Queer Aesthetics in Dance and Performance Digital Zine

This special topics course examined modes of contemporary queer performance in the United States and abroad. We will examine an expanse of queer productions and practices situated in various settings, from public protests, experimental theater, Ballet and Contemporary Dance, Hip Hop and House ciphers, mainstream concert stages, and LGBTQ nightlife. We will profile an array of Dance and Performance artists in tandem with Queer Theories and Methodologies, including but not limited to: Tracking queer temporality and futurity through choreographic world-building; assimilation politics in ballet; queer-coded performances in film; cross-cultural explorations of camp; disidentification; notions of queer minstrelsy and trans misogyny; drag evolutions; choreographies of protest and social power dynamics within queer nightlife.

 

Through Class discussions, lectures, weekly journals, student presentations, and assignments (short essays/performance reviews/creative projects), students will become more familiar with methods and theories from queer and performance studies and learn to apply them both in their individual creative research and critical analysis of live performance. As a class, we will question and interrogate how “queer” as a blanket term can describe both identity and ways of being/doing: What are the limits of “queerness” in terms of visibility legibility? Who gets to claim queer as an identity? Where do notions of queerness account for or evade intersections of gender, sexuality, race, disability, nation, religion, and/or ethnicity? Within this class, we will unpack how “queer” is deployed within the work we examine, as well as within our own individual processes.