Spring 2024 Undergraduate Courses

Performance of the City | Black Feminist Avant-gardes

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

A founding tenet of the Performance Studies field is the significance of the site where performance takes place – including its metropolitan environment. This course thus serves to shape an intimate relationship with the performance culture of New York City, detailing ways in which the local urban environment has come to be and is currently staged by its residents and visitors. Turning our attention to Black Feminist Avant-gardes means this class will use the rubric of black feminist performance to re-contextualize the city itself as an ongoing “text” pertinent to the legacy and ongoing project of black feminist expressive cultures. Members of this class can expect to consider key historical and contemporary moments from the 1970s — 2020s, then ‘get out into the city’ to explore the ‘then and now’ of select performance venues, cross cultural gathering sites, and radical domestic spaces where black femme sociality and queer aesthetic practices have touched, continue to meet, and bend towards transformative socio-political relations. Readings in performance studies and black feminist thought will be supplemented by class trips to performance sites: from the kitchen table to the open mic.

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

This course focuses specifically on the political aspects of performance and the performative aspects of politics. We will begin with some key texts in political theory to ask what we understand as “the political” and where we understand it to take place. Drawing on the resources of performance and performance theory to broaden the scope of the political, we will explore the politics of the everyday—a notion emblematized in the feminist maxim “the personal is political”—and examine events and practices that produce political effects. What does putting performance and politics into contact let us ask, and let us ask differently, about the relations between power, subjectivity, and social change?

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

From the Dadaist’s Cabaret Voltaire, to the jazz cabarets of Harlem, to the downtown NYC scene and beyond, cabaret as a non-traditional theatrical form is often associated with social and artistic alternative cultures. Through literary, dramatic, and musical performance cabaret often allows for both humor and politics, and has been a key site for the development of heterogenous cultural practices.

In this practice-based course, students will explore the history of cabaret and its relationships to an arts practice, politics, and community. Over the course of the semester, each student will create a cabaret act for performance at the end of the term. Students will be encouraged to explore performance from an interdisciplinary perspective, and can incorporate video and new media technologies in their live work. Together, we will analyze the creation of a “persona.” We will explore different genres: stand-up comedy, performance art, musical revue, and Storytelling.

Creating bold innovative acts requires a variety of techniques. Students will generate scripted material through the use of acting exercises and writing prompts developed by playwright Maria Irene Fornes. We will look at the work of important contemporary figures in the cabaret world, such as Justin Vivian Bond, Marga Gomez, Murray Hill, Joseph Keckler Vaginal Davis and analyze what makes these performances vital. Finally, we will workshop performances through the critique method pioneered by Liz Lerman.

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

This course focuses in depth on “everyday” versions of performance (as opposed to theatrical or formal performances).  Drawing from anthropology, affect studies, social psychology, sociology, architecture studies, etc. the course invites students to view seemingly non-theatrical social interaction as performance, and to consider the significance of the seeming “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 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6^th Fl., Room 612

Introduced to the US during the mid-19th century, physical culture quickly gained popularity in universities and would go on to become the basis of the compulsory physical education (PE) that most American students receive between primary and high school. Physical culture includes folk/children’s games (tag, kick-the-can, hide-and-go-seek, etc.), choreographed/cultural dance (swing, square, hula), ball games (baseball, football, rugby, soccer, etc.), organized combat (boxing, wrestling, fencing, etc.), calisthenics (push-ups, squats, gymnastics, etc.), weightlifting, and military training (drill, drumline, shooting, etc.). Promoted by schools and private gyms, physical culture has become an industry unto itself and produced many spin-off movements and fads; from “Muscular Christianity”, to innumerable diets (Atkins, Keto, Paleo), to fake “natural" social media influencers like Liver King.

In this theory-based course we use performance studies as a lens to survey physical culture from its inception to the present in order to shed light on how this subset of performance has produced possibilities for others; or how physical culture has impacted culture in general. This course could be thought of as the lesson left out of your high school PE class: how to think about and not just participate in physical culture. This course is for students interested in the performance of race, gender, (dis)ability, nationality, and bodies broadly. Students will gain knowledge of the history, rules, and administration of a number of sports/games, an increased capacity for deep reading and movement study, and a bolstered ability to see and articulate how physical culture is already an active force in their lives. This course is designed for students invested in cultural analysis and production with interests in bodies, movement, and human virtuosity.

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

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.

Capstone Recitation Section

N. Bazzano, PERF-UT 401.002 (18992) – Tuesdays, 5:05pm to 6:35pm

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.