The Body Is the Medium: AnIntroduction to Performance Art (ARTS 3426 R)
Term: 2025-26 Academic Year Fall
Description
This course will introduce students to the practice and principles of performance art, exploring diverse ways of using the body in relation to audience, site/context, and duration. Performance art’s ties to experimental and avant-garde movements and modes of political resistance make it an ideal medium for exploring themes of identity and power and, equally, forms of improvisational play. Students will develop their own performance style of expression unique to their creative and intellectual interests. As a highly adaptive and interdisciplinary medium, this course will invite students to combine performance art with other visual-arts mediums (painting, sculpture, installation, and video) and to activate any past experiences in theatre, dance, music, ritual, comedy, athletics, and more.