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BASC0082 Body Politics

This module will not begin until 2025/26 so content and assessment may change from that shown below.

Content

How do bodies manifest and find meaning on a stage? How does this relate to the categorisation, disciplining, and surveillance of bodies in our wider lives? And how might performance unravel those relations, re-presenting sensory bodies, liberated bodies, porous bodies without clear definitions, bodies which make us question the categories by which humans are stratified and oppressed? 

Embodiment is always political, and political life is also the orchestration of bodies, the instilling of status, the performance of power. This analytical module explores bodies in performance art (dance, live art, theatre, installations, site-specific/responsive, digital) and in everyday life. We’ll discuss bodies on stage: funny, erotic, sick, gendered, young, old, human, animal. Through key works of performance art, we’ll examine the ways in which performance has presented bodies both disciplined and radical, controlled and abject, mechanised and immanent to a natural environment. How has performance art deployed physical risk and to what ends? How have performances shown us the relational, interdependent nature of bodies through acts of witness, care and vulnerability? 

Performances will be viewed in conjunction with conceptions of identity: racialisation, class, disability, fatness, sexuality, sex and gender (among other concepts). We'll discover the connections between performance art and somatic histories, in conjunction with topics such as colonisation and racism, discipline and militarisation, the concept of childhood, medicine, feminism and sexuality. We will examine the ways in which a performance springs from and speaks to its cultural context, as well as how a culture is reproduced through acts of performance. 

Potential topics

  1. Stage Semiotics and Casting - Broderick Chow; Ashley Thorpe; Brian Herrera; Ayanna Thompson 
  2. Sickness, Health, and Contagion - Dance contagions (Kélina Gottman); performances related to the global AIDS crisis; Sick Woman Theory; Clod Ensemble; Martin O’Brien.
  3. Precarity, Risk, and Care - Judith Butler; Georgio Agamben; stunt performances; protests of privation (hunger strikes, migrant protests); performances of care (Lois Weaver, Tania El Khoury).
  4. Colonialism, Racism, Legacies and Liberation - Work of Selina Thompson (Salt; Race Cards); Daphne A. Brooks on African-American performances of liberation; Suzanne Lori-Parks’ Venus on Sarah Baartman; work of Lorraine O’Grady. 
  5. Bodies, Machines, and Discipline - Cyborgs; surveillance technologies; ballet, Napoleon and militarisation; Modernist human-machine performances (bicycles, solo flights, durational dance contests); performance and discipline (Jon McKenzie’s Perform or Else; Michel Foucault).  
  6. Reproduction - Maternity and childbirth rituals (in conjunction with health inequalities); Aliza Shvarts’ Untitled (Senior Thesis); global reproductive rights protests. 
  7. Gender (in relation to space) - Public/private realm (where is politics?); work of Carolee Schneeman; Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran/state control of religious dress in France; work of trans artists Travis Alabanza and Cassils.
  8. Nature and Environment - Greenham Common Peace Camp; international examples of feminist/environmentalist camps; Dakota Access oil pipe protests; theatre and ecology (Baz Kershaw; Carl Lavery); durational outdoor works (Tehching Hsieh) 
  9. Body Modification and the body norm - Orlan; Dominic Johnson; Victoria Pitts 

Module aims

  • Develop students' abilities in performance and cultural analysis, enabling them to connect acts and texts in performance arenas with those in a wider culture, through the critical lens of performance.
  • Historicise and politicise contemporary states of embodiment, both in relation to identity and also to concepts of work, property, family, the public realm, discipline, and colonialism.
  • Improve students' abilities to dialogue, drawing in critical material and analysing in detail, working towards the production of a podcast.
  • Develop students' awareness of the importance of image as performance documentation, and the relationships between image and text in performance analysis.

Assessment

  1. Creation of a podcast in pairs of threes (4 miutes per student) discussing the work of a company, artist, or artistic/cultural movement, in detail - 50%
  2. 1,500 word essay - 50%