Performance: Art of the Lived Body

In recent years, we have witnessed dance and performance art enter the mainstream of the art world, becoming an integral part of the visual arts corpus. Performance is everywhere: on stage, in the museum, on the street, at protests—and perhaps, choreographic thinking itself is present wherever human beings act alongside one another.

In this seminar, we will seek to contemplate what performance is and how it captures something of the current historical moment, wherein artistic action seemingly seeks to generate community, shatter the paradigm of the solitary viewer standing before an art object, and rethink art as an experience in the sense of an event rather than a representation—as a transformative experience that aims to exert influence through bodily action. We will examine performance as an art of the lived body that seeks to dismantle existing bodily encodings and open up new possibilities through the discovery of embodied knowledge.

Throughout the seminar, we will familiarize ourselves with the theoretical effort to create a conceptual framework for speaking about and conceptualizing this multifaceted phenomenon, which encompasses aesthetic, philosophical, curatorial, cultural, and political dimensions, among others.

Among the questions we will address: what is performance; what is an art of the lived body; what is art as a live, existential, and non-reproducible action; how to think the relationship between art and ritual; what is choreography as an expanded practice; what knowledge is stored within the body; how to think the connection between performance and community, protest, and political action; what is the relationship between curating and performance; and why have many performance artists chosen to exhibit in museums in recent years, among other topics. We will read texts by Lepecki, Agamben, Nancy, Claire Bishop, Schechner, Rancière, Taylor, Fischer-Lichte, Austin, Butler, and others.