The Dance Division offers a range of broadly diverse approaches to dance as a performing art, cultural practice, political act and embodiment of ideology and beliefs. All of the dimensions through which one comes to experience dance, from studying a range of dance techniques, choreographing and performing to viewing and critically and historically assessing dance, are represented in the course offerings of the Dance Division.

Dance at Stanford is positioned as a rich and living art medium through which we read culture and our location within it. Through academic and creative studio work, students are introduced to new models of scholarship that explore dance’s capacity to chart and at times resist social norms and bodily behaviors. Through sustained and rigorous encounters with dance, students in the Dance Division gain skills for understanding how bodies move through cultural spaces and the complex factors of identity, culture and history that determine how we perceive these bodies.

Working from a grounding in Western dance practices, a variety of global dance forms are also offered to invite students to experience dance as a celebration, enactment and contestation of identity and power. Dance is thus highlighted as a unique area of study focusing on the moving body and bringing to the Humanities conceptual and empirical approaches to studying history, culture and political acts.