SoSe 25  
 Philosophy and ...  
 M.A. Dance Stud...  
 Course

Institute of Theater Studies

M.A. Dance Studies (SPO WS 11/12)

0256b_MA120

  • Theory / Aesthetics

    0256bA1.2
    • 17571 Research Seminar
      Choreographic Interventions (Kirsten Maar)
      Schedule: Mi 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      The seminar explores choreography´s inherent potential for intervention by looking at the differentiation of movement cultures and their respective infrastructural contexts. Between choreographies of protest and the micro-politics of movement and their specific material qualities, we will ask what it takes to work against the fixed choreography of a given space? What kind of “critical moves” (R.Martin) have the power to interrupt normative settings or slow down the dynamics of our trained economies of movement? How does an expanded concept of choreography contribute to a post-anthropocentric understanding of dance? What does it take to develop an ethics of choreography and thereby decolonize and queer as well our institutions as our epistemologies? How can critical and careful “choreopolitics” (A.Lepecki) enable accessibility? In order to approach these questions, we will take a look at current forms of dramaturgy and curatorial frameworks that contribute to serve as a basis for interventions. Finally, we will develop our own formats for critical interventions. And last but not least, we invite you to attend our SFB-Workshop “Eco-Somatic Choreographies: Embodying Resistance, Care and Ecological Connection as Micropolitical Intervention”.

    • 17581 Practice seminar
      Reading Group (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session focuses on intensive reading practice of foundational theoretical or discipline-specific texts for dance scholars, to be chosen by the participants together with the instructor.

    • 17582 Practice seminar
      Utopia, Hope and Negativity (Alina Saggerer)
      Schedule: Mo 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Something essential is lacking. The crises and complexities of our present – wars, climate change, threats to democracy, human rights violations – make holding onto hope difficult. How can we build trust in progressive change and imagine the world differently without falling into naïve optimism or paralyzing pessimism? And what role do theater, dance, and performance play in this quest? The course will explore the complex interplay of the notions of utopia, hope and negativity by combining theoretical reflection with the analysis of concrete performances. We will first approach the notions of utopia, hope, and negativity theoretically, discussing key texts from Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson alongside queer and Black perspectives from José Esteban Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Calvin L. Warren, Juana María Rodríguez, and Bini Adamczak. Building on these discussions, we will analyze specific performances and ask how performative practices enable utopian thinking, negotiate hope as an aesthetic and political category, and productively engage with critical negativity. What potential do theater and performance hold in dark times to imagine radical change that can be desired and pursued? The class will be taught in English and German. Participants should have an interest in engaging with theoretical questions.

    • 17583 Practice seminar
      Les Ballets Russes (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Mo 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session accompanies the project seminar by Viktor Ruban, for those who wish to gain broader knowledge of the most famous modernist ballet company, Les Ballets Russes, run by Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. To honour the ‘practice-session’ format, our main focus will be on recordings of a range of major works by Mikhail Fokine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Methodologically, we will focus on movement analysis.

    • 17584 Practice seminar
      Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and historical methods (Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mi 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      In his book Making (2013), anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that “what we might call ‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. It is, in short, to undergo […] an education of attention.” The mentorship model Ingold is describing here is fundamental to communities of practice. One rarely learns to sing, dance, knit, skateboard, or write poetry without finding others who share interest and knowledge in such activities. But how can we meaningfully incorporate a practical ‘education in attention’ within performance research or ethically introduce scholarly analysis into the spaces of practicing communities? With a particular focus on performance-oriented communities, this course is dedicated to both practicing and critically analysing approaches to working in the ‘field’ with groups of people who gather around particular practices. Within this class, we explore research methods that approach performance as a collective effort, considering processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing, collective experimentation, and approaches to archiving, preserving, and remembering that emerge through the work of community documentarians. Throughout the semester, students will focus on a particular mixed-methods fieldwork and archival project that brings them into practical and intellectual engagement with a Berlin-based community of practice. While fieldwork is the emphasis here, we will read a short series of canonical theories of practice — Bourdieu, Bishop, Bakhtin — as well as seminal writings on radical collective and community-based methods of self-directed learning and research (such as works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Thích Nh?t H?nh).

