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ArtSTEM course planned for Spring 2014

ArtSTEM is becoming a course! For the first time, a Division of Liberal Arts course offering at uncsa.stacked.3color.gradUNCSA will be known as an “ArtSTEM” course. The course will be collaboratively taught by six different DLA faculty members, and led by Dr. Janna Levin, faculty member and ArtSTEM co-director. Collaborating faculty include: Joe Mills, Dean Wilcox, Rick Miller, Bob King, and Mike Wakeford. Below, see the course listing from the registration catalog. More on this soon!

ARTSTEMcourselisting

This year’s ArtStem course will center around the theme of “Violence”.

A Chat With Jennifer Homans About Ballet’s Past and Future – Arts & Academe – The Chronicle of Higher Education

Homans’s diagnosis comes not only from years of watching, and reading and writing about, this most ephemeral art form—she is a distinguished scholar in residence at New York University—but also from having been a professional ballet dancer herself. Trained at the School of American Ballet, associated with the renowned New York City Ballet, she performed with sterling dance companies like San Francisco Ballet and Pacific Northwest Ballet. The passion she harbored for working in the studio eventually nudged her to ponder the genesis and meaning of this transformational art form, leading her from the stage and into the research library.

“Ballet, of course is not just the life of the body, but it also has a whole set of ideas and beliefs and feelings that over history have made it meaningful,” she told me in a recent interview. “Although they (professional dancing and academia) seem in some respects to be polar opposites, one is very physical, the other very cerebral, there is an interesting connection between them.” The loneliness of daily work and sweat at the barre is, it seems, akin to the hours of solitary reading, transcribing, and evaluating.

via A Chat With Jennifer Homans About Ballet’s Past and Future – Arts & Academe – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

WaPo article–’Ballet isn’t rocket science, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive either”

Interesting piece about dancers in the science world. Money quote:

“Dancers and scientists are trying to do the same thing: hold up the flags for human experience and human knowledge. They are out there trying to discover something, and when they do, they are the vanguards, responsible for communicating whatever it is they are trying to say.”

Ballet isn’t rocket science, but the two aren’t mutually exclusive, either – The Washington Post.