Introductions & Overviews

Performativity & Performance Theory

 

The Department of Performance Studies integrates artistic and analytical approaches to a wide range of performance texts, events, and processes. The courses explore an interdisciplinary range of literary, cultural, and personal texts in performance. . . In addition to pursuing careers in professional and arts development, many graduates teach literature, theatre, humanities, and performance studies. Majors have found performance studies an excellent preparation for law school and complementary to their interests in creative writing, communication, media, anthropology, dance, literature, or social work. Performance studies can be thought of as a major that bridges artistic expression and conceptual analysis, theory and practice. Performance, in its manifold forms, is the subject and the method of study.

--Northwestern University Dept. of Performance Studies, Degree Description

   The performance studies curriculum covers a full range of performance, from theatre and dance to ritual and popular entertainment. Courses in methodology and theory are complemented by offerings in specialized areas. A wide spectrum of performance--for example, postmodern performance, circus, kathakali, Broadway, festival, ballet, shamanism--are documented using fieldwork, interviews, and archival research and are analyzed from a variety of perspectives. The program is both intercultural and interdisciplinary drawing on the arts, humanities, social sciences, and critical theory.
--NYU Dept. of Performance Studies, Degree Description
  While most of use are familiar with the term "performance" regularly, often performance studies look back to J.L. Austin's term "performative." Yet it's hard to understand the implications of much performance theory without first reading Austin's work on language. To say that an identity is performative is not to say that it is a performance in the sense of a mask or role that some other, more real identity plays or assumes. Rather, it is to say that the very heart of our identity is not a being, but a doing--that representations precede and define identities rather than identities determining or expressing themselves through representations. (Hedges)
 

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