[Danielle Russo]
Hi! My name is Danielle Russo, and I am a professor in PMA. I am a choreographer, director, performer, artivist, and preservationist who lives and works across many facets and iterations of dance and live performance. My practice spans from opera houses—where I danced classical, contemporary, and even physical theatre forms—to the experimental and avant-garde, where I create and produce site and place-specific “stages,” interventions, durational installations, and immersive worlds. I’m interested in play—particularly at the intersection of interactive technology and embodied storytelling—to resituate and recognize intermedia and interdisciplinary dance and choreography as archive, as community, as social justice. In the creative process, my favorite moment is always the first day on stage or on site: that fleeting instant when we become witnesses to ourselves and to our own potential to manifest—our imaginations, our manifestos, our power.
[Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz]
Hi! My name is Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz. I am a professor in PMA. I am an artist and scholar who enjoys analyzing, making, and writing about dance. My productions feature a fusion of (Afro)Latine dance forms such as cumbia, bachata, hip hop, and salsa with Euro-American improvisational scores, contemporary concert dance, and release technique. One of my favorite aspects of the choreographic process is the ten minutes of silence before the start of a performance. I put on my favorite hoodies and headphones and focus—getting ready for a show to begin.
[Danielle Russo]
Here at PMA, we offer undergraduate and graduate students from across campus the opportunity to seriously study, practice, and perform a range of dance forms, traditions, and modes of thinking. This includes a Minor in Dance, as well as the opportunity to endeavor a Dance Honors project. From classical and neoclassical ballet to modern, post-modern, and contemporary to Afrolatine to intermedia and interdisciplinary design—such as making dance for camera--we invite and challenge Cornellians to develop the necessary skills to craft compelling performances, create communities, and write impactful, analytical essays about their work. Our core studio classes include improvisation, composition, and a series of evolving movement practices for the 21st century. PMA’s dance program is both artful and scholarly, and strives to be joyful and cathartic—a welcome, fun space for community, for creative expression and release, for storytelling and truth-telling, for dream-making and risk-taking, and for self-discovery and surprise. Regardless of the curriculum, our mission is to foster a positive self-confidence and satisfaction of understanding and of moving in our own bodies, and for individual voice and collective belonging, alike.
[Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz]
You can expect to take classes that enrich and challenge you. In addition to being in the studio, you will also sit in seminar and lecturer classes understanding the historical, theoretical, and political contexts that shape dance and, in turn, how dance reshapes these contexts. We prioritize doing, thinking, making, and writing about and through dance. We train students to understand that where and when one dances is as important as how and why.
[Danielle Russo]
One example of a course you can take is PMA 1611, which is our annual Dance Project Lab and intends to be a cumulative experience for the full scope of what we offer and invite here at PMA Dance. It’s the connective tissue and synthesis for embodied performance, student creative authorship, and student direction and devising in a semester-long complete production experience, where participants will not only learn and perform professional repertory, but also create and stage their own choreographies, while also having the privilege to collaborate with iconic guest artists, as well as our colleagues and their classmates in Set Design, Lighting and Projection, Costume Design, and Production and Stage Management also here at PMA. The result is a public performance series customized for one of our several state-of-the-art theaters here at PMA. We believe in the expansive potential of choreography—as the art of mobilizing and organizing, and so, it’s also a translation for the very skills to produce a show and to cultivate an audience for live dance and performance. These are essential skills not only in the professional field of dance but in all industries and in life.
[Juan Manuel Aldape Muñoz]
Another example of a course you might take in the History/Theory/Criticism category is Dance in America, PMA 3214. This class explores different dance from across multiple stages—TikTok videos, concert halls, streets—to assess how people create, sustain, and challenge markers of difference (race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class). Units in this class cover topics such as gendered changes in ballet in the 19th century, the circulation of salsa dance, the challenges of Hip Hop. Students in this class have written final essays and created podcasts from topics as varied as queer ballet to dance moms the television series to choreography and its link to emergent AI tools. And the visits to the Cornell Hip Hop Collection are the highlights many students enjoy. Pretty exciting research! We look forward to seeing you in our classes!