Why Performance Studies?

Performance Studies combines anthropology, performing arts and cultural studies, using an interdisciplinary lens to examine a range of social acts: rituals, festivals, theatre, dance, sports, and other live events. Performance Studies offers a mode of critical inquiry that can illuminate cultural practices across cultures, from the aesthetics of everyday life to the complex social movements of our times.

Performance and Politics

Studying performance in its myriad manifestations (as act, as masquerade, as intervention), scholars, activists and artists can analyze the ways in which performance is used to communicate social or religious values, to elicit identification, or to forge a sense of community. But politics itself also provides a rich arena for performance analysis: electoral politics, populism, protest movements, military parades, and mass rallies are just a few of the spectacles that can be best analyzed using a performative lens. The Institute thus explores the ways in which performance and politics are mutually formative: performance as a practice of politics, politics as a mode of performance.

Performance Studies at New York University