Performance and Politics

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

At a time when our world faces myriad intertwined crises, this course offers students an opportunity to engage firsthand with performative practices, projects, and methods for building trust, cultivating new understandings and strategies of resistance, and exploring their own agency as citizens. Via GU's Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics, students will engage with a diversity of cutting-edge artists from around the world who are finding resilient and transformative models for how performance can operate as a humanizing force in world affairs. We will explore ways in which performance can operate to rethink and rehearse notions of community and care, as well as power, justice, citizenship, and democracy. Students with experience in performance practice will develop a deeper understanding of their work in a geopolitical context — just as students with interests in international relations, politics, diplomacy, global health, justice & peace studies etc. will develop an experiential appreciation of the role of performance in those contexts. Previous performance experience is not required. X-listed with CULP and JUPS. This class fulfills the comparative methods / breadth requirement for TPST.