On blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Ello, Tumblr, email, SoundCloud, YouTube, and more, we are constantly performing using technology. Performance Studies has long been concerned with technology, but it is only recently concerned with questions brought to the fore by new technologies and new technological practices, particularly on the Internet. This survey course requires us to consider the relationship between Performance Studies as a discipline (one that incorporates performance theory, critical theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and other theoretical genres) with technology, particularly the Internet. Open to Non-Majors.
Majors Only:This course will introduce incoming Master’s students to some of the concepts, terms, and theoretical genealogies that they can expect to encounter in Performance Studies. What makes performance studies performance studies, and why do it? In considering this question we will consider the specificity of performance as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a practice of self-hood and sociality, and as an aesthetic practice; we will also focus on the specific challenges and potentialities in writing about/as performance.
Performance Studies — An Introduction explores the wide world of performance – from theatre, dance, and music to ritual, play, political campaigns, social media, and the performances of everyday life. Performance studies also ranges across cultures — Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, the Americas. And it spans historical periods from the art of the paleolithic caves to YouTube and the avant-garde. This course is devised by Richard Schechner, one of the pioneers of performance studies, in dialogue with more than a dozen expert scholars and artists. Performance Studies — An Introduction puts students in dialogue with the most important ideas, approaches, theories, and questions of this dynamic, new academic field. Performance Studies — An Introduction is a “flipped” course: students will read and watch lessons online, blog about the material, and participate in a weekly interactive seminar guided by Professor Erin B. Mee — a theatre director and scholar — who has worked with Schechner for years.
To enter the field of Performance Studies is to proceed with a willingness to forgo strict definitions of art “objects” and “events.” The field encourages engagement with everyday life, performers from a variety of media, things inside and outside cultural institutions, and an expansive sense of the stage to reflect on how performance impacts our sense of the world. Music, theater, visual art, dance, and film are not divided into separate areas of study, but are necessarily engaged all together. While the question, “what is performance?” has mystified the minds of many, this course moves beyond this question to investigate: what does performance do? And how does performance help us to ask questions about aesthetics, politics, and the social world? The question “what does performance do?,” opens the line between theory and practice; a line that falsely separates the performer from the critic. Students will work together across these divides. In addition to deepening an understanding of the field of Performance Studies, students read texts that vitalize critical thinking in the humanities. The course engages theories of the field as they emerge from performances themselves, especially from the robust creative repertoires of New York City.