Mar 28, 2024  
2021 - 2022 Academic Catalog 
    
2021 - 2022 Academic Catalog [ARCHIVED CATALOG]

THD 211-01 - Performance Studies Survey

4 credits (Spring)
Race in Motion: Diaspora, Diplomacy, and Moving Bodies. As an embodied cultural practice, performance is a social process through which categories of race and ethnicity are both constructed and destabilized. This course explores dance and performance as complex sites of cultural negotiation, contestation, and exchange. Examining the movement of bodies and ideas across borders, we will question slippages between Western and non-Western traditions to address histories of nationalism, immigration, conquest, and diplomacy. Engaging current scholarship in the field of performance studies, this course introduces a diversity of methodologies and foregrounds interdisciplinary approaches to performance research. Through an examination of Eurocentric notions of ‘the global,’ we will complicate dominant narratives in dance history and question structures of power that have shaped the development of contemporary performance. Course readings integrate frameworks for addressing the afterlives and ongoing implications of cultural imperialism, colonialism, appropriation, and state control of dance and performance - as it migrates, assimilates, diverges, and protests - as a way to regulate expressions of race, class, gender, and nationality.

Prerequisite: Any 100-level Theatre and Dance course. 
Note: Plus-2 option available.
Instructor: Mercer