[SOLVED] Dancing Body and Racial Discrimination

Final Paper Guidelines Dancing Body and Racial Discrimination
For your final paper you must choose a performer, choreographer, or dance company to research in order to answer the following prompt:
How does your subject challenge, uphold or maintain understandings of race or racist stereotypes in the United States?
– What is the relationship between the dancing body and racial discrimination both in the entertainment world and society?
– How does the dancing body(ies) become raced through dance performance?
– How does the dancing body resist or subvert the racing or racialization of bodies in motion?
– How may dance be utilized as a tool for racial/social justice?
The subject you choose may be any of the performers we have studied so far in class or maybe one that we have not covered yet. Your performer’s lifetime and work should fall somewhere on the timeline between the turn of the twentieth century to the present.
Your main focus should be your performer/choreographer and their work in dance however,
you will also need to contextualize your subject. What political/social/cultural climate are
they performing in? What other information is relevant to supporting your argument?
Evidence & Sources
Your answer to the prompt is your thesis statement and you must provide evidence to support
your argument. You are required to provide at least five pieces of evidence. Evidence may
range from choreography, specific performances, elements of a dance piece such as costume,
lighting, or location, music, personal philosophies, personal experiences, reviews, statistics,
etc.
Sources may be both primary and secondary sources. Primary sources may include,
photographs, videos, press reviews, direct quotes from artists, etc. Secondary sources such as
journal articles or books by other scholars may be used as well.
Please cite all sources using Chicago style. Your papers should include footnotes, as well as a
bibliography page at the end of the paper. Please note that the bibliography citations should
be in alphabetical order and formatted in bibliographic style (not note style).
Papers should be 6 to 8 pages in length, double spaced, Times New Roman font. Papers
should include an introduction, body paragraphs dedicated to evidence, a conclusion, and a
separate bibliography page.
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Dance Theater of Harlem
Dance Theater of Harlem is a great topic. What about it interests you? Do you want to look
at Arthur Mitchell’s work as the founder of the company? Do you want to look at the
company as a whole and how it is received in the dance world? Do you want to look at
integration in the company? Perhaps there is a specific dance that the company performs
that you want to explore? Are there certain dances that focus on social and racial justice?
These are just a few possibilities of subjects you can look into. Try to think about a specific
question you have about the topic and then form an argument around that question.