Performance Studies (PERF-GT)

Majors Only:This course will introduce incoming Master’s students to some of the concepts, terms, and theoretical genealogies that they can expect to encounter in Performance Studies. What makes performance studies performance studies, and why do it? In considering this question we will consider the specificity of performance as an object of study, a mode of inquiry, a practice of self-hood and sociality, and as an aesthetic practice; we will also focus on the specific challenges and potentialities in writing about/as performance.

Black horror films have long served as aesthetic containers—assembling, disarming, reflecting, and refusing the horror of living while Black under the daily ruses of U.S. white supremacist terror. At the same time, their screenings double as intra-community gatherings: sites of camaraderie, laughter, stylized critique, and nuanced joy. This class is less about screening suspenseful Black horror than re/visiting canonic Black queer cinema through the lens of horror. From sound and score to script and psycho-somatic text, we will mine subtle terrors—where the exhaust of anti-Blackness lingers. Our work attends to what is displaced off screen yet hyper-visible in the frame; what remains unscripted yet choreographed across and against the Black body as moving image. To guide us, we turn to a congress of Black feminist scholars theorizing visual culture within Performance Studies—its methods, analytics, and world-making investments. After spending time with Nicole Fleetwood, Kara Keeling, and Kimberly Juanita Brown, how might we reorient affect and perception in the act of “seeing” the Black body? Staging a conversation between Tina Campt, Krista Thompson, and Meg Onli, what emerges at the intersection of aesthetic capture and collective improvisation? What insights, possibilities, and limits surface when Black queer horror is refracted through satire, musical, family drama, or the archive? Films include Blackula (1972), Vamp (1986), The Wiz (1978), Eve’s Bayou (1997), the archival work of Cheryl Dunye (1996—ongoing), Get Out (2017), and Swarm (2023). This course also centers the ritual of Black cinematic audience-ing as creative musculature—a Black feminist practice for building and sustaining counter-publics, especially during heightened moments of racist harm on the national stage. Assignments consist of workshopping a professional critical document (e.g., personal statement, artist statement, or syllabus) and a two-part final that inter-animates and distinguishes between intellectual inquiry and artistic (or felt) pursuit. The final, for example, may take the form of a polished, argument-driven paper alongside a creative component—such as a storyboard of an omitted scene from a (favorite or not) Black queer horror film.

To be taken in the student's final semester in the M.A. program. This course will run primarily as a workshop in which current M.A. students will begin with a paper or performance piece begun in a previous PS course and develop that project into a fuller research project. Part of the time will be spent in small (TA-led) workshops; the rest of the time will be spent en masse, where we will discuss strategies for revision, publication, and/or production. The course culminates in a symposium in which graduating M.A. students present an excerpt or précis of that research to the department.

Topics change each term: Please refer to department course website for current description when offered. https://tisch.nyu.edu/performance-studies/courses/graduate-course-descriptions

Performance Studies teaches us to read anew, and again, any text we think we know. This seminar offers the opportunity to collectively experiment with how we approach, take in, and then incorporate a reading (as an activity and object) into our written work. Considering the theoretical, ethical and practical challenges presented by different modes of analysis, students will develop skills related to archival research, talking to people, documentation, and analysis of live performance, and the analysis of documents of various kinds, including ephemeral ones. Together we will consider writing strategies that best transmit different kinds of projects. Work for the course will include various exercises designed for the long view: written responses to the weekly readings, development of exam areas, an early formulation of dissertation projects, and ideas for future teaching.

This course operates as a workshop, emphasizing problems of research, writing, and editing as they apply to the doctoral dissertation. Each student will draft their dissertation proposal in preparation for Dissertation Colloquia at the end of that semester, during which their dissertation committees will evaluate their proposals.

This course examines old and recent performances of divination, their acts of reading, and contexts of study. These include the semiotics of discerning celestial and organic worlds, and collective orientations towards the future, stories of creation and apocalypse, speech acts of prophecy, and materials of talismanic use. We will study histories of quotidian everyday rituals, trials and tests, along with acts deemed implausible, ridiculous, heretical and miraculous, to ask how and why divinatory practices have been needful, authorized or persecuted. We will consider the work that acts of divination have performed under colonial administration, feudal and agrarian transitions to capitalism, relations of enclosure, property and extractivism, and within regimes of political power and social hierarchy, the control of reproductive labor and kinship. In doing so, we will critically reassess performance studies’ roots in the study of ritual. We will also question how esoteric, spiritualist and speculative practices have been studied in anthropology, iconology and history, used as avant-garde and experimental techniques in visual, media and performing arts, and commercialized in popular ritual cultures. Expect to parse excerpts from the Bible, I-Ching, accounts of juridical proceedings, works of visual and live performance and scholarly writing from history, art history, anthropology, medieval and environmental studies. This class will not promote any particular cultural or religious practices, nor does it encourage or emphasize practical magic. This is a seminar based on reading and analytical discussion with a final research paper.

We’ll think about the force of performance in some key works by W.E.B. Du Bois and we’ll also think about Du Bois as a performer, as a theorist of performance, and as a prophet of préformance, which is an underconcept or a noncept, that we’ll attempt to discover and/or invent in the class. Another way to put all this is that we’ll consider the relay between what Du Bois calls “the strange meaning of being black” and what emerges as a fundamental object and mode of study for him under the rubric of "the general strike."

In this course, students will develop performance studies methodologies based on interdisciplinary research paradigms (movement analysis, ethnomusicology, ethnography, history, oral history, orature, visual studies, ethnomethodology, among others) and the close reading and analysis of exemplary studies. Students will also consider the conceptualization and design of research projects in the context of theoretical and ethical issues and in relation to particular research methods and writing strategies, developing practical skills related to archival and library research; ethnographic approaches, including participant observation and interviewing; documentation and analysis of live performance; and analysis of documents of various kinds, including visual material. Readings address the history of ideas, practices, and images of objectivity, as well as of reflexive and interpretive approaches, relationships between science and art, and research perspectives arising from minoritarian and postcolonial experiences. Assignments include weekly readings, written responses to the readings, and exercises.

This course focuses on the relationship of trans and trans of color studies to the arts, critical theory in/of the humanities and culture. We will consider how trans and trans of color studies investigate and reformulate questions and concepts of gender, in addition to objects and analytics beyond gender as a primary focus of inquiry. Readings will be drawn from transgender studies as a growing and changing body of multidisciplinary scholarship and practice of the twentieth and twenty-first century. The course reflects trans and trans of color studies' multiple genealogies, across bodies of scholarship and practice of recent decades, their antecedents and affinities. These include, but are not limited to: histories, theories and practices of performance, art, transgender activism and organizing, gender and sexuality studies, psychoanalysis, feminism, black studies, indigenous studies, queer and queer of color theories, literary studies, animal studies, environmental humanities and ecological studies, media and cultural studies, critical legal studies, critical science, medical and technology studies