    • 17500 Lecture
      Theorien der Schauspielkunst II (Doris Kolesch)
      Schedule: Do 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-17)
      Location: Hörsaal (Theaterwiss.) (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Die Vorlesung setzt die im letzten Semester begonnene kritische Vorstellung zentraler schauspieltheoretischer Texte insbesondere des europäischen Theaters fort. Im Zentrum stehen Konzepte und Theorien der Schauspielkunst aus der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart. Die Vorlesung ist so konzipiert, dass sie auch ohne den Besuch des ersten Teils im Wintersemester 2024/5 gut verfolgt werden kann.

    • 17501 Lecture
      Theater und Ritualität (Matthias Warstat)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: Hörsaal (Theaterwiss.) (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Eine Nähe von Theater und Ritual ist in verschiedensten Phasen der Theatergeschichte unverkennbar. Einerseits finden sich in vielen Ritualen – so etwa in Initiations-, Heilungs- oder Übergangsritualen – theatrale Praktiken (Tänze, Maskenspiel, Verkörperungen etc.), mit denen wirkende Kräfte, Transformationen oder Deutungen angezeigt werden. Andererseits sind Ritualdarstellungen im Theater immer wieder zu finden, und auf unterschiedliche Weisen kann auch die Theateraufführung selbst rituellen Charakter annehmen. Für die Theaterwissenschaft ist es deshalb wichtig, das Verhältnis von Theater und Ritualität immer wieder neu in den Blick zu nehmen – und dabei den Forschungsstand der anthropologischen, ethnologischen und religionswissenschaftlichen Ritualforschung nicht außer Acht zu lassen. Dies gestaltet sich dadurch kompliziert, dass in den genannten Fächern mit ganz unterschiedlichen Ritualdefinitionen gearbeitet wird. Da in vielen Ritualbegriffen Vorstellungen von Medien und Geistern, von einer Götterwelt oder von einer Begegnung mit Ahnen und Verstorbenen eine Rolle spielen, stellt sich auch die Frage, wie mit solchen transzendenten und immateriellen Dimensionen des Theaters umgegangen werden soll. Manche Ritualkonzepte heben auf soziale Formen und Handlungsmuster ab; viele andere sind aber auf Wirkungsversprechen fokussiert, bei denen sich fragt, inwieweit sie vom Theater eingelöst werden können. Die Vorlesung soll das Verhältnis von Theater und Ritualität in drei Abschnitten beleuchten: Zunächst sollen frühe Phasen der Theatergeschichte in den Blick genommen werden, für die häufig eine Übergängigkeit bzw. Hybridität von Ritual und Theater behauptet wird. Zweitens sollen künstlerische und theoretische Positionen aus den Avantgarden des 20. Jahrhunderts analysiert werden, die besonders markant auf Formen von Ritualität Bezug nehmen. Schließlich wird es um die Frage gehen, wie und warum auch in gegenwärtigen Theater- und Performancepraktiken weiterhin auf rituelle Muster rekurriert wird.

    • 17783 Lecture
      Energy Flows: Performance, Modernity, and the Histories of Science and Technology (Joao Cardante Romao Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mo 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: Hörsaal (Theaterwiss.) (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      The lecture series Energy Flows: Performance, Modernity, and the Histories of Science and Technology addresses performance modernity through the lens of dance and music’s entanglement with electrical technologies (including amplification and lighting), communication technologies, medical science, social science methods from anthropology and sociology, as well as technologies arising from the military industrial complex (surveillance tech, Virtual Reality, etc.), and digital and data-based technologies. Approaching music and dance as a series of flows is also about understanding aesthetics as something that is grounded at a broader infrastructural level. Recent research on "audible infrastructures" has focused on the material-environmental relations and political-economic conditions in different geographies, tracing the connection between music industries, forestry, and mining, and linking music to broader circularities of resource extraction, politics of production, and waste, among others (Devine and Boudreault-Fournier 2021). This approach often makes colonial logics visible, and we are also interested in this lecture series to highlight the potential of music and dance to imagine and create spaces that intentionally or unintentionally reject the capitalist logic of technological development and innovation as the sole driving force of modernity. The vast majority of speakers in Energy Flows are early-career scholars who have just published their first book or are in the process of completing it. The series will traverse the early modern period to the present century, drawing together scholars whose work shows how science and technology have not merely contributed to the performing arts of dance and music, but that, indeed, the performing arts have in many ways shaped science and technology in turn.

