The Curriculum of the Lang Dance Program is structured around four focus areas:
Movement Practice
Rather than using the familiar term "technique," the dance program uses "movement practice" for its dance classes to signal an ongoing approach to physical exploration, as opposed to a linear path towards "mastery." With an opportunity to study movement practices ranging from ballet to contact improvisation to vogue, students consider diverse understandings of the body and virtuosity. Engaging in dynamic studio work, students and faculty ask: What can a body do? What can my body do?
Choreographic Research
In Lang's "choreographic research" courses, students explore varied approaches to the creative process as conceived and employed by some of the field's most adventurous contemporary practitioners. These courses frame dance making as a series of investigatory acts, an arena for research and discovery. Students work individually and collaboratively as choreographers and learn methods to describe, analyze, and critique one another's movement studies.
History and Theory
Lang Dance students engage in a range of academic seminars, analyzing dance through a variety of methodological and theoretical approaches and honing their skills as readers and writers. Working closely with faculty and peers (including students majoring in music, visual arts, theater, and a range of other disciplines) students think critically about the body and consider the opportunities and challenges that come with analyzing movement. In addition to considering dance in relation to other art forms, students learn to situate dance within a social and cultural context.
Performance
Each semester, students have the opportunity to work with guest artists in an intensive rehearsal process, presenting a new or re-staged dance in a public performance. Residencies often include a study of the influences that have affected the guest artist's life and work. Recent guests artists include Sarah Michelson, Eiko Otake, John Jasperse, Luciana Achugar, Reggie Wilson, Souleymane Badolo, Beth Gill, Yvonne Meier, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Juliette Mapp, Sally Silvers and representatives from the Trisha Brown Dance Company. In a new institutional partnership, each year one repertory work is created by an artist-in-residence from Movement Research, a New York-based professional organization that serves as a laboratory for experimentation in movement-based performance work.
Students interested in studying dance at Lang have the option of pursuing:
B.A in Contemporary Dance
BA in the Arts with an Arts in Context concentration, combining the study of dance with a liberal arts discipline (such as Psychology, Urban Studies, or Social Inquiry)
Self-designed major (BA or BS)
Minor in Contemporary Dance.