
Dance
Moving, making, thinking, feeling.
A Three Dimensional Dance Education
Interdisciplinary Collaboration
The arts at Oberlin crosses disciplinary and technological frontiers. Work on performance projects with students from theater, TIMARA, studio art, cinema studies and the conservatory.

Community Engagement and Learning
From local internships with arts organizations to mentoring youth with Girls & Boys in Motion, Oberlin helps to facilitate avenues for community engagement in the arts.

Featured Courses
Samba
Experience the joyous movement, music, and culture of Samba. Learn to shuffle your feet, shake your hips and sing along to pagode like a carioca while coming to know the complex history & politics intertwined with Brazil’s most famous art form.
- Taught by
- Alysia Ramos
Somatic Landscapes
Somatic Landscapes begins with the premise that we live in the world through our bodies. Thus, if we want to become conscious of our relationship to the earth we must first become mindful of our physical selves. In order to develop our responsibility to the ecology, we must first develop an ability to respond.
- Taught by
- Ann Cooper Albright
Choreography in the Cultural Traditions
Create, mount and perform choreographic work from the traditional movement and dance traditions of West Africa and its diaspora. Learn the rituals, rhythms, stories and societies that shape these rich dance lineages while exploring them through your personal lens.
- Taught by
- Talise Campbell
Queer Gestures
Explore queerness through the lens of movement and performance. Examine how creative practice, live performance, feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, and postcolonial scholarship contend with competing notions of the body, environment, and performance.
- Taught by
- Al Evangelista
Student Profiles
Dance Practice as Research
After a six month exploration of performance in Filipino American communities, Kara Nepomuceno ’20 performed “Side by Side” at the Asia Pacific Dance Festival Conference.

From Chemistry to Circus Arts
Hayley Larson ’14 entered Oberlin College thinking she would major in chemistry and dance on the side. A double chemistry and dance major, Larson is now a full-time dancer and instructor at Aloft Circus Arts and Aerial Dance Chicago.

Taking Top Prize at a Film Contest
Three Oberlin dance students collaborated for an innovative competition that required them to choreograph, shoot, score, and produce a dance film in only 48 hours. Their project, Not Today, won the 2016 Boundless in Brooklyn: 48 Hour Dance Film Contest.

What does Dance at Oberlin look like?

Professor Alysia Ramos dances with students from Samba & Capoeira classes at a Samba de Roda workshop with guest artist Flavia Nascimento.

Students from the Choreography in the Cultural Traditions class perform in the Oberlin Dance Company Concert directed by Professor Talise Campbell.

Oberlin dance students participate in an intensive workshop taught by visiting dance artist Nora Chipaumire.

Professors Holly Handman-Lopez and Emily Barton collaborate on a Winter Term intensive spanning dance and creative writing.

Michal Schorsch and Kara Nepomuceno perform a site specific work in Spring Back, “Out the Box.”

Professor Ann Cooper Albright leading a workshop in Warner Gymnasium.
