Intensive training in the multifaceted methodology of performance is offered during the summer. Some courses focus on expressive movement, highlighting different performance practices in New York City. In addition, the department also offers the East Coast Artists Performance Workshop and the annual seminar of the Hemi-spheric Institute, a multinational consortium of institutions, artists, scholars, and activists dedicated to exploring the relationship between expressive behavior and social and political life in the Americas.
Summer performance studies courses are only open to New York University graduate students. For a Performance Studies Summer Course Bulletin, please visit the Performance Studies Web site.
Selected Summer 2009 Courses:
Black Women, Politics, Music and the Divine
This seminar examines the convergence of politics and spirituality in the musical work of contemporary black women singer‐songwriters in the United States. We will analyze material that articulates and interrogates the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality, generated across a range of religious and spiritual terrains with African diasporic/Black Atlantic spiritual moorings—including Christianity, Islam, and Yoruba. We will focus on material that reveals a womanist (black feminist) perspective, as we consider the ways resistant identities shape and are shaped by artistic production. This course employs an interdisciplinary approach in its analysis of black women’s politics, spirituality, and music, by incorporating ethnomusicology, anthropology, literature, history, and performance and social theory. We will explore the work of Shirley Caesar, The Clark Sisters, Meshell Ndegeocello, Abby Lincoln, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and Dianne Reeves, among others.
Performance and Technology
The course will serve as an overview of some of the most important critical and theoretical perspectives on the implications of the incorporation of new media technologies into genres of performance like music, theater, performance art, and dance. Among the issues we will address are the status of ‘liveness’ and immediacy in performance, the representation of the body in the age of ‘biocybernetic’ reproduction, and the role of cultural identity in both technological innovation and critique of the technoculture. Sites to be investigated include a work by the Wooster Group, certain sonic explorations in hip hop and trip hop, and various Web‐based performance art experiments.
