Program Content Areas

Master of Fine Arts in Dance

I. Dance Making

Outcomes:

• M.F.A. students will demonstrate the artistic process skills necessary to create a significant body of work, articulate a well-developed personal aesthetic and explain how this aesthetic informs scholarly and pedagogical work.
• M.F.A. students will be able to demonstrate advanced performance/ technique skills supported by the development of personal autonomy, agency, and initiative in a variety of performance contexts and movement styles.
• M.F.A students will be able to demonstrate the pedagogical skills necessary to coach, guide and communicate artistic intentions to other creative participants verbally and through performative processes (i.e., teaching, coaching and rehearsing).

II. Production

Outcomes:

• M.F.A students will be able to negotiate their emerging artistic visions with production and performance contexts appropriate to individual, artistic and professional agendas.
• M.F.A students will be able to implement creative initiatives by taking appropriate and direct action that leads to the realization and production of dance performance in contexts appropriate to one‘s artistic vision.
• M.F.A students will be able to design effective strategies for managing, publicizing, marketing and developing audiences for artistic and professional agendas.

III. Understanding and Theorizing

Outcomes:

• MFA students will be able to articulate relevant cultural, political, social, historical and philosophical threads of thought and implications of these ideas for their creative work and professional contexts.
• M.F.A. students will be able to demonstrate the knowledge and research competencies to design and carry-out an original creative project resulting in the writing of a scholarly paper, the making of a professional presentation to a public audience and responding substantively to questions.
• M.F.A. students will be able to develop pedagogical/content knowledge and articulate a personal teaching philosophy grounded in their scholarly visions and apply this pedagogical theory in appropriate studio and theory teaching contexts at the college/university and/or professional level.