Feminist Performance Ethnography: Performing Art As and At the Site of Feminist Liberational Praxis

Feminist   Performance  Ethnography:
Performing Art As and At the Site of Feminist Liberational Praxis

COURSE DESCRIPTION

The course will explore the relationship between ideas and practices of feminism, performance and ethnography through readings, writing, movement, artistic expression, watching performances and performance.

The participants will conduct fieldplay, use Personal Narratives and Everyday Life Performance techniques, and create performances based upon their fieldwork. In-class exercises and readings will be developed as a group whenever possible and whenever desired. The goal of both will be to encourage participants to deeply explore the interface between performance AS a site of feminist praxis to be explored and discovered, and performance as a method OF feminist praxis (understanding and practice in cycle) used to deeply engage the conditions, consequences, challenges, possibilities and deep resources for human liberation around us. We seek to critique and engage with the virtues and problems associated with Performance Ethnography. We start with key issues such as trust, collectivity, the sacred and the profane in everyday life, emotion and other affective economies, self-reflexivity, intersubjectivity, accountability, voice, multivocality and participation. However, participants are encouraged to rethink, replace, reinvent, add and otherwise SHIFT these issues, foundations and priorities throughout the course and on a moment to moment basis as needed.

Ethnography is a fundamental part of anthropology’s past and present identity and increasingly a core methodological approach in the toolkits of other disciplines in the humanities, social and health sciences.  In its critical practice, ethnography serves to both interrogate disciplinary walls and blurr
genre boundaries. Ethnography, commonly described as “the writing of culture” is reframed here in three interrelated senses; referring to, in turns,

1) the qualitative research approach characterized by the “unending search for what is most precious” (Marlon Riggs) in fields of power and representations, by living and working and moving among and connecting to self and others through the process of participant observation, among other strategies;

2) the product of this we-search – the written, performed and otherwise shared representations and dramas; and

3) ethnographic praxis, that is, the rhetorical, ethical, social, inter-personal and political effects of what we make/do.

This course will focus largely on the process and politics of producing, reading and interpreting embodied accounts of culture, and on discovering the ways performance canserbe both as a SITE for ethnographic discovery and as a MODALITY for discovering, finding meaning in and re-presenting cultural scenes. While students will conduct exploratory field exercises, emphasis is placed on the interdependent relationship between (1) method, (2) theory and (3) practice in ethnography by examining the overlapping, interstitial places where feminist theory, performance theory and performance ethnography meet as praxis.

Since culture can only be made visible to us through its representations, e.g., its structures, dramas, symbols, metaphors, habits, everyday practices, landscape, language patterns, etc., performance (those embodied enactments formed by and embedded in these representations) is fundamental to cultural inquiry and a point of entry where we may be / act and see / hear into an Other’s culture(s), our own culture(s) or the contested, tangled, overlapping and mutually constituting, interstitial spaces in between – nepantla!

Let’s:  “explore both the performance and writing of ethnography. Ethnography is an empathetic act; it is the study of a particular culture from within said culture and is meant to build understanding and foster communication and critical, reflective thinking. Grounded in the belief that performance can be defined as embodied cultural expression, this course involves the study of the capacities and capabilities of the human body as raw communicative material. Students will explore the critical, theoretical and ethical issues located at the intersection of ethnography and performance, as well as methods for creating and critiquing ethnographic performances and ethnographic writings. Students will also explore performative writing, a method in which the body and the word, the performative and theoretical and the personal and political coalesce. This course – focused on interaction and collaboration – will involve intensive amounts of reading, writing and – especially – fieldwork in the community (interviews, etc.). The course will culminate in a polished (solo) (or collective, collaborative) ethnographic performance which should be delivered via innovative means live, on film, an integration of the two, or an alternative practical or digital technique appropriate to the project. This is a performance course, but previous performance experience is not required.” Matt Saltzberg, Ph.D

*This course description borrows from the description of anth 401 at Athabascar College and Prof. Soyini Madison’s course description for “Critical Performance Ethnography, Spring 2002, University of North Carolina.

Course Objectives
The aim of the seminar is to begin to answer two fundamental questions: 1) If the body is the instrument of the ethnographer, how do we best sharpen that tool for its interpretive, expressive, sensory activities; and 2) why, who, when, under what circumstances and how might we “do” feminist performance ethnography? Can ethnography as praxis transcend its critical role in perpetuating and legitimating imperial and other forms of domination? In order to answer these questions, we must learn more about what is involved in “traveling across worlds.”

Participants are encouraged to “enter” a social setting, organization, cultural phenomenon, relationship or individual human experience and “pay attention” to it — be in dialogue with it — by raising significant and fundamental questions, by engaging in thoughtful participation and observation, and by articulating the critical dynamics that drive it and the ethnographic encounter. The site you choose may be yourself (auto-ethnography) or the class itself as a micro-culture.
1) To take seriously the proposal that if the instrument of the ethnographer is the body, how should we “practice” and prepare our instrument to be fully ready to play the symphony that is life in motion?
2) To introduce Participants to feminist/performance/ethnographic methodologies, theories and praxis;
3) To assist Participants preparing for or engaged in research to identify core ideas, questions and approaches most helpful to their own personal, academic, intellectual, artistic, research program AND/OR political development, and to clarify their own liberation methodology – orientation towards theory and analysis of how research/creation/activism should proceed that we might all be free in our human rights;
4) To encourage Participants to focus their own critical theoretical/ practical and political research orientations through the development of a mini-ethnographic project, performance or analytical paper; and
5) To explore as a group the possibilities for the decolonization of ethnographic research through embodied movement, and the potential of performance ethnography as practice, product and praxis to contribute through strategic action, to equity, liberation and justice.

Peace, Rachel