Dance is nonverbal behavior that conveys a heightened, aesthetic sense of body, rhythm, and space.
Human dance may hold individual, social, cultural, and/or spiritual meanings for both participants and observers..
Ethnochoreology (also dance ethnology, dance anthropology) is the study of dance through the application of a number of disciplines such as anthropology, musicology, ethnomusicology, and ethnography..
Dance studies research journals and books often provide good resources for academic philosophy and yet often philosophy students neglect to consult them, sometimes due to ignorance and sometimes due to a fear that they might learn to handle dance “non-philosophically” while they are being trained in traditional philosophic methods.
The dance studies curriculum emphasizes the study of movement as a window into larger cultural processes and historical frameworks.
In keeping with the mission of Theater and Performance Studies, the courses combine practical and theoretical approaches to deepening students’ understanding.
With the expansion of the multidisciplinary critical dance studies in the 1980s, dance scholars who were trained not only in anthropology but also in sociology, history, ethnology, folklore, cultural studies, or performance studies began applying an ethnographic approach.
