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Dance

Prospective Students

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Welcome to the Dance Department web page! We are genuinely glad you have found us.

Dance is not ordinarily taught at the high schools. Most students entering college, if they have pursued dance at all, have only been exposed to ballet and jazz or lyrical dance. If ballet were your main interest in life, it is unlikely that you would be enrolling in a liberal arts school. Consequently we know that you are a very special student in that you are pursuing an interest not easily rewarded or readily identified as an academic course of study. We have confidence that you will risk trying all of the forms we offer here including contemporary dance, ballet, and world dance forms as well as approaching the place of dance as a creative forum, as a cultural event, as a science, and as an analytical methodology.

It is just as rare to have an independent dance department in a small liberal arts college with the academic strengths Denison boosts. Having just celebrated our 30th year as an independent major, our department is one of the oldest majors in any private liberal arts institution in the United States and abroad. We offer you ways of working with your expressive body that will serve you for your entire life, not just for a very short-lived college career in performance.

The combination of your curiosity and our longevity is a powerful one for both students and faculty. We have created a program that will extend your current training, whatever it is, from "received knowledge" to "constructed knowledge", supporting you while you move from working the body for someone else to understanding and expressing yourself with your own body. Here at Denison you will have the opportunity to interact personally with each of your faculty members, audition and perform early in your college career, experience leadership and responsibility, shape the direction of the department's guest roster and activities, and create community among your colleagues.

We invite you to take class with us, meet your fellow classmates and new upper classpersons, make your interests known and plan on taking advantage of all a small college has to offer its dance students! Enjoy all that you can be in Dance at Denison!

For more information about the Denison Dance Department contact us using our
online form.