How to Learn Performance Studies

Study the anthropological roots of performance studies. Explore Arnold van Gennep's rites of passage, Victor Turner's concepts of liminality and communitas, and the relationship between ritual and theater. Understand how play and games function as performance.

Engage with theories of performativity from J.L. Austin's speech act theory through Judith Butler's gender performativity. Study Goffman's dramaturgical analysis of everyday social interaction and impression management.

Survey the history of performance art from Dadaism and Happenings through contemporary practice. Study key artists like Allan Kaprow, Marina Abramovic, Yoko Ono, and Guillermo Gomez-Pena. Understand how performance art challenges conventional boundaries of art, audience, and authorship.

Explore how performance studies foregrounds the body as a site of knowledge, memory, and resistance. Study Diana Taylor's archive/repertoire distinction and Dwight Conquergood's arguments for embodied research methods.

Examine how performance constructs, reinforces, and resists identities related to race, gender, sexuality, class, and nationality. Study postcolonial performance, queer performance, and critical race approaches to performance.

Investigate how digital technologies, social media, and virtual environments create new forms of performance and performativity. Engage with Philip Auslander's challenge to the primacy of liveness and explore concepts of online self-presentation.

Explore applied performance practices including community-based theater, theater for development, performance ethnography, and performance as research. Develop skills in performance-based methodologies for academic and community work.