Spring 2025 Undergraduate Courses

Performance of the City 

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 612

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

Course Description TBA. 

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

This class will begin by paying close attention to the work of the great 20^th Century thinker Walter Benjamin. We will read closely three of his most important essays: “Critique of Violence,” “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproducibility,” and “On the Concept of History,” as a way of approaching some questions concerning the strike (in its irreducible generality), rhythm (in and against the iron/ic spirit of system), and direction (as a matter – or, more precisely, as the matter – of spacetime). All this will be preliminary to some deep listening to and long conversation on and in percussion, which we’ll consider in its relation to the various modalities in which it is given and foregiven, from the quantumautomechanics of the heart to the computational analogic of the trap set to the animated flesh of the Roland TR-808. This will, in turn, offer us the occasion to meditate on and with a bunch of other thinkers and practitioners, like James Baldwin, Edward Baptist, J Dilla, Val Jeanty, Jennie C. Jones, Katherine McKittrick & Alexander Weheliye, Rocio Molina, Sankai Juko, Flora M'Mbugu Schelling, Stephen Sondheim, and Cecil Taylor. Perhaps by the end, we’ll be able to ask – in a dusty, angelic kinda way – two questions: What is performance? What is technology?

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

“We are a country, a republic, of three sovereigns. The federal sovereign, what most of us refer to as the national government; the state sovereign, and third, or first depending on who you are, are tribes or tribal governments.”

-George Emilio Sanchez, In the Court of the Conqueror

This course delves into the dynamic interplay between Indigenous performance and the concept of sovereignty. Students will investigate how traditional and contemporary performances —ranging from rituals, beadwork, and storytelling, to modern theatrical productions and documentaries — serve as powerful acts of cultural affirmation and political resistance. Central to this course is the examination of how these performances articulate and reclaim Indigenous sovereignty against the backdrop of colonial histories and ongoing legal struggles. We will explore the ways in which performance becomes a site of resistance, resilience, and resurgence, enabling Indigenous people to challenge colonial narratives and assert their rights and identities.

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

Note: OPEN TO PS MAJORS ONLY. Majors should check with Alejandra Rodríguez (ar4784@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

J. Evans, PERF-UT 401.002 (13104) – Mondays, 1:35pm to 3:05pm, RM 613

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 Alejandra Rodríguez (ar4784@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.