  • Historicity / Historiography

    0256bA1.3
    • 17570 Research Seminar
      Archives of Care (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Mo 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: 103 Sitzungsraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      How to remember and preserve an object of study – dance – that is by definition transient? The seminar will engage with a range of approaches to dance historiography, from historical reconstruction (not least through person-to-person transmission) to critical reenactment. It will place special emphasis on archival theories of care that emerged in queer studies, as for example by Sara Ahmed (The Promise of Happiness), Ann Cvetkovich (An Archive of Feelings), and José Esteban Muñoz (‘Ephemera as Evidence’). Our main focus will be on case studies that introduce historiographical approaches, whether academic or performative, to significant works of Western dance history, including Giselle, Le Sacre du printemps, and Trio A (taught through a workshop element), as well as dances by Alexander Sakharoff, Mary Wigman, and Merce Cunningham.

    • 17581 Practice seminar
      Reading Group (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session focuses on intensive reading practice of foundational theoretical or discipline-specific texts for dance scholars, to be chosen by the participants together with the instructor.

    • 17582 Practice seminar
      Utopia, Hope and Negativity (Alina Saggerer)
      Schedule: Mo 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Something essential is lacking. The crises and complexities of our present – wars, climate change, threats to democracy, human rights violations – make holding onto hope difficult. How can we build trust in progressive change and imagine the world differently without falling into naïve optimism or paralyzing pessimism? And what role do theater, dance, and performance play in this quest? The course will explore the complex interplay of the notions of utopia, hope and negativity by combining theoretical reflection with the analysis of concrete performances. We will first approach the notions of utopia, hope, and negativity theoretically, discussing key texts from Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson alongside queer and Black perspectives from José Esteban Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Calvin L. Warren, Juana María Rodríguez, and Bini Adamczak. Building on these discussions, we will analyze specific performances and ask how performative practices enable utopian thinking, negotiate hope as an aesthetic and political category, and productively engage with critical negativity. What potential do theater and performance hold in dark times to imagine radical change that can be desired and pursued? The class will be taught in English and German. Participants should have an interest in engaging with theoretical questions.

    • 17583 Practice seminar
      Les Ballets Russes (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Mo 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session accompanies the project seminar by Viktor Ruban, for those who wish to gain broader knowledge of the most famous modernist ballet company, Les Ballets Russes, run by Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. To honour the ‘practice-session’ format, our main focus will be on recordings of a range of major works by Mikhail Fokine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Methodologically, we will focus on movement analysis.

    • 17584 Practice seminar
      Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and historical methods (Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mi 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      In his book Making (2013), anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that “what we might call ‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. It is, in short, to undergo […] an education of attention.” The mentorship model Ingold is describing here is fundamental to communities of practice. One rarely learns to sing, dance, knit, skateboard, or write poetry without finding others who share interest and knowledge in such activities. But how can we meaningfully incorporate a practical ‘education in attention’ within performance research or ethically introduce scholarly analysis into the spaces of practicing communities? With a particular focus on performance-oriented communities, this course is dedicated to both practicing and critically analysing approaches to working in the ‘field’ with groups of people who gather around particular practices. Within this class, we explore research methods that approach performance as a collective effort, considering processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing, collective experimentation, and approaches to archiving, preserving, and remembering that emerge through the work of community documentarians. Throughout the semester, students will focus on a particular mixed-methods fieldwork and archival project that brings them into practical and intellectual engagement with a Berlin-based community of practice. While fieldwork is the emphasis here, we will read a short series of canonical theories of practice — Bourdieu, Bishop, Bakhtin — as well as seminal writings on radical collective and community-based methods of self-directed learning and research (such as works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Thích Nh?t H?nh).

