Course Descriptions
The following is a list of recent course descriptions corresponding to the cluster curriculum.
Entry Courses
Theatre and Drama 501 Research Methods
This course addresses two related aspects of research B method (techniques for gathering evidence) and methodology (the theory and analysis of how research should proceed) B in order to help doctoral students understand how large projects are planned, organized, and carried out, whether in archives, or by field work, or both. Readings include recent scholarship on historical and contemporary theatre. Discussions focus on inter/intra/multidisciplinary strategies for theatre research; types of evidence and methods for gathering data; what is valid under varying circumstances; and what guides researchers in weighing respective pieces of evidence. The assumption is that students on the verge of planning their own large projects can benefit from exposure to a range of techniques employed to study theatre and performance. The course enhances competence in recognizing different methods and methodologies, and students become familiar with pros and cons of various research choices. Students are trained to formulate good questions; distinguish between data, theory, and scholarly narrative; recognize recent approaches to perennial problems in theatre research (such as documenting the theatrical event, investigating spectatorship, standards for historical inquiry, customary practices in analysis and rules of evidence, utilizing theory, and dealing with a performance=s and researcher=s location in history); and identify ways to conceive, execute, and render ideas cogently.
Performance Studies 516-1 Critical Performance Ethnography (Theory)
This seminar focuses on theories of fieldwork. Therefore, we will concentrate on the doing of fieldwork both as a theoretical examination AND as practical application in the critical engagement with Others within specific environments and locations. We will consider various fieldwork methods as our theoretical inquiries help us reflect upon the meanings and purposes of ethnographic praxis or critical ethnography. Because critical ethnography concerns the rhetorical, ethical, and political effects of what we DO, performance is a fundamental dynamic in this seminar. We will explore performance as theory, method, event, and everyday occurrence. We will examine the interpenetrating relationships among performance, ethnography, economy, and culture. Since culture is made visible to us through its representations, e.g., its structures, dramas, symbols, metaphors, habits, everyday practices, landscapes, language patterns, etc., performance becomes those embodied enactments formed by and embedded within these representations, as it simultaneously generates them. Performance becomes a primary point of entry and inquiry where we may be/act, see/hear, feel/sense, and think/evaluate within an Other world and our own.
Selected Optional Courses
Performance Studies 414-History of Performance Traditions
What key concepts and approaches have shaped the field of performance studies? What is the relationship between performance and performativity? What are the underlying assumptions about the nature of performance that allow, for example, Judith Butler to warn against reducing performativity to performance? This course surveys foundational theories that have contributed to the constitution of performance studies as an academic discipline. Included are key selections from the works of Zora Neale Hurston, Victor Turner, Gregory Bateson, Erving Goffman, Richard Schechner, Clifford Geertz, Mikhail Bakhtin, Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Michel de Certeau to the more recent debates on performativity by radical feminist scholars, such as Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler. We will examine how some contemporary theorists have engaged this legacy of performance theory and core issues and debates that have arisen.
Performance Studies 416 Performance and Cultural Studies
This seminar will move between theory and case studies of practices globally. Expanding upon Marx’s foundational text Capital, we will examine cultural studies approaches to performance, including their attention to world systems and cultural flows of media and particularly people through globalization, tourism, migration, displacement, exile, and so forth. Taking stock of issues of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, subjectivity, power, and identity politics, topics include intercultural and intersubjective performance practices, domination and subjugation, modes of cultural production, spectacle and spectatorship, nationalism and performance, decolonization, and postcolonial performance. Indeed, we might go so far as to say, based upon recent research, that Cultural Studies is increasingly becoming Performance Studies.
Performance Studies 427-Modes of Representation
The overall goals of this course are to explore theories of representation as they apply to performance, to break down disciplinary boundaries that compartmentalize the study of social practices and productions, and to give students the tools for the critical analysis of the production of discourse whether in the form of writing or multimedia performances that include music, dance, dialogue, scenography, and so on. More specifically, the course will examine modes of representation and the dynamic, unstable relationships between signifieds and signifiers by treating such topics as repetition and improvisation, mimesis, the ideology of form, intertextuality, metaphor, irony, parody, synesthesia, idiophonics, and effort qualities, among others. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of our field, performance analysts must be conversant in the languages of history, anthropology, dance, musicology, theatre, art history, literary theory, social theory, and feminism and gender theory. These fields of inquiry not only engage in the study of representation (re-presentation), but necessarily employ representation as their very mode of production.
