertory Styles
This intermediate-advanced dance technique course explores various approaches to dance training and practice as experienced with different guest teachers throughout the semester. Students enrolled in this course (and not DANC253) have the option of performing in one piece in the Marcy Plavin Fall Dance Concert. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students. Recommended background: intermediate experience in dance and some contemporary modern training.
DANC 270E: Studio: Jazz I
In this mixed-level technique course, students address jazz dance performance, practice, style, and form in order to build strong technique as well as to enhance artistry and understanding. Recommended background: experience in dance. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270G: Studio: Dance Ensemble, Intermediate
This intermediate-level course focuses on contemporary modern or African-American vernacular dance practices, clarity of intention, and general performance skills, in order to maintain a strong technique and develop one’s personal contribution to ensemble dancing. Recommended background: intermediate experience in dance. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270H: Studio: Ballet II
In this intermediate-level ballet course, students strengthen their technique and enhance their artistry through the practice of classical ballet. This level is appropriate for returning beginner and/or intermediate dancers who are already at ease with the ballet vocabulary. Recommended background: DANC 270B or experience in ballet technique. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270I: Studio: Improvisation
Students explore improvisational dance skills essential to any style of dance through the use of body weight, momentum, and physical contact. Some familiarity with any form of dance is helpful. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270K: Studio: Hip Hop
This course invites students into the study of Hip Hop dance, approaching it as both a physical discipline and a cultural form. Rather than surveying multiple styles, the class centers on one tradition and explores how it has taken shape through community, creativity, and lived experience. Students will engage with foundational movement ideas, experiment with personal expression, and consider how Hip Hop dance reflects and responds to the world around it. Throughout the semester, participants will develop tools for ongoing growth as movers and thinkers—cultivating rhythm, awareness, adaptability, and creative problem solving. The course encourages students to challenge themselves physically and mentally, explore different ways of learning through the body, and make connections between movement, identity, and broader social contexts. The emphasis is on exploration, process, and the evolving relationship between the dancer, the form, and the culture that shapes it. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270L: Studio: Hip Hop II
This movement-centralized course will offer students a deep dive into Hip Hop social dances that span over five decades of American popular culture. This course highlights aesthetically interwoven themes that extend from the African Diaspora, ultimately informing the creation of Hip Hop dance over time. Moving from traditional Hip Hop social dances, we will geographically locate and practice dances extending from Hip Hop’s profound influence, such as "Litefeet" movement vocabulary out of Harlem, NY. Students will learn tools for their Hip Hop freestyle, ultimately utilizing learned movements to develop their way of speaking Hip Hop as a movement language to connect with and build the collective. This class situates Hip Hop social dance as an African American vernacular form and its popular culture influence as highly relevant in the contemporary dance canon. Recommended background: one or two semesters in DANC 270K or previous experience in Hip Hop. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270M: Studio: Dance Ensemble, Advanced
This advanced-level course focuses on contemporary modern or African-American vernacular dance practices, clarity of intention, and general performance skills, in order to maintain a strong technique and develop one’s personal contribution to ensemble dancing in the studio and on the stage. Recommended background: advanced experience in dance training. One-half credit is earned.
DANC 270N: Studio: Ballet III
In this advanced-level ballet course, students strengthen their technique and enhance their artistry through the practice of classical ballet. This level is appropriate for the intermediate-advanced dancer who has prior training in classical ballet at the intermediate-advanced level. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270R: Studio: Somatics
This course will explore the principles of sensation-driven learning, the yoga and dance movements to awaken kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and interoceptive awareness. Focus shifts from achieving aesthetically pleasing movement to discovering greater movement efficiency, freedom of expression, self-agency, awareness, and creativity. No prior dance experience is required. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 270W: Studio: Pilates
An introduction to the exercises and principles of classical Pilates. This physical training course uses the Pilates method and complementary conditioning techniques to develop core strength, alignment, and flexibility. This course is designed for physical performers, but useful for bodies of all kinds. One-half credit is earned. Open to first-year students.
DANC 290: Practicum
Working under faculty direction, students perform major roles in departmental productions as a performer (290A); stage manager, associate stage manager, technician (290B); designer, dramaturg, assistant director (290C). One-half credit is earned. May be repeated.
DANC 300: Bates Dance Festival
For students with previous kinesthetic training who can demonstrate fluency and commitment to their practice, this course provides Bates students with the opportunity to participate in the Bates Dance Festival Professional Training Program. Full participation in this summer program requires 30 weekly hours of technical training across multiple dance disciplines and theoretical practices. Festival courses are taught by leading scholars, artists, and practitioners in their fields. An integral part of this course is attending festival concerts, informal showings, discussions, and video presentations. This course may be repeated for credit.
DANC 351: Advanced Composition Seminar
This course offers students opportunities to deepen and refine their approach to making dance with dedicated attention to devising and directing new dance works from ideation to performance. Students will approach making dances through theoretical inquiry and creative play, regularly engaging with readings, critical analysis, informal showings, structured peer feedback, and discussion. The course will offer students opportunities to develop project proposals, broaden their approach to interdisciplinarity in dance-making, and prepare to produce independent creative projects. The course will culminate in a public studio concert of final projects.Prerequisite(s): DANC 202, 251, 253, or significant choreography for Bates performance clubs.
DANC 360: Independent Study
Students, in consultation with a faculty advisor, individually design and plan a course of study or research not offered in the curriculum. Course work includes a reflective component, evaluation, and completion of an agreed-upon product. Sponsorship by a faculty member in the program/department, a course prospectus, and permission of the chair are required. Students may register for no more than one independent study per semester.
DANC 457: Senior Thesis
A substantial creative research project in dance, usually in the form of choreographic, performance, and/or written work. Student artists register for DANC 457 in the Fall semester. Successful completion of this course qualifies as a thesis credit toward the dance major.
DANC 458: Senior Thesis
A substantial creative research project in dance, usually in the form of choreographic, performance, and/or written work. Student artists register for DANC 458 in the Winter semester. Successful completion of this course qualifies as a thesis credit toward the dance major.
DANC S32: Building a Dance Practice
This course introduces students to applications of a dance practice both inside and outside the field of professional performance and helps them to create a model for a dance practice that they can carry with them beyond Bates. Students also take a daily contemporary modern dance-based movement class and develop an individual project in an area of dance research that models a dance practice for them. This course is part of the Purposeful Work Infusion Project, a programming element of the college’s Purposeful Work initiative. The Purposeful Work Infusion Project is a curricular opportunity that seeks to bridge the gap between course content and "purposeful work," which may include careers, identity, meaning, and purpose. All Purposeful Work Infusion courses include three elements: at least one reading assignment related to "purposeful work"; at least one reflective writing assignment on "purposeful work"; and at least the equivalent of one class session’s discussion focused on bridging the gap between course content and "purposeful work.” Recommended background: At least one college-level dance course or intermediate level of proficiency in any dance form.