    • 17500 Lecture
      Theorien der Schauspielkunst II (Doris Kolesch)
      Schedule: Do 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-17)
      Location: Hörsaal (Theaterwiss.) (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Die Vorlesung setzt die im letzten Semester begonnene kritische Vorstellung zentraler schauspieltheoretischer Texte insbesondere des europäischen Theaters fort. Im Zentrum stehen Konzepte und Theorien der Schauspielkunst aus der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis in die Gegenwart. Die Vorlesung ist so konzipiert, dass sie auch ohne den Besuch des ersten Teils im Wintersemester 2024/5 gut verfolgt werden kann.

    • 17501 Lecture
      Theater und Ritualität (Matthias Warstat)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: Hörsaal (Theaterwiss.) (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Eine Nähe von Theater und Ritual ist in verschiedensten Phasen der Theatergeschichte unverkennbar. Einerseits finden sich in vielen Ritualen – so etwa in Initiations-, Heilungs- oder Übergangsritualen – theatrale Praktiken (Tänze, Maskenspiel, Verkörperungen etc.), mit denen wirkende Kräfte, Transformationen oder Deutungen angezeigt werden. Andererseits sind Ritualdarstellungen im Theater immer wieder zu finden, und auf unterschiedliche Weisen kann auch die Theateraufführung selbst rituellen Charakter annehmen. Für die Theaterwissenschaft ist es deshalb wichtig, das Verhältnis von Theater und Ritualität immer wieder neu in den Blick zu nehmen – und dabei den Forschungsstand der anthropologischen, ethnologischen und religionswissenschaftlichen Ritualforschung nicht außer Acht zu lassen. Dies gestaltet sich dadurch kompliziert, dass in den genannten Fächern mit ganz unterschiedlichen Ritualdefinitionen gearbeitet wird. Da in vielen Ritualbegriffen Vorstellungen von Medien und Geistern, von einer Götterwelt oder von einer Begegnung mit Ahnen und Verstorbenen eine Rolle spielen, stellt sich auch die Frage, wie mit solchen transzendenten und immateriellen Dimensionen des Theaters umgegangen werden soll. Manche Ritualkonzepte heben auf soziale Formen und Handlungsmuster ab; viele andere sind aber auf Wirkungsversprechen fokussiert, bei denen sich fragt, inwieweit sie vom Theater eingelöst werden können. Die Vorlesung soll das Verhältnis von Theater und Ritualität in drei Abschnitten beleuchten: Zunächst sollen frühe Phasen der Theatergeschichte in den Blick genommen werden, für die häufig eine Übergängigkeit bzw. Hybridität von Ritual und Theater behauptet wird. Zweitens sollen künstlerische und theoretische Positionen aus den Avantgarden des 20. Jahrhunderts analysiert werden, die besonders markant auf Formen von Ritualität Bezug nehmen. Schließlich wird es um die Frage gehen, wie und warum auch in gegenwärtigen Theater- und Performancepraktiken weiterhin auf rituelle Muster rekurriert wird.

    • 17783 Lecture
      Energy Flows: Performance, Modernity, and the Histories of Science and Technology (Joao Cardante Romao Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mo 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: Hörsaal (Theaterwiss.) (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      The lecture series Energy Flows: Performance, Modernity, and the Histories of Science and Technology addresses performance modernity through the lens of dance and music’s entanglement with electrical technologies (including amplification and lighting), communication technologies, medical science, social science methods from anthropology and sociology, as well as technologies arising from the military industrial complex (surveillance tech, Virtual Reality, etc.), and digital and data-based technologies. Approaching music and dance as a series of flows is also about understanding aesthetics as something that is grounded at a broader infrastructural level. Recent research on "audible infrastructures" has focused on the material-environmental relations and political-economic conditions in different geographies, tracing the connection between music industries, forestry, and mining, and linking music to broader circularities of resource extraction, politics of production, and waste, among others (Devine and Boudreault-Fournier 2021). This approach often makes colonial logics visible, and we are also interested in this lecture series to highlight the potential of music and dance to imagine and create spaces that intentionally or unintentionally reject the capitalist logic of technological development and innovation as the sole driving force of modernity. The vast majority of speakers in Energy Flows are early-career scholars who have just published their first book or are in the process of completing it. The series will traverse the early modern period to the present century, drawing together scholars whose work shows how science and technology have not merely contributed to the performing arts of dance and music, but that, indeed, the performing arts have in many ways shaped science and technology in turn.

