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The Bell Witch & Other Ghostly Legends |
What is Performance
Studies?
Performance
Studies examines performances in two broad categories: artistic performances
and cultural performances. Artistic performances are performances marked and understood
as art: solo-performance, performance art, performances of literature, theatrical
storytelling, plays, and performance poetry are all examples of this sort of
performance. This category considers performance as an art form.
Cultural
performances include those events embedded in everyday life in which a
culture’s values are displayed for their perpetuation: rituals such as parades,
religious ceremonies, and community festivals as well as conversational
storytelling, performances of social and professional roles, and individual
performances of race, gender, sexuality, and class. This category considers
performance as a way of studying how people move through the world as
individuals, construct identity, and build community together.
Performance
Studies is also keenly interested in the intersection between these categories.
For instance, one might study the performances of a particular culture and turn
that study into a staged performance about that culture. Cultural performances
influence the kinds of artistic performances that a culture creates and, in
turn, those artistic performances influence cultural performances. Therefore, Performance
Studies embraces the creative process of
making art as well as the critical
process of analyzing performances.
Performance Studies
first emerged as its own field of study in the last decades of the twentieth
century informed by insights from anthropology, sociology, theatre, oral
interpretation, communication studies, literary criticism, cultural studies, ethnography,
folkloristics, mythological studies, and psychology. Today, performance
scholars contribute to these diverse fields of study. A recommended online brochure, "A Student's Guide to Performance Studies," outlines the recent developments in performance studies over the last two decades.
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Performance Studies at
Kennesaw State University
The
Program in Theatre and Performance Studies here at KSU features performance as
an art form, as a field of study, and as a method of inquiry (or a way of
knowing) in classes throughout the major. The entire program embraces the idea of
embodied learning, “that knowledge—the process of attaining, sharing, and
projecting knowing—can be accomplished through doing” (Alexander 415).
The
degree program features several required courses in Performance Studies as well
as courses that integrate the scholarship of Theatre Studies and Performance
Studies, including:
•Introduction to Performance Studies
•Performing Culture
•Performing Literature
•History & Theory I: Ancient through
Renaissance Theatre & Performance
•History & Theory II: Neoclassical
through Early Modern Theatre & Performance
•Senior Seminar: Contemporary Theatre &
Performance.
Additionally,
the program offers a Concentration in
Performance Studies, which includes:
•Performance Art
•Adapting & Staging Literary Texts
•Performance Composition
•Dramaturgy
•Directing
•Directing Styles
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Redwing: Voice from 1888 |
Plus a sequence of courses in Storytelling,
a distinguishing feature of our program, which includes:
•Performing Folktales & Fairy Tales
•Performing World Myth
•Performing Classical Myth
•Performing Personal Narrative
•Storytelling Practicum, a methods and
practice-based course in the art of storytelling that supports the work of The KSU Tellers, a student storytelling
performance troupe, whose performances have been featured throughout the
metro-Atlanta area as well as at national and international performance
festivals.
Finally,
our production seasons extend what is learned in our classrooms with public
performances of literary works adapted for the stage, performances of
ethnography, performance art cabarets, storytelling concerts, and spoken word
poetry nights.
To learn more about
Performance Studies at KSU:
You may call our
department at 770-499-3123. And think about it: a telephone call is a kind of
performance—a repeatable interaction with expected and required language, the
handling of an object, a beginning-middle-and-end structure, an objective, and
an emotional or intellectual effect on another.
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"Touch Me" - Original Performance Art |
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Work Cited
Alexander, Bryant Keith. “Performance Ethnography: The
Reenacting and Inciting
of Culture.” The SAGE Handbook
of Qualitative Research. 3rd ed. Ed. Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna
S. Lincoln. Thousand Oakes: SAGE, 2005. Print.
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