Each of the four main clusters of interest offers a possible
way for a student to focus their studies. Students choose to work
across the cluster range, and with a wide variety of faculty.
Cultures/Ecologies
Embodiments
Interactive Medias
Text and History
CULTURES/ECOLOGIES
Performance and culture at the local, societal, national,
transnational and global levels, including the interaction of
humans and their material environments. The ecology of a given
culture in performance terms (how it manifests and is maintained
in process). Ethnographies of performance. The interaction of
culture and the environment. The influence of colonialism,
postcolonialism, and neocolonialism on performance and culture.
This cluster of interests is intended to speak to scholars who
interrogate broader social processes beyond the individual, who
chart the relationship of individuals to the environment, and who
investigate performance in culture. It will appeal to
anthropologists, ethnographers, ethnic studies scholars and those
studying the performative aspects of cultural symbols.
Ecologies will attract scholars of literature and languages
dealing with issues of nationalism, state formation and other
forms and organizations of power. It will serve scholars
working on the use and influence of space and the built
environment including architects and urban planners. It engages
the process of thinking about the relationship between human
performance and sustainability.
Cultures/Ecologies refers to the area of scholarly inquiry that
engages human cultures and/or their social and material
environments, either separately or in interaction through their
interdependence. Research areas may encompass issues constituent
of the following: the interdependence of globalization and
cultural performance (such as how hip-hop youth culture has
become transnational, interfacing with many discrete cultures
across the globe); anthropological studies of performance, both
traditional and contemporary, in world cultures (engagement of
Victor Turner‟s self-reflexive paradigm of Anthropology as
Theater in studying contemporary Indian pow-pows for example);
ethnographies of specific performance art practices globally (for
instance, a study of New York choreographers Eiko & Komo‟s work
in relation to traditional Japanese Buddhism); ecological
processes of environmental sustainability as models of new social
behaviors (studies that might encompass a city‟s “green” efforts
as a “scripted” choreography of efforts, linking theater devices
to effective coordination of sustainable living in city
planning); music, dance, and theatre, and rhetorical studies in
relation to the “performance of real life” (studies of how race,
gender, and/or sexuality are performed through enactments,
subversions, and re-enforcements in the US); the interaction of
culture and the environment as national performances (ambitious
historical studies of how national cultures are invented and
performed, and changed through policy, politics, and
rhetoric—the “invention of tradition” paradigm); and many more.
Cultures/Ecologies assumes “culture” as a learned collective
process of becoming that engages the traditional past with the
contemporary “new.” This understanding of culture is augmented by
the increasing awareness in the 21st century of our global
environmental interdependence as what binds us beyond cultural
differences. This perspective of culture and ecology allows
critical engagement of decades-old paradigms of performance as
well as emerging models of sustainability by creative, inventive
graduate students interested in Performance Studies.
EMBODIMENTS
The relationship of bodies in performance and performative
contexts past and present. Identity as and in performance.
Embodied experiences of and in performance, sociohistorical,
psychological, and physiological. Methods of representing,
transforming, and taking a position through the body in
performance and performative contexts. Models of understanding
human interaction through performance
This cluster of interest might attract the work of individuals in
theater, dance, and performance art as they discuss the
experience of individual bodies in performance. It is relevant to
scholars of history, sociology and ethnic studies as they talk
about identity as a performance and the performative elements of
social and group identity. It references the practical
implications of embodied training that would have potential
significance to psychologists, physiologists, biologists,
individuals working with neurocognitive models,
artist/practitioners, and exercise scientists. It also deals with
questions of representation and documentation of bodies in
performance that will encompass scholars working in discursive
fields such as literature and languages.
Finally, it attends to the full rhetorical situation of
performance as an intersection of bodies, real or virtual, and
may interest scholars in technocultural studies, those interested
in human performance and ergonomics.
Embodiments embraces the presence of bodies within performance
practice, as physiological, psychological, and virtual entities.
Research in this space ranges from the phenomenological to the
affective, from questions of identity politics as lived on the
streets to the psychophysical experiences of a dancer on the
stage. It involves the study of consciousness, situational
politics, spirituality and activism. Though the body can be
imagined as a metaphor for thinking about a relation to the
world, this extends beyond the metaphorical to deal with the
lived conditions of actual bodies both on stage and off in a wide
range of performative situations. Categories such as race,
ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, age, and class are placed
in dialogue with performance and performativity to ask questions
such as: How does one‟s identity shape one‟s social interactions?
How is this reflected in performance? How does one perform an
identity? How are bodies used, understood, and experienced in the
process of performance? What are the relationships between bodies
and rituals? How is a body trained and how does this manifest in
performance? What cultural expectations attached by the self and
others to the body? What is the reality of sensory experience and
how can this be understood in performance? What are the physical
and technological limits of the body? How do affect, joy, pain,
fear, transform a body in the space of performance? What are the
possibilities of the body as a work of art? How is the body used
as a tool in performance? How does a performer experience her
body? Using methodologies from linguistics, anthropology,
psychology, sociology, linguistics, rhetoric, theater, dance and
other ways of thinking about performance, Embodiments explores
the possibilities of bodies in process, in action, in
performance.
