Fall 2024 Undergraduate Courses

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Recitation Sections:

PERF-UT 101.002 (14814) - Thursdays, 10:00am - 11:15am, Room 611

PERF-UT 101.003 (14815) - Thursdays, 10:00am - 11:15am, Room 613

PERF-UT 101.004 (9510) - Thursdays, 1:00pm - 2:15pm, Room 611

PERF-UT 101.005 (21518) - Thursdays, 1:00pm - 2:15pm, Room 613

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. 

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

This course examines the diverse issues and methodological questions raised by different kinds of performance. Where “Introduction to Performance Studies” asks, “What is performance? What counts as performance, and what is its cultural significance?” this course asks, “How can we interpret and analyze performance? What is ‘theory’ in this context, and how do theory and practice inform each other?” Readings introduce students to key concepts in the field such as “ritual,” “performativity,” “liveness,” and “affect.” Material for the course (readings, videos, and other media) exemplify the interdisciplinary nature of performance studies by drawing from work in aesthetics, anthropology, architecture studies, ethnic/area studies, queer studies, religious studies, legal studies, literary studies, etc.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Countering the “presentist” critique of performance studies as a field (i.e., that its emphasis on “liveness” limits it to analysis of contemporary practices), this course will examine both the long history of performance (and the specific research methodologies that are required for that examination), and the history of performance studies as a mode of social inquiry.  How have performance, and the writing about performance, been deployed historically, and to what ends?  How can contemporary researches access the archives that house answers to these questions, and how do archives in themselves constitute an historiographic “performance”?  Students will consider the impact of performance in the contexts of (post-)colonial history, aesthetic genealogies, and other historiographic projects.

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

This course will explore the rich history of experimental dance and movement-based performance, and the possibility of a movement-based analysis of performativity.  While dominant theories of “performativity” (the doing that performance does) emerge from linguistic theories and/or text-based accounts (ethnographic descriptions of ritual, etc.), the direct impact of movement has garnered less scholarly attention (with the exception of dance studies).  How does movement (not only in dance, but in performance more generally) enact social/aesthetic theory, and how might movement itself theorize social relations?

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 613

What are the “proper” role and place of religion in American public life? What are the “proper” role and place of sex in American public life? And how are these two questions related to each other? Despite the fact that there is no established church in the United States (indeed, the U.S. is an officially secular nation), U.S. laws and policies regulating sexual life have historically derived much of their rationale from specific and specifically religious notions of “good” versus bad “sex,” what bodies are “for,” what kinds of human relationships are valuable. How are we to understand this apparent contradiction between principles of church-state separation and religious freedom, on the one hand, and the invocation of religious ideas to justify state regulation of bodily life, especially sexual life, on the other? Does American national identity have not just a specific sexual identity, but a particular religious character, too? If so, what room is held open for different ways of performing embodiment, religion, and American-ness? As a way into these questions we will consider a range of case studies, situating each in its deeper historical context. Throughout the semester, we will think with the category of performance and the question of conduct – what bodies and embodied subjects do and feel – as a way to apply critical pressure to the course’s keywords: religion, sexuality, affect, public, and American. 

4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Scholars have considered the increasing integration of performance into the visual art world, but one might argue that craft, with its inherent focus on process, was always already, in the words of curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, "inextricably linked to performance." There’s a large bibliography on the politics of craft (much of it focusing on the ways in which gender, race, nation and class determine how cultural production is determined to be “art” or “mere craft”), and in recent years, some scholars have explored the surge in “craftivism” – the mobilizing of craft practices toward ostensibly radical political ends. Students of affect have probed the significance of hapticality in relation to handmade objects. And the fiber arts in particular are often invoked in discussions of writerly technique (encapsulated in the etymological link between text and textiles). We will explore together political, affective and writerly questions raised by the category of craft - and perhaps most importantly, we will use our own craft practices to derive new understandings of the relationship between labor, identity, feeling and writing. Readings will range from Gandhi and Marx to Sedgwick, hooks, Bryan-Wilson, Adamson, and Aram Han Sifuentes, among others. Practice will involve our hands.

1- 4 pts – In-Person

721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 611

Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. The department does not place students in internships, students are responsible for procuring their own internships. Majors should speak with Allison Brobst (amb22@nyu.edu) before enrolling in this course.*

Performance Studies is a discipline which has sometimes addressed the performance of workers in the labor market, offering a theoretical perspective on some very practical questions: What are some of the professional skills that training in our field offers to students? What are some of the professional contexts within which this training is most useful? How might one employ some of our field's insights in the work environment? This course provides an opportunity for students to establish working relationships with organizations or institutions relevant to the field of Performance Studies, and to process and discuss their on-site work experiences with their peers and a supervising instructor. The class will touch on some of the theoretical dimensions of the experience of interning but will also offer students a space to work through real-world challenges and opportunities.

4 pts – In-Person | 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl.

Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. Majors should check with Allison Brobst (amb22@nyu.edu) before enrolling in this course.*

Students in this course will build on a research paper/project that they originated in another PS course, with the goal of extending, refining, and further developing it in order to synthesize what they have learned, as well as further hone their research, analysis, and writing skills.