Performance Anxiety: Text, Stage, Self

Catalog description

This course takes up the polysemous dimensions of the word “performance” as well as it what it means to “perform” through a range of disciplinary perspectives. We will begin by discussing the relations between performance and religious ritual before assessing when performance practices begin to become conceived as discreet “arts” and “disciplines” in their own right. We will examine philosophy’s often anxious relation to practices associated with performance, and we will probe deeply into the kinds of “performance anxieties” we might experience or encounter in our everyday lives and our mediated worlds. Drawing from philosophy, literature, anthropology, sociology, gender studies, queer theory, and performance studies, this course is an invitation to think about performance in theory and practice. Readings will include writings by people like Fred Moten, Ann Pellegrini, Judith Butler, Amiri Baraka, Leo Tolstoy, Martha Graham, Constantin Stanislavski, Allan Kaprow, Peggy Phelan, Richard Schechner, Erwin Goffman, Diana Taylor, Susan Leigh-Foster, Una Chaudhuri, and José Muñoz, among others. Moreover, students will take advantage of various performance events at NYU’s Skirball Center.