DRAMA 582 A: Performance Ethnography

This course engages Black aesthetics, staging dialogues between Black art practices and aesthetic theories, with What are the methods for observing, engaging, and embodying culture? How does the lens of performance — as embodied action, practice, and repertoire — deepen methods attentive to aesthetics, expressive cultures, sensorium, and geography?

These questions root this course on performance ethnography, which aligns ethnography — the method of studying culture (often through observation, fieldwork, and interviews) — with the interdisciplinary lens of performance. Readings cover ethnographic methods (including critical, dance, and performance ethnography), and include ethnographic texts that consider performance in dialogue with geography, race, gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and form, as well as ethics.

Throughout the course, students will practice ethnographic methods (including observation, writing field notes, conducting interviews, documenting sensorium, and staging embodied performance) in support of a final ethnographic research paper.