Rehearsal & Performance (Dance Theatre)

Course Description

Rehearsal & Performance (Dance Theatre) focuses on the creation, preparation and performance of original dance compositions. Students engage in public performances as members of the Daytona State Dance Ensemble. Daytona State states the course may be repeated three times for credit.

Within the SCNS taxonomy, DAA is the Dance Activity prefix. Daytona State publishes this at 1 credit, offered fall and spring.

⚠ The contact-hour figure for this course is derived

Daytona State publishes no contact-hour figure for this course, and no live guide in this repository provides a dance anchor. The figure shown is derived from the institution's one-credit laboratory convention of 30 hours (CET1114L, PHT2211L, and ETC4241L are all published at 1 credit and 30 hours). ⚠ Rehearsal-and-performance courses commonly demand more contact time than their credit value suggests, and the load rises sharply as performances approach. Treat the figure as indicative and ask the department for the actual rehearsal schedule before committing.

The most important thing to understand about a course like this is that its credit value badly understates its time cost, and that this is normal rather than a problem. A one-credit ensemble course carries a production's obligations: fixed rehearsal calls, technical rehearsals, and performance dates that cannot move. Students who schedule it as though it were one credit of anything else are the ones who come unstuck in performance week.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Participate in the creation of original dance compositions.
• Learn and retain choreography accurately.
• Adapt to changes in choreography during the rehearsal process.
• Rehearse productively and use rehearsal time well.
• Work collaboratively within an ensemble.
• Maintain spacing, timing, and unison within a group.
• Respond to direction from a choreographer.
• Contribute to a collaborative choreographic process where invited.
• Prepare physically for rehearsal and performance.
• Maintain condition and manage fatigue across a rehearsal period.
• Describe and apply injury prevention practice.
• Describe rehearsal and performance etiquette.
• Meet call times and production commitments reliably.
• Work with music, costume, and lighting as they are added.
• Adapt performance to the actual performance space.
• Participate in technical and dress rehearsals appropriately.
• Perform for a public audience.
• Sustain performance quality across multiple performances.
• Handle performance nerves and prepare mentally.
• Respond appropriately when something goes wrong on stage.
• Describe the roles of the production team and work with them.
• Apply consent and boundary practice in partnering and contact work.
• Receive and act on notes constructively.
• Reflect on and evaluate your own performance honestly.

Optional Outcomes

• Choreograph an original work or section.
• Describe the production process from concept to performance.
• Describe stage management and its role.
• Describe touring and outreach performance.
• Document performance work for a portfolio.
• Describe audition preparation for dance.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• Creating original compositions
• Learning and retaining choreography
• Adapting to changes
• Productive rehearsal
• Ensemble collaboration
• Spacing, timing, and unison
• Responding to a choreographer
• Collaborative choreographic process
• Physical preparation
• Managing fatigue across a rehearsal period
• Injury prevention
• Rehearsal and performance etiquette
• Call times and commitments
• Working with music, costume, and lighting
• Adapting to the performance space
• Technical and dress rehearsals
• Public performance
• Sustaining quality across performances
• Performance nerves and mental preparation
• Responding when something goes wrong
• The production team
• Consent and boundaries in partnering
• Receiving notes
• Honest self-evaluation

Optional Topics

• Choreographing original work
• The production process
• Stage management
• Touring and outreach
• Portfolio documentation
• Dance audition preparation

Resources & Tools

• Your department's productions — audition, crew, and stage manage. Practical production credit is what the field actually recruits on, and it is free and available now.
• Recordings of professional work — many companies and archives stream productions, and college libraries frequently carry theatre and dance video databases at no cost to students.
• Your college's counselling and health services — free and confidential; relevant to a field with real physical and emotional demands.
• Local and regional companies — volunteering, ushering, or crewing gets you inside a working organisation and in front of people who hire.
• Florida's theme park and cruise line auditions — posted publicly and held regularly; substantial, steady, paid performance work that many students never think to pursue.
• Actors' Equity Association, SAG-AFTRA, and IATSE — the professional unions; understand what membership means and when it makes sense before you are eligible.
• Keep a portfolio from the first term — video, photographs, programmes, and a maintained resume.
• International Association for Dance Medicine and Science (iadms.org) — free resource papers on injury prevention, conditioning, and dancer health; the best available material on training safely.
• Your college's fitness centre and any athletic training staff — frequently free to students and rarely used by dancers who would benefit most.