  • Methods / Practice

    0256bA1.4
    • 17580 Seminar
      Dance Reenactment:Ways of Exploring the Future (Victor Ruban)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      During this course we will dive into methods of dance reenactment in several takes: firstly, watching, analysing and performing feedback on several existing dance reenactments; secondly, familiarising ourselves with the interplay between reenactment and reconstruction that gave shape to the «Bronislava Nijinska» lecture performance, trying practical elements of it; and thirdly, developing our own process for small-format reenactment projects, presenting results performatively through combining dance, movement, music, props, video, text, voice, and/or other media. In this process of interaction with the past we will be reflecting on two different concepts of time: horizontal or linear (of a past that moves to the future through the present), and vertical, as proposed by Tristan Garcia in Form and Object: A Treatise on Things (of a present that stands on a past that stands on a future), to define which of them has more performative potential with regard to the current political situation that we are dealing with both in Germany and Ukraine. A special focus of this course will be a conceptual frame that was born in the artistic and cultural processes that took off in Ukraine after Maidan 2014, i.e., at the beginning of the war in order to reflect on glocal artistic and institutional challenges. This frame was formulated by the Ukrainian artist Larysa Venedyktova (Tanzlaboratorium) to imagine the «Artist as Institution». Together, we will look at the questions and the potential that arise from Venedyktova’s concept for artists, researchers, and institutions alike.

    • 17581 Practice seminar
      Reading Group (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session focuses on intensive reading practice of foundational theoretical or discipline-specific texts for dance scholars, to be chosen by the participants together with the instructor.

    • 17582 Practice seminar
      Utopia, Hope and Negativity (Alina Saggerer)
      Schedule: Mo 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Something essential is lacking. The crises and complexities of our present – wars, climate change, threats to democracy, human rights violations – make holding onto hope difficult. How can we build trust in progressive change and imagine the world differently without falling into naïve optimism or paralyzing pessimism? And what role do theater, dance, and performance play in this quest? The course will explore the complex interplay of the notions of utopia, hope and negativity by combining theoretical reflection with the analysis of concrete performances. We will first approach the notions of utopia, hope, and negativity theoretically, discussing key texts from Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson alongside queer and Black perspectives from José Esteban Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Calvin L. Warren, Juana María Rodríguez, and Bini Adamczak. Building on these discussions, we will analyze specific performances and ask how performative practices enable utopian thinking, negotiate hope as an aesthetic and political category, and productively engage with critical negativity. What potential do theater and performance hold in dark times to imagine radical change that can be desired and pursued? The class will be taught in English and German. Participants should have an interest in engaging with theoretical questions.

    • 17583 Practice seminar
      Les Ballets Russes (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Mo 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session accompanies the project seminar by Viktor Ruban, for those who wish to gain broader knowledge of the most famous modernist ballet company, Les Ballets Russes, run by Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. To honour the ‘practice-session’ format, our main focus will be on recordings of a range of major works by Mikhail Fokine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Methodologically, we will focus on movement analysis.

    • 17584 Practice seminar
      Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and historical methods (Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mi 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      In his book Making (2013), anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that “what we might call ‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. It is, in short, to undergo […] an education of attention.” The mentorship model Ingold is describing here is fundamental to communities of practice. One rarely learns to sing, dance, knit, skateboard, or write poetry without finding others who share interest and knowledge in such activities. But how can we meaningfully incorporate a practical ‘education in attention’ within performance research or ethically introduce scholarly analysis into the spaces of practicing communities? With a particular focus on performance-oriented communities, this course is dedicated to both practicing and critically analysing approaches to working in the ‘field’ with groups of people who gather around particular practices. Within this class, we explore research methods that approach performance as a collective effort, considering processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing, collective experimentation, and approaches to archiving, preserving, and remembering that emerge through the work of community documentarians. Throughout the semester, students will focus on a particular mixed-methods fieldwork and archival project that brings them into practical and intellectual engagement with a Berlin-based community of practice. While fieldwork is the emphasis here, we will read a short series of canonical theories of practice — Bourdieu, Bishop, Bakhtin — as well as seminal writings on radical collective and community-based methods of self-directed learning and research (such as works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Thích Nh?t H?nh).

