Performing Politics

Studio brief

This studio aims to provide students with the opportunity to explore the links between performance and politics in any medium.

Can we ever stop performing? How are class, gender and race performed? How are sub-cultural rituals performed? Could performance be used to subvert social norms?

By combining reading seminars, discussions, presentations, gallery visits and technical workshops focusing on specific aspects of performance and theatre (props, costumes, staging and choreography, documentation), this studio’s exploration of performance and politics integrates theory and practice. The studio takes a broad approach to performativity and its relation to the political in a range of art forms, from time-based media to object- and image-making.

Liveness, spectacle, performativity, ritual and gender are questioned as well as the relationship between props, objects and bodies and between audiences, performers and technology. Art students work towards an individual or collaborative project in the form of a live performance, a video, a set design for a stage, a costume or a prop or a script or artist book.

We visit the Tate’s Painting after Performance Art show in October. The studio will benefit not only students interested in live art but also painters, sculptors, installation and sound artists. Through this multidisciplinary approach, art students will consider power structures and claims that underlie both performance of authorship and construction of spectatorship.