INTERACTIVE MEDIAS
A study of the specific modes, forms, effects and interactions of
various media including embodied media: film,photography, the
visual arts, radio, television, music and sound, digital media,
human and animal bodies, the internet, and the printed word.
Mediated social performances and communications in their
historical and theoretical contexts. Ethnographic documentation
of media audiences including models of readership and
spectatorship. Formal and philosophical approaches to media
analysis, the construction of cultural hierarchies and taste,
modes of production. Historically-based examination of critical
junctures in the histories of media and technology
This cluster of interest might attract the work of scholars
working in a variety of media including graphic artists, creative
writers, sound and new media artists, documentary film makers,
and those who study a range of media forms including faculty in
Theatre and Dance, English, Film Studies, Technocultural Studies,
Languages, and Ethnic Studies. It is relevant to historians,
political scientists and sociologists attending to issues of
mediated representation as well as scholars of communication
studies. It asks questions about identity and spectatorship that
will speak to scholars of gender, race and ethnicity, as well as
those focused on community formation. It allows for an
interrogation of various forms of media as genres of performance.
The comparative axis of Performance Studies examines the
mobilization of both disembodied and embodied media (including
posthuman and cyborg bodies) within and across cultures
(anthropological and aesthetic) in different times and spaces. In
our contemporary context, new digital media and the internet are
rapidly transforming modes of citizenship, social engagement, and
political activism. But media transformation and cultural change
have a long history. Media have always re-shaped modes of
perception, subjectivities, identities, and political engagement.
New radio and film technologies re-shaped political participation
in 1930s and 40s Europe, just as amateur video productions are
changing vernacular culture in contemporary Nigeria. The
Interactive Medias cluster examines diversely mediated social
performances and communications within a deep historical and
critical framework. The critical perspectives entail a rigorous
understanding of formal and philosophical approaches to media
analysis, models of readership and spectatorship, the
construction of cultural hierarchies and taste, the ethnographic
documentation of media audiences and an understanding of modes of
production. Thus, the theories, practices and methodologies of
comparative media complement a historically-based examination of
landmark, or critical, junctures in the histories of media and
technology. From this core component comprising theories and
histories of comparative medias, students can elect to specialize
in a range of comparative media research and practice under the
guidance of UC Davis faculty. 10
TEXT AND HISTORY
The Text and History cluster within the Performance Studies
program focuses on the history of the production and reception of
dramatic texts and performance practices. It situates performance
texts in political, social and historical contexts in
transcultural settings, from the ancient, to the early modern and
the contemporary world. It also theorizes the issues raised
around performance that took place in an historical past.
Approaches in relationship to performance
include:
Historical study of the people who create and the audiences
that take part in performance
Theoretical approaches and methodologies to performance and
performance studies, including changes in theories of
performance, and the use of performance studies‟ theories to
think about the construction of the historical past
Phenomenological analysis of the changing spatial and
temporal dimensions of performance
Textual, literary and rhetorical exploration of theatrical
and performance texts in a wide range of media.
Examples of faculty and student research areas:
Exploration of production history through archives of theatre
and performance spaces relating to the San Francisco Mime
Troupe
Religious ritual from the medieval to modern period as
central to defining the role and position of women
Sixteenth and seventeenth century English drama, theater
history, performance of games, masculinity, sound studies.
Modern Chinese drama, film, television drama, political
theater, street theater, women’s theater, comparative literature,
literary theory, cultural studies, and performance studies.
Medieval and early modern French literature, theater, and
culture. Ethics and politics in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century
farce; medieval romance, Molière, and the Theater of the Absurd.
Twentieth-century American composers and the mythology of the
American West; eighteenth- and nineteenth-century aesthetics,
reception history, and representations of music in literature.
Nineteenth and early-twentieth-century British literature,
culture, and politics; gender studies; film and visuality; print
culture and media studies; late-Victorian dramatic revival and
the socialist movement; Shaw, Wilde and Ibsen.
Early modern Spanish literature and drama: drama as textual,
cultural and performative practice; theatrical spaces and
playhouses; Golden Age comedia studies; history of Spanish
theater; transatlantic drama
Ancient Mediterranean art; Greek theater; Greek and Roman
cult practice; religious ritual as performance.
Early modern and modern Islamic Art and Architectural
History, urban history, theory of architectural preservation, and
architecture and gender 11
Modern European and American drama, Theory of drama and
performance, History of American cinema, Family trauma in
contemporary American film
Gender and film studies, the history and representation of
violence and warfare, German literature and culture from the
eighteenth century to the present
Medieval cartography; classical receptions; film and the
classical world
Poetic and visual representations of dance in the late Middle
Ages; their role in the modern construction of medieval studies
