The following list includes courses offered in the recent past and ones projected for the near future. Approxi-mately 35 courses are offered each year, many of them new. As a result, only a portion of the courses listed in the bulletin can actually be scheduled during any academic year. Courses taught on a regular basis are indicated with an asterisk (*).

Healing and Performance
H42.1026  Barbara Browning. 4 points.
An exploration of the ways in which performance theory and practice have informed the field of medical anthropology and the ways in which medical anthropology can in turn amplify and inform the creation and analysis of performance. Examines seminal texts in both fields (including Artaud, Lévi-Strauss, Turner, Kleinman, Taussig, Scheper-Hughes and Lock, and Csordas) to find points of contact and confluence. Also explores a variety of performances (in diverse cultural contexts) that take on the issue of healing.

Tourist Productions
H42.1041*  Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. 4 points.
How tourist settings, events, and artifacts are produced, interpreted, and consumed; the “production of culture” for the consumption of the “other” (guest, stranger, tourist, expatriate, pilgrim); tradition and authenticity and the synthetic nature of culture; the process of aestheticizing and commoditizing history, politics, and aesthetics of tourist cultural production.

Theories of Directing
H42.1060  Richard Schechner. 4 points.
Starts with a brief theoretical-historical overview of directing. Then examines four directorial approaches to texts—realization, interpretation, adaptation, and deconstruction. Next looks at the director-actor relationship in terms of actor training. Finally, considers how directors deal with interculturalism. Uses as examples the works of Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Brecht, Grotowski, Brook, Schechner, Le Compte, Mnouchkine, Suzuki, and Ong. Students give classroom reports and stage short scenes.

Performing Cultures in the Middle East and North Africa
H42.1065  Deborah Anne Kapchan. 4 points.
Focuses on the expressive culture of the Middle East and North Africa, looking at both sacred (religious) practices and more popular forms of cultural performance, such as music, poetry, film, festivals, novels, and dance. Analyzes all these practices in their historical context as well as their place in the history of scholarship in and about the Middle East and North Africa. Explores the many and various forms of being and knowing extant in contemporary cultures of the Arab-Islamic world. Draws heavily on ethnographic texts but also draws inspiration from readings in philosophy, literature, and history.

History of the Body
H42.1095  Tavia Nyong’o. 4 points.
A rhetoric of embodiment has arisen in many contemporary discourses that seek leverage against the abstracting, totalizing, and idealizing tendencies of theory. Such investments in “the body,” however, risk repeating the very process of abstraction, totalization, and idealization that they seek to counter, particularly when a unitary “body” with no further specification is called on to do all the heavy lifting. Can we produce a rhetoric of embodiment that does not immediately reinvest itself, through such lack of specification, in the body/mind dualism? This course takes a historical route to answering that question, examining the emergence of the body as a site of knowledge for humanism, while at the same time attending carefully to humanism’s gendered and racialized unconscious. We explore how constructions of “the body” produce hierarchizing and marginalizing effects, in terms of which flesh can and cannot access its pains and privileges. We explore how sentience and affect are figured through shifting layers of historical knowledge that unsettle any unitary or stable concept of “the human.” And we conclude with a consideration of the range of claims—technical, philosophical, and political—that have been made recently on behalf of the “posthuman.” Authors include Deleuze, Foucault, Haraway, Hayles, Kuriyama, Laqueuer, Otis, Reid-Pharr, Schiebinger, and Sedgwick.

Projects in Performance Studies
H42.2000*  Required course for all M.A. students. Resident faculty. 4 points.
The final course in master’s programs in performance studies. The course helps students develop and present a final culminating project.

Topics in Critical Theory: Critical Race Theory
H42.2100*  José Esteban Muñoz. 4 points.
This course offers students methodologies to think critically about race and ethnicity. Fundamental phenomenological questions about the relationship between “self” and “other” launch the inquiry. Early materialist and psychological investigations into the nature of racialization are also pursued. Readings and lectures challenge ontological claims about the nature of race and ethnicity by proposing theories of racial and ethnic performativity. Critical legal theories are also considered. Intersectional methodologies that consider the relationship between racialization and other major rubrics of difference like class, gender, and sexuality are emphasized as students survey recent works in the field of critical race theory. This section of the course bibliography includes essays and books by Spillers, Gilroy, Lubiano, Kondo, Spivak, Alarcòn, Muñoz, Reid-Pharr, Lippit, Moten, and Eng. Theoretical readings are often read in conjunction with performances as well as literary and cinematic texts.

Bibliography and Research: Advanced Readings in Performance Studies
H42.2201*  Required course for first-year Ph.D. students. Resident faculty. 4 points.
Readings are balanced between foundational texts in the field of performance studies as well as new interventions that propel the discourse forward. Readings examine the performance studies project’s intersections with different lines of thought that include anthropology, philosophy, feminism, critical race theory, legal theory, Marxism, and queer critique. Students are expected to assemble an annotated bibilography on some aspect of the field as well as writing a final research paper.

Seminar on Antonin Artaud
H42.2202*  Allen Weiss. 4 points.

Dissertation Proposal Advising
H42.2301*  Required for doctoral students. Prerequisite: 72 points of completed course work. Resident faculty. 0 points.
Emphasis is on problems and opportunities of research, writing, and editing as they apply to the doctoral dissertation. Each student prepares a dissertation proposal as a class project.

