At the intersection of dance, performance, and Indigenous studies, this essay reflects on how an assistant professor at the University of California, Los Angeles—with the support of a graduate student researcher—has aimed to put an Indigenous land acknowledgment into praxis through community-engaged work. In academic settings, land acknowledgments are often given prior to an event and may circulate on written materials, such as event programs, syllabi, letterhead, departmental and research centre websites, and email signatures. Based on Indigenous protocols, these statements typically identify the original Indigenous peoples whose land the university currently occupies; they should also be created in collaboration with Indigenous leaders from the tribe(s). Indigenous land acknowledgments can be important because they directly combat the injustice of settler-capitalist, mainstream discourses that often obscure Indigenous peoples and practices or relegate them to the historical past. Yet, Indigenous people and Indigenous studies scholars have critiqued non-Native land acknowledgments as “performative.” Without direct material benefits to Indigenous peoples, land acknowledgments can serve as empty gestures that “perform” university commitments to anti-racism, equity, diversity, and inclusion. In contrast to the “performative” as an empty gesture, the fields of performance and dance studies frequently theorize “performativity” as a material action that can function both hegemonically and subversively. This essay argues that community-engaged research, teaching, and service—which the authors view holistically—are key ways to begin or further the process of putting a university’s land acknowledgment into action.
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This article describes an "Introduction to Performance Theory" course that the authors co-teach to MFA students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Through the semester, we track genealogies of performance studies, highlighting the ways in which our interdiscipline has been incorporated as an academic field while still remaining sensationally unsettled in its interventions, methods, and objects of analysis. The focus of this article is on the ways we have tailored a performance theory course to serve MFA students—artists and makers across genre and discipline. The article offers our syllabus and ten practice-based assignments to illustrate how we encourage the artists in our class to engage with critical theory and performance studies scholarship in an embodied way. Bringing the studio into the seminar, our MFA students stage performance experiments related to each week’s readings. Our syllabus is accompanied by a reflection on co-teaching performance studies as a dynamic couple form that itself constitutes a performance of pedagogy, an enactment of sociality, and an embodiment of theory.
{"title":"The Studio in the Seminar: Performing Theory in an MFA Classroom","authors":"Karin Shankar, Julia Steinmetz","doi":"10.7202/1099880ar","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1099880ar","url":null,"abstract":"This article describes an \"Introduction to Performance Theory\" course that the authors co-teach to MFA students at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Through the semester, we track genealogies of performance studies, highlighting the ways in which our interdiscipline has been incorporated as an academic field while still remaining sensationally unsettled in its interventions, methods, and objects of analysis. The focus of this article is on the ways we have tailored a performance theory course to serve MFA students—artists and makers across genre and discipline. The article offers our syllabus and ten practice-based assignments to illustrate how we encourage the artists in our class to engage with critical theory and performance studies scholarship in an embodied way. Bringing the studio into the seminar, our MFA students stage performance experiments related to each week’s readings. Our syllabus is accompanied by a reflection on co-teaching performance studies as a dynamic couple form that itself constitutes a performance of pedagogy, an enactment of sociality, and an embodiment of theory.","PeriodicalId":212884,"journal":{"name":"The Syllabus is the Thing: Materialities of the Performance Studies Classroom","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129872007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: The Stuff of Teaching","authors":"Karin Shankar, Julia Steinmetz","doi":"10.7202/1099876ar","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1099876ar","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":212884,"journal":{"name":"The Syllabus is the Thing: Materialities of the Performance Studies Classroom","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128591848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jessica Dorrance, Julia Havard, Caleb Luna, Olivia K. Young
This article explores the practice of critically and lovingly manifesting access in syllabus construction and examines how axes of oppression shape our classrooms via the syllabus. We are a collective of multi-racial queer and trans disabled academics writing from our personal experiences and our engagements with performance studies and Disability Justice. We argue that the academy must shift from discussions of accommodations to access, surface questions of Disability Justice and teaching labour in graduate school and higher education at large, and offer a series of questions for teachers to examine their approach to disability in their classrooms.
{"title":"Awe of What a Body Can Be: Disability Justice, the Syllabus, and Academic Labour","authors":"Jessica Dorrance, Julia Havard, Caleb Luna, Olivia K. Young","doi":"10.7202/1099881ar","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.7202/1099881ar","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the practice of critically and lovingly manifesting access in syllabus construction and examines how axes of oppression shape our classrooms via the syllabus. We are a collective of multi-racial queer and trans disabled academics writing from our personal experiences and our engagements with performance studies and Disability Justice. We argue that the academy must shift from discussions of accommodations to access, surface questions of Disability Justice and teaching labour in graduate school and higher education at large, and offer a series of questions for teachers to examine their approach to disability in their classrooms.","PeriodicalId":212884,"journal":{"name":"The Syllabus is the Thing: Materialities of the Performance Studies Classroom","volume":"29 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132566944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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