Dancing Till the World Ends: Performance and Political Crisis

Undergraduate

If the world is ending, why does dance still matter? This class analyzes systemic crisis, or the overlapping global economic, political, and environmental crises that we confront in our news cycle daily, through the work of performing artists who offer alternative roadmaps and otherwise futures of survival and repair. After comparing theories of crisis authored by Habermas, Arendt, Agamben, Glissant, and others, we move through performances of 20th and 21st-century crises in the Americas. Case studies range from evangelical prophecies of apocalypse to gun violence, from the war on terror to climate change. We ask how performance can help us confront the unthinkable, and explore the unique affordances of the body for interpreting and representing states of crisis. How can performance move beyond the stage to help build and sustain coalitions, and how are performers negotiating the economic crises facing the arts today? Queer, black, and minoritarian theory and practice are the focus of this course. Moving between stagings of utopia and dystopia, this class explores how creativity has historically served as a space for generating hope and critique. HU T 1:30pm-3:25pm