
The Department of Dance is nationally acclaimed and has a long-standing tradition of excellence offering an educational environment integrating performance opportunities, creative projects, and theoretical studies. Our wide-ranging areas of research and study create an environment in which students create, perform, analyze and investigate dance from experiential, historical, philosophical and scientific perspectives.
The curriculum features a wide range of studio courses designed to build strong technical skills. UCI emphasizes the traditional techniques of classical ballet and modern dance. The department offers these techniques, as well as jazz, in multi-level sequences. Training in choreography ranges widely from the free exploration of movement, space, sound, and formal concepts, to the study of the craft of choreography for both theatre and video dance.
Students have many opportunities to perform and to choreograph, which include the Department’s four annual concerts, as well as many interdisciplinary productions.
In lecture courses, students develop literacy and methodological skills in a variety of disciplines including movement analysis, Laban studies and reconstruction, critical issues in dance, dance history, teaching methods, dance science, arts management, and music for dancers. These courses provide training in the many disciplines of dance study and enhance the students’ understanding of dance as an art form, a physical discipline, a means of social and ritual expression, and an integral component of human life and culture world-wide.