Introduction to Theatre and Performance Studies
1.The main objective of the course is to open up the field of ‘Theatre and Performance Studies’ to the students such that the various debates around it across continents become clear to them and it enables thinking about the discipline within our contemporary academic landscape.
2 The course would broadly familiarise students with the interactions between ‘Theatre and Performance Studies’ to other disciplines from which it has drawn extensively vis-à-vis concepts such as aesthetic experience, play, practice, sadhana, theatrum philosophicum, theatricality, rasa, dhvani, mimesis, performativity, mediality, corporeality etc.
3. It would familiarise students with research methodologies such as fieldwork and ethnography, performance as research (PAR) in the study of Theatre and/or Performance such as the works of Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Eugenio Barba, Dwight Conquergood, Baz Kershaw, and others.
4. A part of the course would be devoted to methods of documentation and archiving processes/techniques that are implemented in documenting theatre and/or performance, so that students are aware of the various mechanisms of documentation followed in archives of the performing arts and the role they play in the study of theatre and/or performance, theatre historiography and performance making.
1. Conquergood, Dwight. Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis. Universityof Michigan Press, 2013.2. Egginton, William. How The World Became A Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and theQuestion of Modernity. State University of New York Press, 2003.3. Fischer-Lichte, Erika, Minou Arjomand and Ramona Mosse, eds. The RoutledgeIntroduction to Theatre and Performance Studies. Taylor and Francis Group, 2014.4. Gebauer, Gunter and Christoph Wulf, Don Reneau (Trans.). Mimesis: Culture302255Art302255Society.University of California Press, 1995.5. Kersaw, Baz and Helen J. Nicholson. Research Methods in Theatre and Performance.Edinburgh University Press, 2011.6. Parker, Andrew and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, eds. Performativity and Performance.Routledge, 1995.7. Pollock, Sheldon. A Rasa Reader: Classical Indian Aesthetics. Columbia University Press,New York, 2016.8. Smith, Hazel and Roger T. Dean, eds. Practice302255led Research and Research302255led Practice inthe Creative Arts. Edinburgh University Press, 2009.