Political Performance
H42.2406  Diana Taylor. 4 points.
This course examines the use of performance—by the State, by oppositional groups, and by theatre and performance practitioners—to solidify or challenge structures of power. The course looks at specific examples of how public spectacles have been used in the 20th and 21st centuries—from Nazi rallies to antiwar demonstrations, AIDS activism, and “escraches” (acts of public shaming by the children of the “disappeared” in Argentina), to the current use of stagecraft by the Bush administration. Following the lead of Guy Debord, students examine how the “concentrated spectacle” of fascism and military dictatorships blends with “diffuse” spectacles of capitalism resulting in the “integrated spectacle” of the current U.S. administration. Students are asked to develop their own sites of analysis. Readings include Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin, Bertold Brecht, Adorno, Augusto Boal, and others. The course includes a Web component.

Studies in Dance: Still Acts
H42.2504*  André Lepecki. 4 points.
Perception has a social structure—it operates by erasing certain acts from its cognitive field and dismissing those acts as being either in/significant or im/perceptible. In those leftover zones filled with canceled meanings and microscopic perceptions, we find traces of the deep ideological imbrications between sensory and signification. However, the “insignificant” and the “imperceptible” also constitute many shady areas for unruly creativity, subversion, and resistance. In the development of Western choreographic imagination and ideologies, one act has been particularly accused of lacking in signification, purpose, and value: the still act. However, one can trace in dance’s uses of stillness not only extraordinary challenges to hegemonic structures of perception but to the very definition of dance. This seminar examines the epistemological, political, and performative challenges brought by uses of stillness within Western choreography. The seminar contextualizes stillness in dance historically, theoretically, and aesthetically by tracing its uses in the visual arts, performance art, and film. Students read closely seminal texts in the history of perception (Benjamin, Corbin, Foucault), phenomenology (José Gil, Hegel, Merleau-Ponty), and dance and performance theory (Kleist, Susan Foster, Mark Franko, Jacques Riviere) to assess how stillness, by challenging ideologies of perception, challenges not only dance’s ontology but, more ambitiously, undermines the very notion of Being.

Performance Theory: Performance, Identity, and the Law
H42.2602  Ann Pellegrini. 4 points.
An examination of the interplay between “identity” and “the law” (in both its regulatory and generative modes) with a focus on the U.S. context. Engages selected federal and state court decisions (e.g., Reynolds v. U.S. [1878], Plessy v. Ferguson [1896], Bowers v. Hardwick [1986], R.A.V. v. St. Paul [1991]) through the critical resources of performance studies, critical race theory, and feminist and queer theories. Special attention is given to law’s reliance on “the precedent” and analogy (the precedent as analogy?) to construct identity and difference.

Methods in Performance Studies
H42.2616*  Required course for first-year Ph.D. students. Resident faculty. 4 points.
The development of performance studies methodologies based on interdisciplinary research paradigms (movement analysis, ethnomusicology, ethnography, history, oral history, orature, visual studies, ethnomethodology, among others) and the close reading and analysis of exemplary studies. Considers the conceptualization and design of research projects in the context of theoretical and ethical issues and in relation to particular research methods and writing strategies. Develops practical skills related to archival and library research; ethnographic approaches, including participant observation and interviewing; documentation and analysis of live performance; and analysis of documents of various kinds, including visual material. Readings address the history of ideas, practices, and images of objectivity, as well as of reflexive and interpretive approaches, relationships between science and art, and research perspectives arising from minoritarian and postcolonial experiences. Assignments include weekly readings, written responses to the readings, and exercises. Students are encouraged to bring projects to the course, especially ones that might develop into dissertations.

Drama, Theatre, and Performance: Theories of Spectatorship
H42.2746  Diana Taylor. 4 points.
An exploration of the many ways in which theorists and theatre practitioners have thought about the ways in which staged action (whether in film, theatre, or politics) pacifies, activates, interpolates, and manipulates viewers. Examines concepts such as identification, voyeurism, narcissism, bearing witness, percepticide, spect-actor, and others. Readings include ancient texts such as Aristotle’s The Poetics and Popul Vuh but focuses on contemporary theorists: Brecht, Althusser, Laura Mulvey, Christian Metz, Herbert Blau, Augusto Boal, Fernandez Retamar, Martin Jay, Shosana Felman, and Dori Laub, and others.

Intercultural Performance
H42.2860  Karen Shimakawa. 4 points.
This course locates the genre of (contemporary) “intercultural performance” within the context of the rise of transnational and/or “global” capitalism. How might the former term be seen as a materialization of, catalyst for, or commentary on, the latter—or vice versa? The course considers current theories of the bases of transnationalism, its current formations (its legal, corporate, labor, and representational manifestations), as well as concurrent developments in intercultural performance. Requirements: one to two class presentations/discussion facilitation(s); biweekly response papers; final research project (M.A. students: conference-length presentation; Ph.D. students: article-length essay).

Dance Ethnography
H42.2920*  Barbara Browning. 4 points.
An examination of the challenges and possibilities of cross-cultural dance analysis. Begins with a brief overview of the history of the field and a consideration of the advantages and disadvantages of a variety of methods and approaches. Then alternates close readings of recent dance ethnographies with the workshopping of students’ own writing. Student projects may be based on previously performed fieldwork or on research conducted specifically for the class. The course includes weekly readings, written responses to the readings, and exercises. Students are encouraged to bring projects to the course, especially ones that might develop into dissertations.

Topics in Music and Performance: Critical Readings in World Music and Dance
H42.2960  Deborah Anne Kapchan. 4 points.
How do contemporary musical and dance forms restructure public spaces and public imaginaries? What does world music contribute to theories of globalization? How do racial and gender identities take shape in the realm of the aesthetic? How is the sacred constructed in new media? This course begins by interrogating the concepts of public culture, globalization, and the imagination. It then moves on to explore theories of sound, temporality, affect, and aesthetics as they relate to genres of music and dance. Some examples of visual art are also explored.

 Back to Top