Foundations and Futures in Performance Studies

Performance studies takes seriously that performance is a critical site of knowledge making; performance thus becomes a way of doing research, engaging in critical analysis, and staging research and theoretical concepts. Understanding performance in this way makes it an effective tool in pedagogical and political praxis. Performance studies also holds a wide conception of what performance can be: national and global exhibitions of power; gestural practices; everyday stylings of the body; and spiritual ritual. As such, this interdisciplinary field draws from and makes itself relevant to other academic disciplines: theater, literature, dance, film, art, and music; critical social theory; anthropology; geography; and history. In this class, we will survey a range of key terms and ideas in performance studies. We will follow the genealogies of particular analytics such as performativity, memory, witnessing, ephemerality, liveness, gesture, theatricality, flesh, and body within the field. Drawing on these ideas, we will ask who gets to perform and who is required to perform, who does culture and who makes art. We will think through the ways that performance is used in / as research, and we will also perform in order to converse with readings, to explore how theory works. From beginning to end, we will ask how performance makes itself relevant to questions of gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability.