Graduate

Interested in peaking behind the curtain of a professional theater company? Follow along with the conceptual questions and artistic decisions for two productions, one at Court Theatre and one at Steppenwolf. Activities will include visiting rehearsals, meeting with artists, and providing dramaturgical research and discussion for upcoming productions of Miss Julie and Catch As Catch Can. We will also experiment with active dramaturgy methods ourselves. This course is aimed at students who want to put theories of performance into practice in real time, alongside a professional production process. 

The course examines how blackness has been both constructed and reimagined across Latin America and the Caribbean through an exploration of the performance and cultural practices of Afro-Latin communities. We treat popular and performance traditions as a crucial terrain for discerning how Black people across the region navigate discourses of racial democracy, mestizaje, multiculturalism, and racial fraternity even as they faced the realities of racism in individual nations. The course examines imaginations of blackness in hip hop, reggaetón, rumba, folklore, carnivals, and visual art in varied sites such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, Peru, Colombia, and Brazil. Grounded in Black and Diaspora Studies, the writings of Frantz Fanon, W.E.B. Dubois, Paul Gilroy and others will serve as theoretical touchstones for placing these forms and lived realities in diasporic context. We will also engage the work of noted and upcoming Black artists from the region.

Undergraduates must be in their 3rd or 4th year.

While the course will be taught in English, please note that many of the performances studied will be in Spanish.

This course explores the intersection of religion and performance/theatre through the lenses of performance studies that highlight religious practices, investigate worship practices that incorporate theatrical modes, and examine representations of religion and faith practices in and through secular performances. We will study disparate performances of religion (such as prayer, dances, stage plays, music, and art) that involve major religions of the world and some minor ones. Performance activities allow the experimentation and embodied expressions that can authorize normativity as well as enable transgressions. What this homology of religion and performance ultimately shows is a recognition of their mutual expressive force, infinite creative potential, and the power of human imagination. Students will learn practices of meaning that play on all the chords of the sensorium from where cognition and experience emerge or co-arise.

This co-taught, in-person seminar will take up the philosophical, social, and political problem of how love relates to music as both experience and idea with a focus on Greece and the wider Mediterranean. Whether staged and performed, publicly shared, or privately consumed, love and music pervade time and place, shaping diverse genres, engaging different media, and articulating numerous domains of human life and the public sphere. Yet the mediation of love experiences through music remains radically undertheorized. The seminar “Love/ Music” will think about what the love/ music nexus demands as an object of ethnographic and historical study and as a theoretical entity. The course has a binary scope, being both theoretical and hands-on ethnographic (including historical ethnography). Thus its syllabus includes sessions addressing seminal theoretical readings alongside sessions structured as “ethnographic workshops” variously addressing the problematic of the “love / music relation.” 

Over the course of the quarter, students will carry out short ethnographic assignments designed to train them to think theoretically while doing field research or creative projects with an ethnographic sensibility, fusing and playfully unsettling the boundaries between the artistic, the ethnographic, and the philosophical. Assignments will range from experimentation with multimodal and sensory ethnographic methodologies, dialogic, reflexive and (auto)ethnographic narrative, field-note or historical-ethnographic writing, and oral history, to creative work (e.g. making playlists, podcasts, radio essays, short films, sound art, performatively reinventing archival material, or the like), thereby fusing the boundaries between the fictional, the artistic, the ethnographic, and the historical.

Writings by Christina Woolner, Hilton Als, Luis Manuel García-Mispireta, Eva Iliouz, Roland Barthes, Alain Badiou, Martin Stokes, Marta Savigliano, Wayne Koestenbaum, Mladen Dolar, and James Davidson will figure among the readings.

Requirements: Each student will do 1) two small ethnographic projects for the “ethnographic workshops” (held in sessions 4, 6, and 8) and 2) a 4-5,000-word final term paper. In lieu of a fully written term paper, students may do a creative or ethnographic project, developed in consultation with the instructors.

The course will be capped at twelve graduate students. It is open to students from all academic units.

NOTE ON SCHEDULE 

This seminar will meet twice weekly for five weeks on Mondays 1:30-4:20 and Thursdays 2:00-4:50 from April 20 until May 18. A tenth session held on Thurs. May 21 will be devoted to student presentations. Students are required to attend all sessions in person.

Additionally, on Friday, May 15, students will participate in a workshop of the multi-year international project “Love / Music: Problematics of a Relationship.” The workshop, held under the sub-rubric of “Methodologies from across Disciplinary and Practice-based Terrains” and hosted by the Franke Institute for the Humanities, will focus on how different disciplines, diverse in their methods for dealing with love, have been approaching the love /music nexus as a disciplinary issue, and might reconsider it in empirical and theoretical terms.

This course examines key texts from antiquity through the 18th century related to music and sound. “Literature” is construed broadly to include the many genres in which music or sound play a principle part: philosophical and scientific essays; anecdotes, biographies, and tales; poems and informal essays; songbooks, formularies, and scores; encyclopedias and manuals. The course will be organized historically and thematically. Some of the issues we hope to investigate: the role of music in ritual and governance; theories of the voice and sound production; the translation of sound into words, and what is lost and gained; the pictorial representation of sound and listening; the relation between music and emotion; the social roles of musicians and entertainers; and the cultural significance of musical instruments.

The performance score is a visual/textual work unto itself. Scores also provide performers and audiences with a language to understand the work. In this way, scores are documents of performative world-building while at the same time offering pathways into those worlds. This is a course about producing writing, drawing, and trace-making for the purpose of some other action – the performance of some unknown. Students will consider, in particular, how diasporic artists and writers have used writing, drawing, and mark-making as tools for inhabiting and re-enlivening performances of the past, theoretical performances, and those performances difficult to transcribe or translate. Students will have several opportunities over the course of the term to create and perform scores including their own in various media.

This course will cover the rich representation of university life in non-professional Renaissance drama (including student-written plays, hazing plays, moralities, and satirical pamphlets, as well as intriguing fragments from lost plays), and the tantalizing glimpses this subject that the public stage offer. Plays include Love's Labour's Lost, The Parnassus Plays, Michaelmas Term, The Marriage of Wit & Science, and several neo-Latin plays in English translation. It will also provide a deep dive into the student scrapbooks of the late 16th / early 17th centuries; students will assemble their own album amicorum based on this curious and compelling form of self-documentation. Half of the course meetings will be taking place in the Regenstein Library's Special Collections.

This course examines the ways histories of US intervention in Latin America have been engaged in cultural practice. We assess the history of US intervention by reading primary documents alongside cultural artifacts including film, performance and visual art, song, music, and poetry. The course begins with the Cuban revolution and ends with the ongoing crisis in Puerto Rico.

This course investigates what we mean by "performance practice as research", as well as the related formulations practice as research, arts-based research, arts-led research, performance as research, etc. It will primarily, though not entirely, take the form of a seminar, with the expectation that studio work will follow in companion components of the TAPS PhD program and/or other venues. This course is intended for doctoral students seeking to understand and develop the relationship (and non-relationship) between arts practice and academic research without insisting on a particular approach or outcome. Through readings, case studies, discussions, and small artistic experiments, students will puzzle through their own idiosyncratic constellations of methods and interests, and so gain clarity about expansive and not always obviously intersecting bodies of work. While the course is designed for TAPS PhD students, other graduate students who find this mode of performance-based inquiry relevant to their work are welcome to apply. Please contact the instructor for further information.

Audio storytelling insinuates itself into the day-to-day unlike other narrative forms. People listen to podcasts while they do the dishes, drive to work, or walk the dog. In this hands-on course, we will learn to produce a podcast from idea to final sound mix, and explore the unique opportunities that the podcast form affords the storyteller. Students will complete several short audio exercises, and one larger podcast project. The class will be held remotely, with an emphasis on remote recording techniques and what it means to document this moment using tools of non-fiction, fiction, and oral history.