Course detail
Introduction to Performance Studies: Performance as Practice 1
FaVU-1UdPUAcad. year: 2026/2027
This course approaches performance as a historically changing, situated, material-discursive practice. Rather than treating performance solely as an autonomous artistic genre, it examines how relations, identities, memory, and power are organised through bodies, voices, movement, objects, images, spaces, institutions, audiences, and technologies. The history of performative art will therefore not be approached as a linear history of a genre, but as a critical field in which performance takes place under specific social, material, institutional, and media conditions.
Alongside historical orientation in performative art, the course develops a critical vocabulary for analysing embodiment, gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, labour, care, spectatorship, participation, and the institutional conditions of artistic production. Attention will be paid to live events as well as their mediation and documentation, collective reading, the development of students’ interpretive skills, and independent research or artistic projects. Teaching combines contextual lectures (45–60 minutes) with close reading of texts and close viewing of artworks, including follow-up seminar discussions (30–45 minutes).
In the winter semester, the course focuses on the genealogies of performative art from the historical avant-gardes, happening, and Fluxus through Czechoslovak situational, conceptual, and action-based practices to feminist, queer, decolonial, participatory, and site-responsive approaches. These will be examined through selected artworks, records, manifestos, artists’ texts, and theoretical studies. One theme of this overview will be the dynamic relationship between live event, document, and archive as mutually constitutive practices, including the performative character of documentation and archival work.
Language of instruction
Number of ECTS credits
Assignment to study programme types
Mode of study
Guarantor
Entry knowledge
No prior knowledge is required. Students are expected to be willing to work with scholarly texts and actively participate in collective discussion.
Rules for evaluation and completion of the course
Credit requirements:
– A minimum of 80% active attendance.
– One presentation of a developing topic during the semester.
– A written assignment (an analysis of a selected artwork or project) of approximately 1,500 to 2,000 words; the assignment will be specified by agreement during the semester.
Aims
The aim of the course is for students not only to situate performance historically, but also to analyse it as a relational event embedded in specific social, institutional, and media conditions. Studeints will:
– Gain a basic orientation in key concepts and historical phases of performative art, from the avant-gardes to contemporary networked and post-digital practices.
– Develop the ability to analyse performance in relation to body, gender, sexuality, race, class, disability, labour, audience, institution, space, and media.
– Become familiar with documentation, the performative function of documents, archiving, and curatorial approaches to performance.
– Be able to use gained knowledge and experiences to improve articulated formulation of one’s own artistic, research, or curatorial practice.
Study aids
Prerequisites and corequisites
Basic literature
Butlerová, Judith: Závažná těla: O materialitě a diskursivních mezích „pohlaví“. Přel. Josef Fulka. Praha: Karolinum, 2016. (CS)
Fischer-Lichte, Erika: Estetika performativity. Přel. Markéta Polochová. Mníšek pod Brdy: Na konári, 2011. (CS)
Fischer-Lichte, Erika: The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. London: Routledge, 2008. (EN)
Goldberg, RoseLee: Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. London: Thames & Hudson, 2011. (EN)
Jones, Amelia: Body Art/Performing the Subject. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. (EN)
Koubová, Alice a Eliška Kubartová, eds.: Terény performance. Praha: Nakladatelství AMU, 2022. (CS)
Muñoz, José Esteban: Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. (EN)
Taylor, Diana: The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. (EN)
Recommended reading
Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. (EN)
Butler, Judith: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge, 1993. (EN)
Kaprow, Allan: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. (EN)
Kuppers, Petra: Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge. London a New York: Routledge, 2003. (EN)
Schneider, Rebecca: Performing Remains: Art and War in Times of Theatrical Reenactment. London: Routledge, 2011. (EN)
Classification of course in study plans
- Programme VUM_B Bachelor's 2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
2 year of study, winter semester, compulsory-optional
Type of course unit
Lecture
Teacher / Lecturer
Syllabus
- Introduction: performance, performativity, and action. Distinctions between performance art, performativity, theatre, choreography, action, live event, and liveness. Related concepts: document, reenactment, delegated performance, participation, instruction, performative installation, and curating immaterial and variable works. (Tino Sehgal)
- The performative archive. The document as both autonomous artwork and secondary record; testimony, evidence, administrative file, and forensic material; archive, repertoire, and collective bodily memory. How does documentation not only preserve performance but also produce its history, value, and institutional legibility? (Diana Taylor, Amelia Jones, Jiří Kovanda, Forensic Architecture)
- Historical avant-garde traditions. The manifesto as a performative act and the transformation of the relationship between artwork and event: Futurism, Dada, cabaret, scandal, Constructivist and Bauhaus experiments. (F. T. Marinetti, Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball)
- Art and life. Chance, instruction, collective situation, and anti-object aesthetics. (Happening, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono, John Cage, Milan Knížák, Milan Adamčiak)
- Body art and crip performance: body, norm, access. The body as medium and political field – not only in relation to gender, sexuality, pain, and discipline, but also to ableism, accessibility, dependency, care, consent, risk, and institutionalisation. (Chris Burden, Gina Pane, Vito Acconci, Marina Abramović, Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose, Claire Cunningham, Kira O’Reilly, Christine Sun Kim)
- Durational endurance performance. Rhythm, repetition, routine, boredom, productivity, and refusal of production; time as material, labour regime, and existential politics. (Tehching Hsieh, Abramović/Ulay)
- Feminist performance. Body, reproduction, sexuality, gaze, care, vulnerability, accessibility, and agency; debates on essentialism, bodily materiality, identity politics, and intersectionality. (Carolee Schneemann, VALIE EXPORT, Joan Jonas, Ana Mendieta, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Kelly, Melanie Bonajo)
- Queer performativity and the decategorisation of identity. The right to so-called opacity/unintelligibility against colonial demands for transparency. Normativity and its repetition; drag, disguise, affect, public visibility, disidentification, and queer and trans archives. (Judith Butler, Édouard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, Anča Daučíková, Lenka Klodová, Kateřina Olivová)
- Performance during Czechoslovak normalisation. Between resistance, privacy, and apoliticism: unofficial culture, apartment settings, samizdat, conceptual gesture, public space, and control. (Jiří Kovanda, Július Koller, Ján Budaj, Ľubomír Ďurček, Jiří Valoch, Peter Bartoš)
- Postsocialist transformation. Privatisation of public space, transformations of institutions and infrastructures, narratives of transition, and the layering of socialist modernity. Participation and social practice as tools for mapping local experiences. (Ján Mančuška, Roman Ondák, Kateřina Šedá, Michal Moravčík)
- Audience, participation, delegation, and non-participation. From spectator to participant, performer, and co-author; asymmetries of power, remuneration for participation, and the possibility of refusing participation as part of an ethics of care. (Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Claire Bishop vs. Nicolas Bourriaud)
- Site-specific and site-responsive practices. Performative installation, immersive environments, maintenance, public space, and political choreography. (Francis Alÿs; Mierle Laderman Ukeles)
- Review, comparative analysis, and presentations.
Individual preparation - study of technical texts
Teacher / Lecturer
Individual preparation - preparing a written work
Teacher / Lecturer