H28.0650 Lecture 4 Credits
Topics in Performance Studies: Animal Rites
This course will explore the relationship between performance and the fast-growing new field of Animal Studies, which examines the cultural meaning of human animal practices. These include not only literary representations of animals (from Aesop’s Fables to Will Self’s Great Apes), not only dramatic representations of animals (from Aristophanes’ The Frogs to Shaeffer’s Equus to Albee’s The Goat), not only animal performances in circuses and on stage, but also such ubiquitous or isolated social practices as pet-keeping, cock-fighting, dog shows, equestrian displays, rodeos, bull-fighting, animal sacrifice, hunting, animal slaughter, and meat-eating. We will study plays and films that explore the ways our interaction with animals shapes our accounts of the human, the “other” (including the racial and ethnic other), and the world. Plays: Rhinoceros (Ionesco), Equus (Shaeffer), The Goat, The Zoo Story (Albee), The Swan (Egloff), The Hairy Ape (O’Neill), Sylvia (Gurney) Far Away (Churchill), Cries from the Mammal House (Johnson) The Gnadiges Fraulien (Tennessee Williams). Films: The Silence of the Lambs, Amores Perroes, Carnage, Twelve Monkeys, Planet of the Apes, Tarzan, Disney. Other readings: John Berger “Why Look at Animals?” Jacques Derrida, “The Animal that Therefore I Am,” Jean Baudrillard, “Animals: Territory and Metamorphosis,” Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal, J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of the Animals.
Topics in Performance Studies: Carnival and Masquerade Performance
This course inquires into the characters, bodies and fantasies of carnivalesque performances in Pre-Lenten and other masquerade festivals in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and the Caribbean. We include festivals like Mardi Gras in New Orleans and Carnival in Trinidad. We pay special attention not only to specific characters and masquerades from a performance perspective, but also the historical, cultural and political context in which these "identities" arise and claim power. We discuss what it means to perform masked, by studying texts on the theoretical aspects of physically transforming the appearance of face and body, in both a ritual and play context. Our interest is centered on Carnivals and Masquerades as performances of cultural memory, embodied resistance, and as a means of spatial/temporal transformation, how such performances remember and recreate cultural histories on/within individual bodies, by introducing the possibility of becoming “other,” be it a creature or spirit or simply a parody of the higher class. We attend to how cultural change and fantasy are manifested through what can appear to be magical acts of transformation, evolution, and even possession. We address how theoretical and critical issues of class, race and gender intersect in carnival and other masquerade performances across different regions, with different local implications. Finally, we connect this perspective on human behavior and performative action with our view on our local everyday life, finding the masquerade and masking that takes place in fashion, politics, science and mass media.