  • Dance / Arts / Media

    0256bA1.5
    • 17581 Practice seminar
      Reading Group (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session focuses on intensive reading practice of foundational theoretical or discipline-specific texts for dance scholars, to be chosen by the participants together with the instructor.

    • 17582 Practice seminar
      Utopia, Hope and Negativity (Alina Saggerer)
      Schedule: Mo 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Something essential is lacking. The crises and complexities of our present – wars, climate change, threats to democracy, human rights violations – make holding onto hope difficult. How can we build trust in progressive change and imagine the world differently without falling into naïve optimism or paralyzing pessimism? And what role do theater, dance, and performance play in this quest? The course will explore the complex interplay of the notions of utopia, hope and negativity by combining theoretical reflection with the analysis of concrete performances. We will first approach the notions of utopia, hope, and negativity theoretically, discussing key texts from Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson alongside queer and Black perspectives from José Esteban Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Calvin L. Warren, Juana María Rodríguez, and Bini Adamczak. Building on these discussions, we will analyze specific performances and ask how performative practices enable utopian thinking, negotiate hope as an aesthetic and political category, and productively engage with critical negativity. What potential do theater and performance hold in dark times to imagine radical change that can be desired and pursued? The class will be taught in English and German. Participants should have an interest in engaging with theoretical questions.

    • 17583 Practice seminar
      Les Ballets Russes (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Mo 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session accompanies the project seminar by Viktor Ruban, for those who wish to gain broader knowledge of the most famous modernist ballet company, Les Ballets Russes, run by Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. To honour the ‘practice-session’ format, our main focus will be on recordings of a range of major works by Mikhail Fokine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Methodologically, we will focus on movement analysis.

    • 17584 Practice seminar
      Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and historical methods (Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mi 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      In his book Making (2013), anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that “what we might call ‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. It is, in short, to undergo […] an education of attention.” The mentorship model Ingold is describing here is fundamental to communities of practice. One rarely learns to sing, dance, knit, skateboard, or write poetry without finding others who share interest and knowledge in such activities. But how can we meaningfully incorporate a practical ‘education in attention’ within performance research or ethically introduce scholarly analysis into the spaces of practicing communities? With a particular focus on performance-oriented communities, this course is dedicated to both practicing and critically analysing approaches to working in the ‘field’ with groups of people who gather around particular practices. Within this class, we explore research methods that approach performance as a collective effort, considering processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing, collective experimentation, and approaches to archiving, preserving, and remembering that emerge through the work of community documentarians. Throughout the semester, students will focus on a particular mixed-methods fieldwork and archival project that brings them into practical and intellectual engagement with a Berlin-based community of practice. While fieldwork is the emphasis here, we will read a short series of canonical theories of practice — Bourdieu, Bishop, Bakhtin — as well as seminal writings on radical collective and community-based methods of self-directed learning and research (such as works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Thích Nh?t H?nh).

  • Research Practice

    0256bA1.6
    • 17581 Practice seminar
      Reading Group (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Di 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session focuses on intensive reading practice of foundational theoretical or discipline-specific texts for dance scholars, to be chosen by the participants together with the instructor.

    • 17582 Practice seminar
      Utopia, Hope and Negativity (Alina Saggerer)
      Schedule: Mo 12:00-14:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Something essential is lacking. The crises and complexities of our present – wars, climate change, threats to democracy, human rights violations – make holding onto hope difficult. How can we build trust in progressive change and imagine the world differently without falling into naïve optimism or paralyzing pessimism? And what role do theater, dance, and performance play in this quest? The course will explore the complex interplay of the notions of utopia, hope and negativity by combining theoretical reflection with the analysis of concrete performances. We will first approach the notions of utopia, hope, and negativity theoretically, discussing key texts from Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Fredric Jameson alongside queer and Black perspectives from José Esteban Muñoz, Jill Dolan, Calvin L. Warren, Juana María Rodríguez, and Bini Adamczak. Building on these discussions, we will analyze specific performances and ask how performative practices enable utopian thinking, negotiate hope as an aesthetic and political category, and productively engage with critical negativity. What potential do theater and performance hold in dark times to imagine radical change that can be desired and pursued? The class will be taught in English and German. Participants should have an interest in engaging with theoretical questions.

