Theatre and Dance

Performance as Public Practice (PPP)

Program Overview

Performance: Theatre, Dance, Culture, Ritual, and Identity
Performance reflects and produces cultural, historical, and political meanings. PPP students and faculty study embodiment and/or the analyses of texts.

Students and faculty in PPP examine a wide range of performances, texts, and embodied practices in order to consider the myriad ways in which performance both reflects and makes cultural, historical, and political meanings.
 
We access multiple campus archives such as the Nettie Benson Latin American Collection, the Harry Ransom Center, and the LBJ Library. We have interdisciplinary associations Center for Mexican American Studies, the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies, John L. Warfield Center for African and African American Studies, and Texas Performing Art. PPP is also an affiliate member of the Hemipheric Institute.

Student Work:

  • Funding Footprints: US State Department sponsorship of international dance tours, 1954-2010.
  • Roaring Times a Thousand: Performances of Race, Gender, and Sexuality in Taiko Drumming
  • “Listen to the Stories, Hear it in the Songs”: Musical Theatre as Queer Historiography Progressive Compromises: Performing Gender, Race, and Class in Historical Pageants of 1913

Faculty Work:

  • Canning, Charlotte. The Most American Thing in America: Circuit Chautauqua as Performance. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
  • Rossen, Rebecca. “The Jewish Man and his Dancing Schtick: Stock Characterization and Jewish Masculinity in Postmodern Dance.” “You Should See Yourself!”: Jewish Identity and American Postmodern Culture. Ed. Vincent Brook. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
  • Paredez, Deborah. Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009.

Public: Policy, Activism, Leadership
Public refers variously to the social impact and scope of performance works, community engagement projects and activities, as public policy studies and development.

Public refers to a myriad of identities and political positions, as well as materialist histories.

Student Work:

  • Adapting Boal's Legislative Theatre: Producing Democracies, Casting Citizens as Policy Experts.
  • Radical Street Theatre and the Yippie Legacy: A Performance History of the Youth International Party, 1967-1968.
  • (Re)Embodying girlhood: collective autobiography and identity performance in Rude Mechanicals' Grrl Action
  • Performing Liminal Citizenship
  • Too foul and dishonoring to be overlooked: newspaper responses to controversial English stars in the Northeastern United States, 1820-1870.

Faculty Work:

  • Canning, Charlotte. Feminist Theatres in the U.S.A.: Staging Women’s Experience. New York: Routledge, 1996.
  • Ostrower, Francie. Why the Wealthy Give: The Culture of Elite Philanthropy. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1995
  • Ostrower, Francie. Trustees of Culture: Status, wealth, and power on elite Arts Boards. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002

Practice: Directing, Criticism, Performing, Dramaturgy, Pedagogy, Historiography
Practice encompasses the doing of performance and acts related to that doing. PPP students conduct performance-based research. They have the opportunity to work in local professional companies and departmental productions, develop site-specific performances, and collaborate and create performances for the biennial New Works Festival. Students teach courses about performance and including performance.

Student Work:

  • Actors as embodied public intellectuals: reanimating consciousness, community and activism through oral history interviewing and solo performance in an intertextual method of actor training
  • Embodied resistance: a historiographic intervention into the performance of queer violence
  • Landscapes of American modernity [electronic resource] : a cultural history of theatrical design, 1912-1951

Performance Events:

  • Susan Todd, Sycorax
  • Jaclyn Pryor, floodlines (2004-2010), pink: a love courier service, bread
  • Rayna Matthews, campcamp!
  • Roen Salinas, Grupo Aztlan


Faculty Work:

  • Bonin-Rodriguez, Paul. “Between One and Many: Dramaturgical Praxis at Jump-Start Performance Co.” Theatre Topics, Volume 13, Number 1, March 2003
  • Jones, Joni (Omi Osun) with Sharon Bridgeforth and Lisa Moore. Experiments in a jazz aesthetic : art, activism, academia, and the Austin Project. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010.

M.A. in Performance as Public Practice (PPP)

M.F.A. Performance as Public Practice (PPP)

Ph.D. Performance as Public Practice (PPP)

PPP: Publications

PPP: Current Students

PPP: Frequently Asked Questions

PPP: Contact Information

PPP: Professional Affiliations

PPP in the News

Graduate Program FAQ