Fall 2024 Graduate Courses

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

Recitation Sections:

PERF-GT 1000.002 (9498) - Thursdays, 3:00pm- 4:15pm, Room 611

PERF-GT 1000.003 (9502) - Thursdays, 3:00pm- 4:15pm, Room 612

PERF-GT 1000.004 (15461) - Thursdays, 3:00pm- 4:15pm, Room 613

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.  

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

This course focuses on “everyday” versions of performance (as opposed to theatrical or formal performances). Drawing from philosophy, anthropology, sociology, affect studies, feminist and queer theory, the course invites students to view seemingly non-theatrical social interaction as performance, and to consider the significance of the seemingly “normal” and inconsequential nature of such performances. What happens when what is “second nature” becomes the focus of our attention? The course will also place particular emphasis on writing as a mode of illuminating and interrogating the “everyday”, as well as considering it as performance practice in and of itself.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

This course focuses on modern and contemporary enmeshments of race and materiality, through a focus on art, aesthetics and production. We will study processes, contexts and techniques of material production traversing the colony, studio, factory, gallery, home, laboratory and atmosphere. Questions that animate our study will include: How do formal and technical processes help us sense, materialize and reconfigure modern concepts of humanity, animality and thingness? What are some ways artists have linked our material world, materialist approach to history, aesthetic production and phenomenal experience? How do race, gender and sex come to matter – sediment and accrue substance, take shape and form in/as objects, bodies and resources, accumulate cultural and political consequence – and how do manipulations of materiality, in turn, affect utilitarian and symbolic productions of spaces, persons and things? We will investigate how racializing processes have interacted with modern sculpture, installation, de/classifications and reinventions of decorative or craft traditions. We will also examine procedure-based conceptual or process art, environmental intervention, and experimentation across workshops, labs and amateur science across the twentieth and twenty-first century. Readings and objects of the course will be drawn from art history and visual culture, critical race theory, cultural economies of colonialism,  old and renewed materialisms, indigenous, queer and trans studies, affect theory, environmental humanities, histories of labor and the workplace, critical science and technology studies.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 611

Performance Studies teaches us to read anew, and again, any text we think we know. This seminar offers the opportunity to collectively experiment with how we approach, take in, and then incorporate a reading (as an activity and object) into our written work.  We will consider the theoretical, ethical and practical challenges presented by different modes of analysis. Students will develop skills related to archival research, talking to people, documentation, and analysis of live performance, and the analysis of documents of various kinds, including ephemeral ones. Together we will consider writing strategies that best transmit different kinds of projects.  Work for the course will include various exercises designed for the long view: written responses to the weekly readings, development of exam areas, an early formulation of dissertation projects, and ideas for future teaching.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 611

Emphasis on problems of research, writing, and editing as they apply to the doctoral dissertation.  Each student prepares a dissertation proposal as a class project and presents it at the end of the semester colloquium.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 613

This course investigates the states of social marginalization produced by U.S. Immigration Law and the many ways that Latinx performers resist that condition. Analyzing performances in various media--theater, live art, music, and dance--this course examines how Latinx performers reshape national belonging, resist criminalization, and advance decolonial visions. The course will be structured chronologically, tracing immigration law from the Chinese Exclusion Acts of the late 19th century to the "crimmigration policies" of the present day. Our study of these historical landmarks will be elaborated with theoretical readings on the performative dynamics of law, sovereignty, and the border. Each week, we juxtapose a moment in legal history with a performance practice or performance maker. Such makers may include Cherríe Moraga, Lila Downs, Orlando Hernandez, Coco Fusco, the Nuyorican Poets, Teatro Luna, and many more.

4 points, 721 Broadway, 6^th floor, Classroom 612

The premise of this course is that “movement” is a bio-techno-political substance. We will look into how some key political philosophers, choreographers, and dancers have developed and enacted theories of movement and embodiment that address compositional practices and social-political problems binding movement and the political. Some of those problems include: command and obedience; embodiment and discipline; movement and freedom; ephemerality and the political ontology of dance. A particular focus will be given to how efforts to capture and control movement by contemporary as well as historical systems of “power/knowledge” illuminate the choreographic production of movement theories.