THEA 298 - Special Topics in Performance Studies

Performance Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines performance in its broadest sense-as artistic practice, social ritual, cultural expression, and political intervention. Drawing from theatre, dance, anthropology, cultural studies, and critical theory, Performance Studies explores how performance shapes and reflects identity, power, and meaning in everyday life. This course offers an in-depth exploration of specialized topics within Performance Studies, with themes that may include intercultural performance, gender and performance, race and performance, disability performance, performance and technology, and/or performance and politics. Each iteration of the course will focus on a specific area of study, engaging with performance theory texts, live and mediated performances, and creative research methods. Students will analyze performances as sites of cultural negotiation, resistance, and innovation while also considering their own roles as performers, spectators, and makers of meaning. Through critical discussions, written analysis, and creative projects, students will gain a deeper understanding of how performance functions both on and off the stage, shaping our world and our ways of being in it.

Taking it to the Streets: Processions, Puppets and Protest Performance
This course examines performances that enact protest, and how protests can be understood as performance. Using performance theory, we will analyze the relationship between theatre and social change, alongside more explicit acts of political protest. We will analyze how public space and the space of “the street” have been mobilized both formally and politically. The course asks how embodied acts function as modes of political resistance and solidarity, and why seemingly ordinary actions, such as walking through public space, can become powerful collective enactments. We will study processions, radical puppets, and protest performances, including (but not limited to): ACT UP, Bread and Puppet Theater, El Teatro Campesino, Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the community parades of Spiral Q and In the Heart of the Beast, as well as the performative elements of Black Lives Matter and anti-ICE protests. In addition to critical analysis, students will engage in embodied and collaborative creation, including paper-mache puppet construction and the imagining and possible realization of public performances with transformative intentions. Throughout the course, we will consider the ethical, political, and communal responsibilities of making performance in public space.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference-laboratory
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken 5 times for credit
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).