LATS 375
Performance and Its Traces Fall 2009
Division II
Cross-listed THEA 375
This is not the current course catalog

This is an inter-disciplinary video production workshop that explores visual strategies to produce and re-produce performance practices such as: performance art, ritual, dance, music, spoken-word and media spectacles. At the theoretical level, we will study performance as a practical, aesthetic and theoretical terrain, and as a historical site that produces knowledge in its relationship to the politics and power of representation, culture and memory. We will engage with various practices of documenting performance such as visual anthropology, docu-drama, ethnographic surrealism, dance for the camera, and other experimental approaches. In addition to the discussion of assigned readings, students will attend weekly video/film screenings, produce their own videos, and critique other students’ video projects. For their final projects, students will produce a video and write a final paper analyzing the production process in relationship to the theoretical readings from the course.