Kristin Horrigan - Dance
“I think it is important for students to develop a body-mind connection,” says dance professor Kristin Horrigan. “The experience of academic study – as rich and fulfilling as it can be – can also often become quite disembodying. Students spend all day curled up reading, writing, calculating, and pay little attention to the bodies that house their brains.Dance as a part of a liberal arts education helps create healthy embodied human beings.”
Kristin’s view, that dance can greatly enhance a balanced liberal arts education, reflects her own intellectual history. The concentration of her graduate studies at Ohio State concerned the ways in which concert dance and social and political activism intersect. Surprisingly, her major while as an undergraduate at Princeton was actually in chemistry -- with a minor in dance.
Her broad educational background allows Kristin to provide for students whose academic work is interdisciplinary. “Princeton also prepared me for Marlboro in some very direct ways,” she says. “It provided me with a wonderful model for how dance can function as a component of a liberal arts education. It also taught me the value of independent work.”
Kristin specializes in teaching modern dance, tap, choreography and improvisation, and has also taught theory, dance history and writing. She has worked at a variety of different institutions, including Dean, Providence, Kenyon, Keene State and Oberlin colleges. Her work has been published in academic journals such as Dance Magazine and Contact Quarterly. Her current research regards intergenerational dance and she directs a company of dancers who range in age from 23 to 88 in Northampton, MA.
“I want students to understand dance as an art form -- its history, its theory, its methods, it's relationship to other aspects of culture -- and to develop critical frameworks for understanding dance in a larger social context,” says Kristin.“On the flip side of this, I want students to be able to apply paradigms from their dance studies to their work in other fields and their experiences in other parts of life. I want students to develop tools for creative and analytical thought (from an embodied perspective) that they can carry out into their other studies.”
A.B., Princeton University, 1999; M.F.A., Ohio State University, 2002. Marlboro College, 2006-