Extreme Body in Performance

The Extreme Body in Performance: Sexuality, Race,
Labor is a graduate course that engages students
in the interdisciplinary field of performance
studies, paying particular attention to how the
"extreme" body generates and disrupts
socio-cultural constructions of sexuality, race,
and labor through performance and live art. How
do we "read" bodies; how do bodies "read" us?
Keeping in mind that performance operates as both
a critical lens and an object of study, this
course inquires into practices of artists of
color and/or queer or feminist artists who call
upon the live (often explicit or "difficult")
body in performance. We will analyze the ways in
which such performances critique culture at large
and trouble distinctions between dance, theater,
performance art, activism, and visual art.
Concepts explored include embodied
memory/archive, surface/mutability,
virtuosity/disability, queer of color critique,
racial kitsch, mixed-race and trans identity,
abjection, reskilling, vital materialism,
difficulty, obscenity, freakery, and
pain/pleasure. The artists in question (many of
whom comment on their training in dance) include
Adrian Piper, Narcissister, Yoko Ono, Ann Liv
Young, Annie Sprinkle, Carolee Schneemann, Yve
Laris Cohen, Carmelita Tropicana, Marina
Abromovic, Senga Nengudi, Ron Athey, Lee Bul,
Aliza Shvarts, and more. We will read writing by
scholars and artists such as Adrian Piper,
Rebecca Schneider, Amelia Jones, Claire Bishop,
Judith Butler, Jane Bennett, Tavia Nyong'o, Linda
Williams, Jennifer Doyle, Jose Munoz, bell hooks,
Susan Stryker, Roderick Ferguson, Saidiya
Hartman, Alison Kafer, Mark Anthony Neal,
Hortense Spillers, and Anne Anlin Cheng. Moving
from the 1960s to the present through
international contexts, we will study these
artists and concepts through the
interdisciplinary lenses of performance studies,
gender and sexuality studies, critical race
theory, critical dance studies, porn studies, and
visual studies. In addition to generating written
work, students will attend up to two performances
in LA, and may have the opportunity to create a
short performance work. Requirements include
close reading of text and performance, weekly
written responses on text or performance, up to
two short essays, and one longer final essay.
While this course fulfills a Dance MFA
requirement, it is open to graduate students
across campus.