Performance: Theory and Ethnography
Instructor: Professor Ellen Gray

Performance has been theorized from a wide range of academic disciplines including: cultural/social anthropology, linguistics, ethnomusicology, musicology, performance and cultural studies, and literary theory. Additionally, in the past decade, "performance" and "performativity" have been useful cross-disciplinary tools for thinking through categories such as gender, sexuality, identity and race and concepts of representation and power. This course treats performance (from performance in the arts to theories of performativity in the everyday) as a lens through which to understand relationships between expressive aesthetic practices and social life.

What might we learn from thinking about ethnography as performance, history as performance, or text as performance? What challenges do theories of performance pose to the ethnographic study of music and the reception of music? What unique challenges might the study of musical process and artistry pose to performance theory? We will get at some of these questions through situating contemporary performance ethnographies within the context of an historical genealogy of theories of performance from the perspective of the social sciences and the humanities.