CRITICAL PERFORMANCES

This course occupies the intersection of two practices: making theory and making theatre. It presents theatre as a distinctively theoretical and material activity, one in which the stage practices of training and performance are understood to articulate theoretical and ideological attitudes about the world, and in which theoretical texts are understood to summon modes of theatrical being into presence.  In the course, students will undertake four distinctive activities: they will read plays; they will read theoretical texts, often having to do with performance; they will make several brief experimental critical performances; and they will write about performance as a mode of theoretical critique. The course is broken up into four main units, each of which opens with a critical response to a problem in the history of performance—the impact of realism, or of politics as theatre, for example—followed by a studio class, in which students experiment with the interaction between performance and conceptualization, and then returns to the seminar room for an accounting of how, how well, or whether this interaction was materialized. Plays have been selected in order to bring critical issues directly into focus. All students will participate in 4 experimental critical performances; write briefly about them, and undertake both a final performance and a longer critical essay analyzing the challenging interface between theoretical critique and critical performance. (This course counts as a lecture/seminar “studies” course for the Theatre major.)