Performance of the City | M. De Berry
PERF-UT 103.001 (11317) – Mondays, 4:00pm to 7:00pm
Performance of the City
4 pts – In-Person, 721 Broadway, 6th 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.