Dance - elective courses

Courses available in 2025

Course prescription: Focuses on the development and consolidation of choreographic and performance skills.
Semester availability: Summer School
Prerequisite: Any 30 points at Stage I in Dance Studies
Points: 15

Course prescription: Dance 215 invites students to immerse themselves in the dynamic world of street dance, exploring its powerful cultural narratives, diverse styles, and unique social impact. Through both practical and theoretical work, they’ll engage with forms like breaking, vogue, and other hip-hop and street dance traditions, discovering how these styles express and shape identities, including their celebrated presence in Aotearoa. Beginner street dancers will learn relevant technical and cultural foundations, and more experienced dancers will be challenged to develop their own artistic approaches to movement forms.
Semester availability: Semester One
Prerequisite: 30 points at Stage I in Dance Studies
Programme restriction: BDanceSt
Points: 15

Course Prescription: Develops knowledge of foundational creative dance praxis pertaining to the contexts of Aotearoa and Moana-Nui-a-Kiwa. Explores cultural and kinaesthetic expressions, traditions, protocols and artists' elements in relation to indigenous concepts and methodologies of dance practices.
Semester Availability: Semester Two
Prerequisite: MĀORI 190, PACIFIC 110

Course prescription: Explores the artistic relationality of Vā and
Whakapapa through indigenous dance praxis. Storytelling through complex choreographic methodological and theoretical concepts will navigate the importance of people to place. Offers an insight into distinct Oceania values as they pertain to the creative arts in Aotearoa and wider te-moana-nui-a-kiwa.
Semester Availability: Semester One
Prerequisite: DANCE 216

Course prescription: Dance 351: Introduction to ballet, looks at ballet technique as a process of opening the body to new movement pathways by using experimentation, fun, and deep practice. All dancers and all levels of experience are welcome. The class contributes to reframing ballet as inclusive of personal/diverse expression and choreographic interpretation so that ballet fundamentals become applicable to multiple forms of movement in the design of (for example) student choreography. The class will warm the body for long days of movement practice in Semester Two and warm the mind to different ways of accessing choreographic pathways. Contemporary music is used to generate a connection to the ‘now’; think Charlie XCX meets plié and pirouette.
Semester availability: Semester Two
Prerequisite: 30 points at Stage II in Dance Studies
Programme restriction: BDanceSt
Points: 15