Introduction to Performance

Catalog description

This course is designed to introduce students interested in art, dance, theater, music, video to the expansive medium of performance. In everyday living we come across performances all the time–in places of art and culture, but also on tiktok and YouTube, on the city street and in the park, on stage, in church and on screens. Performance circulates in various genres and repertoires. In this course, we won’t divide music, theater, visual art, dance, social media and film into separate areas of consideration but will engage ways that performance helps us understand something about fundamentals of all these genres: time, space, presence, context, distribution and the relationship between performer and audience or speaker and listener. The course will look at the foundations of performance and performance studies through reading, viewings of work, classroom workshops and research and practical experimentation. Students will begin to make their own performance work using a variety of techniques and frameworks discovered through classroom activities. The course is well suited to students without any previous experience or training and students who have extensive performance training in one or more disciplines but want to think about performance forms in a new way.