Browse Hierarchy DRA7014: Text, Self, Performance

This module explores through practice the relation between text, self, and performance, in order to investigate critically the way performance may articulate individual experience, to invoke or confirm aspects of collective identity, and to complicate the assumed relations between performances and texts. Through weekly practical workshops and contextual research, you will explore forms, methodologies and topics including (for example): writing for solo performance, live art, verbatim and documentary theatre, improvisation, protest performance, and oral histories. Your practical investigations will be embedded in critical readings in identity politics and social justice, in relation to identity formations including gender, sexuality, race, class and ability. In your engagement with found or created texts, you will consider truth and dissemblance, authenticity and representation, auto/biography and disclosure, particularity and community, the politics of representation, and the ethics of performance. Throughout, an emphasis is placed on testing the limits of familiar approaches to creating and performing texts.