    • 17583 Practice seminar
      Les Ballets Russes (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Mo 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-14)
      Location: SR II Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      This practice session accompanies the project seminar by Viktor Ruban, for those who wish to gain broader knowledge of the most famous modernist ballet company, Les Ballets Russes, run by Russian impresario Sergei Diaghilev. To honour the ‘practice-session’ format, our main focus will be on recordings of a range of major works by Mikhail Fokine, Bronislava Nijinska, and Vaslav Nijinsky. Methodologically, we will focus on movement analysis.

    • 17584 Practice seminar
      Researching Communities of Practice: Fieldwork and historical methods (Lindsey Drury)
      Schedule: Mi 10:00-12:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: DanceLab (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      In his book Making (2013), anthropologist Tim Ingold wrote that “what we might call ‘research’ or even ‘fieldwork’ is in truth a protracted masterclass in which the novice gradually learns to see things, and to hear and feel them too, in the ways his or her mentors do. It is, in short, to undergo […] an education of attention.” The mentorship model Ingold is describing here is fundamental to communities of practice. One rarely learns to sing, dance, knit, skateboard, or write poetry without finding others who share interest and knowledge in such activities. But how can we meaningfully incorporate a practical ‘education in attention’ within performance research or ethically introduce scholarly analysis into the spaces of practicing communities? With a particular focus on performance-oriented communities, this course is dedicated to both practicing and critically analysing approaches to working in the ‘field’ with groups of people who gather around particular practices. Within this class, we explore research methods that approach performance as a collective effort, considering processes of intergenerational knowledge sharing, collective experimentation, and approaches to archiving, preserving, and remembering that emerge through the work of community documentarians. Throughout the semester, students will focus on a particular mixed-methods fieldwork and archival project that brings them into practical and intellectual engagement with a Berlin-based community of practice. While fieldwork is the emphasis here, we will read a short series of canonical theories of practice — Bourdieu, Bishop, Bakhtin — as well as seminal writings on radical collective and community-based methods of self-directed learning and research (such as works by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Thích Nh?t H?nh).

  • Master's Thesis Colloquium

    0256bE1.2
    • 17592 Colloquium
      Colloquium für Masterstudierende u. Promovierende (Gabriele Brandstetter)
      Schedule: Di 16:00-18:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: SR IV Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Additional information / Pre-requisites

      Die einzelnen Präsentationstermine werden zu Semesterbeginn festgelegt.

      Comments

      Das Colloquium bietet Masterstudierenden und Promovierenden ein Forum, ihre jeweiligen Arbeiten vorzustellen und zu diskutieren. Daneben wird es in Absprache mit den Teilnehmenden Raum geben, um methodische und theoretische Herangehensweisen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens, aber auch Fragen zu Schreibpraxen, Themenfindung, Strukturierung und Präsentation zu besprechen und zu begleiten.

    • 17596 Colloquium
      Approaches to Research: Master Colloquium (Lucia Ruprecht)
      Schedule: Di 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-15)
      Location: SR I Seminarraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Students will engage with current research topics and questions. They present their own specific research topics, contribute to discussions, and learn to explain conceptual and methodological decisions. Principles of rigorous academic work and good scientific practice are taken into account. Students also work on their academic writing and oral presentation.

    • 17598 Colloquium
      Colloqium zur Masterstudierende u. Promovierende (Kirsten Maar)
      Schedule: Mi 14:00-16:00 (Class starts on: 2025-04-16)
      Location: 103 Sitzungsraum (Grunewaldstr. 35)

      Comments

      Das Colloquium bietet Masterstudierenden und Promovierenden ein Forum, ihre jeweiligen Arbeiten vorzustellen und zu diskutieren. Daneben wird es in Absprache mit den Teilnehmenden Raum geben, um methodische und theoretische Herangehensweisen wissenschaftlichen Arbeitens, aber auch Fragen zu Schreibpraxen, Themenfindung, Strukturierung und Präsentation zu besprechen und zu begleiten.