Career Pathways

• Actor — SOC 27-2011.
• Dancer — SOC 27-2031; and choreographer, SOC 27-2032.
• Producer and director — SOC 27-2012.
• Stage manager and production management — consistently more employable than performance and frequently overlooked by students.
• Technical theatre — lighting, sound, scenery, costume, and rigging; steady work and transferable to live events.
• Theme park and cruise line entertainment — a major Florida employer of performers, technicians, and stage management.
• Live events, corporate production, and conference work — large, year-round, and well paid.
• Teaching artist, studio instruction, and K-12 arts teaching — the latter requires teacher certification.
• Arts administration, marketing, and development — every company needs these and they are steadier than performance.
• Applied and healthcare performance work — standardised patient programmes, simulation, and training scenarios; paid, local, and genuinely available.
• Transfer to a bachelor's programme in theatre, dance, or musical theatre.
• Dance studio teaching — a substantial and accessible employment sector, particularly in Florida's residential communities.
• Fitness, Pilates, yoga, and conditioning instruction — certification-based, flexible, and a common complement to performance work.

Special Information

⚠⚠ A one-credit ensemble course is not a one-credit time commitment

• Production obligations do not scale with credit value. Rehearsal calls, technical rehearsals, and performances are fixed by the production, not by the course's credit weight.
• ⚠ The load is heavily back-loaded. Early rehearsals are manageable; technical week and performance week are close to full-time, and they arrive at the same point in the term as everything else's deadlines.
• Get the calendar at the start and put every date in your schedule immediately — including technical rehearsals and strike.
• ⚠ Plan your other coursework around performance week, and tell your other instructors in advance if a conflict is unavoidable. Doing that early works; doing it the night before does not.
• Do not take on more than you can honour. Missing a rehearsal in an ensemble affects everyone else's work, which is why reliability matters more here than in an individual course.
• Arrive warmed up and ready at the call time, not arriving at the call time.
• Tell the choreographer early if you have a conflict or an injury — choreography can be adjusted with notice and cannot be adjusted on the day.
• Take the repeat seriously as an opportunity. Daytona State allows this course three times; a student who performs across four terms leaves with a body of documented work rather than one credit, and that is what transfer auditions and employers respond to.

⚠ What to do when something goes wrong on stage

• Something will go wrong — a missed entrance, a costume failure, a lighting cue, a fall. How a performer handles it is a large part of what distinguishes a trained one.
• Keep going. The audience does not know what was supposed to happen, and most errors are invisible unless the performer signals them.
• ⚠ Do not react. Grimacing, apologising, or breaking to look at the wings converts an unnoticed slip into an obvious one.
• Find the next fixed point — a musical cue, a formation, an entrance — and rejoin there rather than trying to recover everything missed.
• Support each other. If a colleague is lost, the ensemble absorbs it; adjusting spacing quietly is worth more than any individual's exactness.
• ⚠ Stop for genuine danger. An injury, an unsafe floor, or a hazard is not something to perform through — there is a procedure, and using it is correct.
• Deal with it in notes afterwards, not on stage or in the wings mid-show.
• Learn from it without dwelling. Every performer has a catalogue of these, and they stop being distressing once you have survived a few.

