Description

The ambitious new Bennington BFA Dance Lab activates a physically and intellectually rigorous curriculum and amplifies a diversity of styles and ideologies. We constantly move students into immersive formations of thinking, making, and doing. Most importantly, we dance. The pedagogical approach of the program calls forth new considerations of dance study by encouraging imagination, resilience, and nimble responsiveness to a changing world. The curriculum fosters a deep sense of vitality as students learn to thrive as agents of creative, expressive change and in contexts where difference informs and reinforces community. The BFA Dance Lab aims to provide an environment for students to shape a dance practice that is personal, driven by curiosities and deeply reflective by focusing not just on how they dance but why they dance and with whom. The curriculum is aligned with the long-standing characteristics of Bennington College’s plans of study that emphasize student-designed flexible curricula that are responsive to the expansion of disciplinary boundaries. It is also reflective of the combination of critical pedagogies with a rigorous engagement of studio practice that is characteristic of successful dance conservatories. Faculty of the BFA Dance Lab, like the faculty of Bennington College as a whole, are teacher-practitioners active in intentionally diverse aspects of the dance field. BFA students consistently participate collaboratively in the research and creative practices of BFA Dance Lab faculty. From their first year in the Lab, students are encouraged to make their own choices about study possibilities through discussions with and mentoring by their advisors and faculty members. In taking responsibility for their own educational pathways, emerging artists discover how they want to situate their voice in relation to the world. This sort of choice-making is crucial for advanced dance artistry and professional work in associated fields, and the curriculum expects engaged, direct participation in the learning process. Within the BFA Dance Lab curriculum, students are encouraged to discover their interests, articulate their perspectives, and situate themselves as participants capable of developing new relationships to dance and to the world. A distinctive characteristic of the Lab is that students have the opportunity to travel to study intensively and perform works by both students and visiting choreographers. On campus, surrounded by nature, students study and perform in state-of-the-art studios and classrooms that both anchor and inspire the program.