Performance and Historiography

Catalog description

This graduate seminar focuses on questions of historiography and the archive as they relate to studies of theater, dance, and performance. It blends rigorous discussion and theoretical exploration with practical experience in libraries, museums, and other local archival repositories. Throughout the course, we will explore representation, memory, repertoire, and narrative through examples in theatre and performance history. We will examine how events have been historicized, how absence has been represented, and how individuals are remembered and refigured. Important principles and practices of documentation will also be addressed throughout our discussions and activities. Our discussions and field trips will examine the status of data and various forms of evidence in constructing critical performance history (including prompt scripts, set designs, costumes, publicity material and other ephemera, actorly life-writing, video and digital documents, artifacts, visual material, and embodied traces). TAPS 311 also functions as a gateway course for TAPS PhD students in your first quarter of study at Stanford, familiarizing you with resources at the university and in the broader Bay Area.