FROM PAGE TO STAGE: DANCE & LITERATURE

This course explores how dance and other forms of embodied performance adapt literature, as well as how dance serves as inspiration for the written word. What is retained, what is lost, and what is enhanced when moving bodies enliven literature, or when literature seeks to capture the motions of dance? How does choreography transform the constituent parts of literature, from characters and plot to the rhythms of language? How do words and movement collaborate to tell the stories of such disparate figures as lovers, monsters, migrants, and robots, and in modes that range from the pastoral to the autobiographical to the comic? To answer these and other questions, we will read short fiction, plays, and poems, focused largely on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; and watch numerous genres of dance, including ballet, experimental dance, dance-theater, musical theater, hip hop, silent film, and puppetry. To explore the conceptual relationship of body and text, students will gain introductory exposure to theories of narrative, performance, adaptation, and more. "Page to Stage" welcomes, and is geared toward, students from any disciplinary background.