Body to Brain: Connecting Dance and the Curriculum

Students at Harvard learn about dance through different channels. The Dance Program, born at Radcliffe College and now under the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, has been managed by the Office for the Arts since 1973. It offers 36 co-curricular courses in a range of dance forms during the academic year. These are taught at various levels and for the most part involve technique (bodywork and building of vocabulary), by dance specialists from the Boston area.

“Every year since my freshman year the dance scene has become more amazing, says Katie O’Brien ’04. “The students have such commitment. The Dance Program is booming and blossoming – The classes have such great teachers and workshops. The ball is rolling.”

In addition to the co-curricular courses which confer no credit, students can enroll in two credit dance course through the Committee on Dramatic Arts. Dramatic Arts 14 “The Art of Movement Design,” taught by dance director Elizabeth Bergmann, explores “what makes movement art.” Students find new ways to think about choreography by starting with a phrase, and building gin the use of weight, time, and space. These elements are then put together to create a composition. Artistic director Emerita Claire Mallardi teaches Dramatic Arts 15 “Movement for Actors and Directors,” a hybrid of theater and dance that translates text and movement into production staging. Both these courses examine how to create and balance elements of movement and form into a comprehensive whole.

“There is no question that my Dramatic Arts course is reaching an entirely different population than our noncredit program,” says Elizabeth Bergmann. “The credit classes give us the time to cover theoretical aspects of the field of dance. This gives students a grounding, overview, and depth that doesn’t necessarily come in a class that tends to focus only on the physical nature of dance.” Junior Adrienne Minster adds, “We can already see the impact Dramatic Arts 14 has had on its students – more people talk to me about dance, I see more people at performances and other arts students are getting excite about collaborating with dancers. Universities have always protected arts, allowing them to thrive – adding more dance to the curriculum is one way to ensure the continues support of dance at Harvard.”

Students may also create a Special Concentration that includes dance courses. Folklore and Mythology offers a special field course called “Embodied Expression/Expressive Body: Dance as a Medium of Cultural and Personal Meaning” taught by Deborah Foster. “When I first taught this, I was amazed at the amount of interest it generated. Students from almost every concentration shopped the course. Clearly, the interest in dance at Harvard is broad. The perspectives brought from all these disciplines to the subject of dance in class discussions ins indeed exciting,” says Foster. Kimerer LaMothe, Head Tutor of the Religion Department, offers a biennial seminar in the relationship of religion and art with a focus on American Modern Dance. “It is important for us to consider the context in which students study technique and choreography,” say Cathy McCormick, Director of Programs at the Office for the Arts, “so making dance theory, criticism , and history available to them is essential.”

Ryuji Yamaguchi ’03 likes the fact that Harvard has a Dance Program and not a Dance Department, but wants more than the status quo. “What we have now is more inclusive to all dancers (unlike Visual and Environmental Studies, which prioritizes concentrators), and favorable to talented dancers who want to devote a o considerable amount of time to dance, but would also like to commit to other academic interest. However, I feel as though dance should have more credit courses. I like that Dramatic Arts is set up without concentrators. I would like Harvard to have a similar system devoted to dance – dance is physical theatre.” Echoing Yamaguchi’s interest, Katie O’Brien ‘04 thinks that creating a dance parallel to the theatre courses offered by Dramatic Arts, in which “students have to audition and then spend the semester crafting their own performance technique, would be an exciting place for the Dance Program to go from here.” O’Brien adds that she “would love to see a certificate offered for Dramatic Arts such as there is for language to show validation for courses taken outside one’s concentration.”

“It is absolutely essential for a liberal arts institution to have dance as a part of its curriculum,” says Adrienne Minster. “Dancers here want to keep learning and exploring their art, but that is difficult to do when dance is almost entirely extracurricular. I would love to see the Core Course ‘Lit and Arts B’ include dance. Having for-credit dance classes will also expand the horizons of students who had never even though about dancing before. One of the duties of an institution like Harvard is to provide opportunities for its students to experience things they have never encountered.

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