Graduate Seminar at the Center for World Performance Studies

Graduate Seminar at the Center for World Performance Studies	Fall 2006
Ethnography and Performance Roundtable	Dr. E.J. Westlake
WDC - 2443/CWPS	jewestla@umich.edu

Objectives:

1. To understand the historical relationship between the disciplines of ethnography and performance.

2. To study and discuss the myriad ways ethnography and performance overlap in the present day: ethnographers who study performance, theatre scholars who use ethnography, performers who use ethnographic material, etc.

3. To study several examples of scholarship and performance that exist within the space between ethnography and performance.

Assignments:

1. Reflection papers on the reading and the speakers due every three weeks (500-700 words).

2. Final paper/performance that integrates the material from the course and helps students explore ideas for further research and to consider how to present this research the following semester.

Course Schedule:

Sept 18 - Speaker: Jill Dolan, 5 pm - 7 pm, Lane Hall.

Reading: "Performance, Utopia, and the 'Utopian Performative,'" Theatre Journal 53, no. 3 (2001): 455-479.

Sept. 26 - Speaker: E.J. Westlake, The Gueguence Effect: the Old Man and the Ethnographer.

Reading: Conquergood, Dwight. "Performance studies: interventions and radical research." TDR v. 46 no2 (Summer 2002) p. 145-56.

October 3 - No class meeting.

Reading: Politics, disaster, performance, and community. Glenda Dickerson, "Katrina: Acting Black/Playing Blackness,"

Dominick LaCapra, "Trauma, Absence, Loss," in Writing History, Writing Trauma,
Dominick LaCapra, 43-85.

October 10 - No speaker

Reflection papers due on speakers and readings from Sept 18 - Oct 10.

Bhabha, Homi K. "Introduction" and "DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation," in Nation and Narration.

October 17 - Fall Break

October 24 - Peter Sparling, The Bodytalk Template, The End of Shame, and Peninsula: Explorations in World Dance.

Reading: Lo, Jacqueline.; Gilbert, Helen. "Toward a Topography of Cross-Cultural Theatre Praxis." TDR v. 46 no3 (Fall 2002) p. 31-53.

October 31 - Speaker: Mbala Nkanga

Reading: Moy, James. "Flawed Self-Representations." Marginal Sights: Staging Chinese in America. 1993.

Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. "Afterword" in Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road.

November 7 - Christi-Anne Castro

Reading: Fusco, Coco. "The Other History of Intercultural Performance." English is Broken Here: Notes on Cultural Fusion in the Americas, New York: The New Press, 1995.

November 14 - No speaker

Reading: Phelan, Peggy. "The Golden Apple: Jeannie Livingston's Paris is Burning,"
in Unmarked, by Peggy Phelan, 93-111.

Reflection papers due on speakers and readings from Oct 24 - Nov 14

November 21 - No class

November 28 - Alaina Lemon

Reading: Lemon, Alaina. "'Dealing emotional blows': realism and verbal 'terror' at the Russian state theatrical academy" Language & communication, 24, no. 4, (2004): 31

December 5 - Speaker: Glenda Dickerson, Kitchen Prayers

Dickerson, Glenda. "Festivities and Jubilations on the Graves of the Dead: sanctifying sullied space." in Performance and Cultural Politics by Elin Diamond.

December 12 - No speaker

Reading: Chalmers, Jessica. "I Would Have Liked to Give a Paper at this Conference." TDR v. 46 no4 (Winter 2002) p. 5-7.

Reading: Roach, Joseph. "History, Memory, and Performance" & "Carnival and the Law" in
Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance, Joseph Roach, 1-31 & 179-238.

Reflection papers due on speakers and readings from Nov 28 - Dec 12

Final Papers due: December 19th at 6 pm.