First-Year Interdisciplinary Seminar: Revolutionary Acts in Radical Spaces

Catalog description

What is performance? What do we notice when we look at ordinary life as something people do and stage, not just something that happens? How do social movements use performance techniques such as images, sound, choreography, storytelling, and spectacle to build solidarity or contest power? By actively exploring New York City’s performance scenes, this course considers how art and social movements shape one another, asking how creative practices from street actions to music, theater, fashion, food, visual culture, and online performance make political claims, produce communities, as well as transform the meanings of specific places. Throughout the course we will consider: place as a process, mobility and power, public space and “radical” spaces, performance beyond the stage, arts activism, and the performance of identity in everyday and digital life. Course materials include readings and viewings drawn from performance studies, sociology, cultural geography, and social movement studies, paired with case studies from New York City including NYU’s surrounding area. Course activities emphasize site visits and performance outings, observation assignments, artistic and critical experiments, short presentations, and a final project that synthesizes course concepts with students’ own interests and questions.