76-222 Texts for Social Change Units: 9.0 Department: English Related URLs: http://hss.cmu.edu/HTML/departments/engl Performance theorists have long considered how rituals, theatrical productions and even performances of identity impact the communities in which they occur. And multiple generations of activists have questioned how to inspire and mobilize new audiences. Somewhere between these two overlapping investigations, exists a grey area in which performance and activism converge. In this course we will explore a selection of 20th century texts and media that can be understood as activist performances. We will also map the various ways that scholars define the study of performance. On a small scale, we will consider how we all perform our identities every day through our gestures, styles, professions, genders, nationalities, races and religions. On a larger scale, performance can be understood as a mechanism that has structured relations of power throughout history via public events and phenomena such as politics, ritual, protest, written narratives and dramatic productions. Beginning with Luis Valdezs Teatro Campesino, founded in 1965 as the cultural arm of the United Farm Workers, we will trace a lineage of activist performances in the Americas. Diana Taylors work on Argentinean guerilla performance groups like H.I.J.O.S. and Madres and Anna Deveare Smiths documentary theatre will serve as innovative examples of non-traditional modes of activist performance. More recently, feminist playwrights and anti-war activists, Eve Ensler, Sharron Bower and Kathryn Blume developed their respective productions, The Vagina Monologues (1998) and The Lysistrata Project (2003) with the intention of sending a wake-up call to audiences. By the end of this course, students will be able to articulate the ways that a variety of performative texts actively imagine, construct, resist and inspire social change.

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