⚠⚠ Consent and boundaries in rehearsal — the standards have changed and they matter

• Performance work involves physical contact, physical closeness, and emotionally exposing material, and the profession's standards for how that is handled have changed substantially and for the better in recent years.
• Contact should be choreographed, discussed in advance, and agreed — not discovered in the moment. Spontaneity is not a justification for surprising a scene partner with touch.
• ⚠ You may decline. Saying that a piece of staging is not something you are willing to do is a professional statement, not a failure of commitment, and a good rehearsal room makes that easy to say.
• Intimacy direction exists as a discipline precisely because scenes involving intimacy need the same deliberate choreography that stage violence does.
• Check in during and after emotionally demanding work, and treat that as ordinary practice rather than fuss.
• ⚠ De-role deliberately. Learn a practice for leaving a character behind at the end of a session — particularly with distressing material. Actors who never learned this carry work home for years.
• Raise concerns with the instructor or director, and know your institution's reporting routes if that is not possible.
• Extend the same care to others. The person who makes a rehearsal room safe to speak up in is usually a peer rather than the person in charge.

⚠⚠ Performers get injured, and the culture works against reporting it

• Performance training is physical training, and the injury rates in dance and physical theatre are comparable to those in sport — but the culture around them is much worse, because performers are taught that continuing is professionalism.
• ⚠⚠ Working through pain is not discipline. Pain is information. The overuse injuries that end performing careers are almost always ones that were felt, ignored, and worked through — and they are far more treatable early.
• Warm up properly and cool down. Cold muscle is the condition in which most acute injuries happen, and the warm-up is the first thing skipped when time is short.
• Know the difference between effort and strain, and between the discomfort of stretching and the sharpness of damage.
• ⚠ Do not push a stretch to pain, and never bounce into one. Flexibility gained by forcing is gained at the joint's expense.
• Rest is training. Adaptation happens during recovery, and continuous work without it produces injury rather than progress.
• Hydrate and eat adequately. ⚠ Disordered eating is a recognised and serious problem in dance and performance training; if you or someone you know is struggling, campus counselling and health services are confidential and free.
• Report injuries to your instructor rather than concealing them, and get proper assessment rather than advice from other students.
• Speak up about unsafe conditions — floors, lighting, obstructions, equipment. A rehearsal or performance space is a workplace.

⚠ An honest account of performing arts employment

• Performance work is intermittent, competitive, and unevenly paid, and most people who work in it also do other things. That is the normal shape of the career rather than a sign of failure, and knowing it in advance changes how you plan.
• Build the second and third skill deliberately. Teaching, stage management, technical work, arts administration, choreography, and directing are all adjacent, and the people who sustain careers in this field are usually the ones who can do several things.
• The transferable skills are real and employers value them — public presentation, collaboration under pressure, taking direction and criticism, meeting immovable deadlines, and performing when unwell or unprepared. Name them explicitly when applying for anything.
• Florida has a genuine market: theme parks and cruise lines are substantial and year-round employers of performers, technicians, and stage management, alongside regional theatre, education, and events. It is not New York, and it is a great deal steadier than New York.
• Learn the business side early — contracts, self-employment tax, invoicing, and keeping records. Most performers learn this the hard way.
• ⚠ Unpaid work has a place and it has limits. Student and community work builds craft and contacts; a professional production expecting free labour is a different matter.
• Keep documentation of everything you do — recordings, photographs, programmes, reviews. A portfolio is built continuously and cannot be assembled retrospectively.
• Health insurance and income stability deserve a plan, not optimism.

How Florida course levels affect transfer

The first digit of an SCNS number denotes the year of offering, not transferability. Courses at the 1000 and 2000 levels transfer transparently between Florida public institutions, and 3000 to 4000 is unproblematic since both are upper division. The boundary that actually matters is 2000 to 3000, where lower-division credit generally cannot satisfy an upper-division requirement.

DAA2640 is published by Daytona State at 1 credit, offered fall and spring, and may be repeated three times for credit. ⚠ The contact-hour figure shown is derived — see the note above and get the actual rehearsal calendar from the department before committing.