*Fashioning Dance – Choreographic Fashion

This course will explore the relation between fashion and performance from a theoretical and a performance practice perspective. students will first consider how fashion has become the prominent way in which we express our identities and relate fashion to questions of identity and self-fashioning as well as to images of the body, ideas of femininity and masculinity, conformism and subversion. While analyzing current theoretical discussions on fashion, they will evaluate the lines of intersection among fashion, performance, media, and spectacle. the course will examine how the fashion industry consciously employs performative modes and theatrical devices to stage runway shows, readymade fashion advertisements, and retail stores and seek to understand what lies beyond the continuous invoking of the theatrical and the spectacular in fashion. are these modes used consciously as a way to assuage the ambivalence of fashion shoppers and their collective guilt over consumption? and, how are “artistic and theatrical” devices used to dissociate clothing from the labor process that produced it? Prerequisites: Modern Dance I or equivalent. Placement audition required. cross-listed to Fashion communication and Publishing (Fashion and accessory Studies and technology).