Volume 8, Number 2, 2023 The Syllabus is the Thing: Materialities of the Performance Studies Classroom Guest-edited by Karin Shankar and Julia Steinmetz

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A reflection on the serious work and pressing exigencies of interdisciplinary teaching at the intersection of media studies, performance studies, and race and ethnic studies, this syllabus is both a portrait of pandemic pedagogy and a reflection of the work of friendship and mutual struggle.

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This project presents a syllabus that emerged out of an ongoing set of discussions between the two co-authors about how Black, Southern theatre and performance traditions—as well as embodied and transmitted genealogies of community engagement and activism—informed the intellectual, social, and political commitments that have suffused performance studies from its origins as an academic discipline. These discussions allowed us to generate a syllabus that provides the raw materials for an alternative and potentially radically destabilizing pedagogical approach to narrating the historical roots and development of performance studies over the past half-century. Specifically, we ask what shifts might occur in the performance studies classroom by narrating the field’s origins through the Free Southern Theatre, founded as a multiracial artistic ensemble in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1964. Our syllabus incorporates the key strands woven into the Free Southern Theatre’s aesthetic and political interventions, including Africanist cultural forms (such as the story circle); influences from the artistic and theatrical avant-garde; and populist theatre projects that developed in tandem with the revolutionary energies of the anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist struggles of the student movements of the 1960s. We ask how these largely hidden histories of resistance and dramaturgies of evasion reorient the way performance studies syllabi of the future tell the story of who and what matters, and in so doing materialize pedagogies of field formation that get frozen in place.

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How do activists in Latin America fight for change both online and in the streets? This piece narrates a course on Feminist Protest and Performance in Latin America that explores the limits and possibilities of feminist activism in physical and digital spaces. At this critical historical juncture, feminists across the hemisphere are organizing en masse to demand change and justice, to denounce pervasive misogyny and gender violence, and to envision and realize another world. Drawing on a long history of struggle, they are engaging in performance artivism across multiple platforms including Las Tesis piece El Violador Eres Tu (The rapist is you), under the hashtags #NiUnaMenos (#NotOneWomanLess) and #AbortoLegalYa (#LegalizeAbortionNow), and in massive physical occupations and protests like #OcupaEscola (#OccupyTheSchools). They are mobilizing to condemn femicide, to advocate access to legal abortions in public hospitals, and to introduce comprehensive sex education in public schools. Drawing on these interconnected forms of performance and protest, what Marcela Fuentes refers to as “performance constellations,” women and disidencias sexuales are fighting together for the right to live without fear, to make decisions about their own bodies, and to exist in a more just world. This class asks students to learn from Latin American feminst movements and to connect their insights to our intimate and collective experiences. Beyond the syllabus, this piece offers reflections on the philosophy of co-teaching, transnational activism across the Americas, and modes of embodiment that can happen online. We invite students and educators alike to consider what it might mean to “perform well” in a university class focused on pleasure and solidarity.

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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.

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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.

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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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Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective are seven dancer-scholars who centre embodied anti-racist praxis in our teaching across the fields of anthropology, sociology, African American and Africana studies, gender, sexuality and women’s studies, dance, and performance studies. Since 2019, the Un/Commoning Pedagogies Collective has engaged in consistent, process-based collaboration around teaching, scholarship, movement practice, and collegiality. We have co-authored essays, facilitated workshops, and given talks and performances. We also share syllabi, strategies, stories, milestones, failures, resources, and friendship. This writing is rooted in our ongoing collaborations and documents a co-generation of knowledge about the possibilities and tensions of teaching with and through our full-bodied selves. Moving beyond the syllabus, we offer you a glimpse into our concerns, commitments, experiences, and strategies as movement educators. We invite you to participate with us in a process of un/commoning pedagogy through embodied practice, dialogue, and reflection.

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This article explores how writing occurs within pedgagogical practice and examines the possibilty of the handout as an experimental genre.

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This essay discusses a course I taught in 2021 at the University of Texas at Austin. The course, titled “The Politics of Refusal,” was prompted by my interest in exploring how pain, debility, and suffering, usually understood as limited and passive experiences, might also be generative and disruptive. The essay reflects on the trajectory of the class as the semester progressed. In particular, I pay attention to the dynamics of discussion as they relate to students’ relationship to theory and to disability and care. I consider what worked, what needed rethinking, and what possibilities were opened up for imagining new and creative ways to approach teaching theory during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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This article describes my experiences navigating the terrain of pandemic pedagogy in the 2020–21 academic year. I examine three artifacts derived from classroom instructional materials to excavate and preserve that year's emotional, intellectual, and creative labour. These artifacts reveal strategies I developed to make students' experiences of the pandemic the site of critical and creative inquiry. This essay argues that validation of the grief and loss students were experiencing became critical to successful teaching, especially for those in the performing arts.

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This piece charts the creation of a gallery within an ethnic studies unit, a syllabus in conjunction with said space, and a student-artist group exhibition titled Objects Who Hold/Objects Who Let Go. The exhibition asks one to consider how we learn to withhold and let go of the memories that bridge gaps between permanence and ephemerality. Curated in community by the artists themselves, the show drives the audience to embrace this tension of holding on and letting go as one intentionally engages with experimental art that pushes the boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality across expressions of loss and mourning.

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This article discusses my pedagogies of praxis in the performance studies classroom focused on identity, inclusion, and social justice. I especially consider methodologies I employ in seminars focused on analyzing and making social justice performances such as Performing Human Rights and Performing Activism. This discussion explores the significance of embodied ways of learning and the materialities of the performance studies classroom. I argue that such praxis—which combines foundational and cutting-edge theories in the field, analysis of sites of performance that exemplify such work, and affective exercises that allow students to embody these theories through their lived experience—creates the most meaningful learning outcomes. I discuss various exercises I developed which offer up a material trace of the embodied, praxis-oriented pedagogy that I centre in my seminars focused on analyzing and making social justice performances.

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This annotated syllabus proposes an undergraduate course designed to develop dramaturgical methods around a common theme. While the course focuses on performances in and around bathtubs, the ultimate goal of this essay is to put forward methods that can be applied across an expansive range of theatre and performance studies topics. Each unit in the proposed course explores a different facet of dramaturgical practice with corresponding assignments that challenge students to practise essential research, writing, and communication skills. These assignments culminate in a final project: the presentation of students’ own devised bathtub performances. This syllabus, aiming toward a restorative pedagogy, imagines a future in-person classroom where students can collectively explore the relationship between public and private through bathtubs as a microcosm for the complexity of human experience.