516-2 Critical Performance Ethnography (Methods)
The course is a practicum in fieldwork and performance ethnography. You have the option of conducting: (1) auto-ethnography that draws from one of your particular communities or spaces of belonging (this does not mean autobiographical performance that is disconnected from a community or group of Others); (2) oral history that draws from the life story and/or eventful moments in the life experience of a specific individual or individuals; (3) fieldwork community that draws from an identifiable sub-culture, group, or organization from police stations, urban dance communities, or ethnic spaces. The main prerequisite is that you enter the seminar with a field project/field site in mind so that you may pinpoint your site and then begin fieldwork early in the quarter. In the course, we will examine the work of experienced ethnographers and we will also apply specific concepts from critical theory that will guide your fieldwork. We will draw from selected illuminations within the realms of psychoanalytic, Marxists, postcolonial, critical race, feminist, queer, and poststructuralist thinking. This is a "hands-on" practicum so our efforts will be focused upon how to put particular theoretical concepts into action so they serve us in articulating, realizing, and experiencing the labor and love of fieldwork.
Theatre and Drama 503: Phenomenology and Performance
Graduate students enrolled in this advanced, reading intensive seminar read a selection of theoretical and critical texts on the topic of phenomenology. Reading assignments begin chronologically with early 20th century French theorists and end with more contemporary voices. The class will view phenomenology from multiple angles which will allow for an interrogation of concepts integral to the study of theatre and performance: the body, experience and presence. Reading assignments will include the following authors: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, Joseph Roach, Marvin Carlson, and Rebecca Schneider among several others.
Theatre and Drama 503: Spectatorship and Performance in US Culture
This course surveys methods and theories for historicizing spectatorship across diverse performance genres, and in so doing demonstrates the potential (and limitations) of cross-genre and cross-disciplinary approaches to performance history. Examples and case studies are drawn from US culture. Topics include women in the 19th-century theatre; all-black musicals at the turn of the 20th-century; silent film, the dance hall, settlement house theatre, and the changing urbanscape in the early-20th century; leftist theatre and swing dancing in the 1930s; musicals on stage and screen at mid-century; and statistical audience studies from the founding of the National Endowment of the Arts in 1965 to the present. Students from all departments are welcome, and individual projects are tailored to students’ own research interests.
English 431: Studies in 16th-Century Literature
Recent scholarship on early modern drama has begun to move away from taking the play as the natural unit of critical and cognitive focus, both for its own belated activity and for that of contemporary audiences. When the Elizabethan system of drama is scaled either larger – the place of the stage(s), the yearly repertories of competing companies, the “veins” of performing – or smaller – the working words of the actor or the aphorism, the shreds and patches that plays and plots appeared as, the worn worlds of prop and costume – it reveals patterns of meaning and experience unsuspected at the level of the individual play. Our conclusions and some of our premises, I hope, will spread more broadly. In this class we will look at some of these different scales and what they suggest about the production of information in the theaters of not only Shakespeare, but of Marlowe, Kyd, Peele, Gascoigne, and others. We will explore the constitution and politics of companies, patrons, and sharers; investigate the cultural and cash economies of companies and playhouses; recreate the circumstances of performance; and read many, many plays. Evaluation will be based on a seminar paper as well as at least one individual presentation and active participation in the seminar.
Theatre 441 Studies in Modern Theatre and Drama (Latin America)
We will explore ideas about troubled nations and the people who are forced to leave them, either out of political or economic necessity, or both. The works we will read include plays, performance pieces, and a couple of novels rooted in three areas of Latin America ˆ Cuba, Uruguay and Mexico ˆ with significant patterns of twentieth-century exile and emigration. Part of our task will be to analyze how biographical events and geographical perspective may shape artistic work. For instance, do playwrights who stayed in their native countries tend to represent nation and exile differently from those who had to leave? And how are themes such as nationality, patriotism, identity, assimilation, and resistance to assimilation, articulated in U.S. Latina/o performance created by artists born of refugee parents? I am particularly interested in exploring how theater contributes to negotiations between cultures, negotiations that have been defined by various theorists as: mestizajes, hybridities, transculturations, contact zones, culture-sympathy, culture-clash, and cultures in-between.
Theoretical readings should also help us grapple with related issues: how the phenomena of exile, diaspora, and globalization challenge our concepts of nationality and nationalism; how artists recreate cultural identity in the face of challenges such as exile and globalization; how different aesthetic strategies have functioned as responses to these often traumatic historical shifts.
Theatre 440: Not Present at the Occasion
This course examines the conjoined problems of the theory of history and modes of narration with the special interpretive issues posed by drama, theatre, or the performance event. Historians and critics often write about events at which they were not present, but what difficulties does this pose in the gathering and weighing of evidence, reconstructive methodologies, and narrative practices? How does the narrative of drama, for example, impinge on the narrative written by an historian? What is the circumstance of theatre, or the condition of performance, and how is “presence” implicated in its scope? Theatre and performance double the complications inherent to historical narrative by having an ontology of eventhood and a fictionality of "what if" in the aesthetic pretence. Recent scholarship has posed this as a problem of the trace, or the ephemerality of performance; by considering theatre in a wider array of theories of history and practices of narration, scholars' options are clarified. Readings are primarily articles or chapters selected from books. This is intended to serve as a sampling of writing, which students will follow-up by reading more extensively from texts that emerge as especially pertinent.
