Course detail

Introduction to Performance Studies: Performance as Practice 2

FaVU-1UdUPAcad. year: 2026/2027

The summer semester builds on the first part of the course and examines performance as a field of political intervention, collective action, institutional critique, care, and the creation of alternative forms of public. It focuses on activist, participatory, community-oriented, feminist, queer, decolonial, and disability-justice practices, as well as on their relationship to transformations in labour, media, infrastructures, and technologically mediated experience.

The course explores how performative practices respond to gendered, racialised, class-based, and ability-based inequalities, colonial and extractivist legacies, but also health crises, migration, ecological devastation, and changing conditions of public space. A key component is the critical analysis of digital and platformised forms of performativity, including livestreaming, social media, avatar identities, influencer culture, algorithmic visibility, machine vision, and generative systems. Technologies are understood not as neutral tools but as socio-technical and material infrastructures that distribute and monetise visibility, attention, and access to public space.

Alongside the question “What is performance?”, the course asks: “Who can perform?”, “Under what labour, economic, and institutional conditions?”, “For whom is an event accessible?”, and “What forms of non-participation or refusal can be politically meaningful?” Relations between the human and more-than-human will be explored through ecological, posthumanist, and material-ecological approaches as a transformation of how agency itself is understood.

 

Language of instruction

Czech

Number of ECTS credits

2

Assignment to study programme types

Bachelor's

Mode of study

Not applicable.

Guarantor

Mgr. Miroslava Keratová, Ph.D.

Department

Department of Art History and Theory (KTDU)

Entry knowledge

Completion of the first part of the course is recommended, but participation is possible without it. 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 is given on the basis of:

– A minimum of 80% active attendance.

– One presentation of a developing topic during the semester.

– A written assignment — a critical essay on a selected project or topic — of approximately 3,500 to 4,500 words; the assignment will be specified by agreement during the semester.

 

Aims

Objectives of the course are to:

– Deepen the ability to interpret performance as political, social, technological, and institutional practice.

– Become familiar with feminist, queer, decolonial, antiracist, disability/crip, and posthumanist approaches to performance.

– Support critical reflection on participation, activism, social practice, and institutional critique in relation to labour, remuneration, consent, accessibility, and unevenly distributed risk.

– Consider relationships between performance, digitalisation, platformisation, algorithmic visibility, the data economy, and artificial intelligence.

– Develop independent research and argumentation based on the analysis of artworks, situations, documents, and texts.

 

Study aids

Not applicable.

Prerequisites and corequisites

Basic literature

Benjamin, Ruha: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Cambridge: Polity, 2019. (EN)
Bishop, Claire: Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso, 2012. (EN)
Butler, Judith: Trampoty s rodom: Feminizmus a podrývanie identity. Přel. Jana Juráňová. Bratislava: Aspekt, 2014. (SK)
Butlerová, Judith: Závažná těla: O materialitě a diskursivních mezích „pohlaví“. Přel. Josef Fulka. Praha: Karolinum, 2016. (CS)
Crawford, Kate: Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2021. (EN)
Jackson, Shannon: Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. New York: Routledge, 2011. (EN)
Koubová, Alice a Eliška Kubartová, eds.: Terény performance. Praha: Nakladatelství AMU, 2022. (CS)
Roubal, Jan, ed.: Souřadnice a kontexty divadla: Antologie současné německé divadelní teorie. Praha: Divadelní ústav, 2005. Kapitola Eriky Fischer-Lichte a Jense Roselta „Přitažlivost okamžiku — představení, performance, performativ a performativnost jako tetralogické pojmy“, s. 147–154. (CS)
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt: The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. (EN)

Recommended reading

Boal, Augusto: Theatre of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press, 2008. (EN)
Campt, Tina M.: Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. (EN)
Haraway, Donna: Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. (EN)
Hartman, Saidiya: Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. (EN)
Lepecki, André: Exhausting Dance: Performance and the Politics of Movement. London: Routledge, 2006. (EN)
Morton, Timothy: Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. (EN)
Moten, Fred a Stefano Harney: The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013. (EN)
Neimanis, Astrida: Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. (EN)
Noble, Safiya Umoja: Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press, 2018. (EN)
Paul, Christiane: Digital Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 2023. (EN)
Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi: Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2018. (EN)
Rancière, Jacques: The Emancipated Spectator. London: Verso, 2009. (EN)
Russell, Legacy: Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso, 2020. (EN)
Said, Edward W.: Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979. (EN)
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty: „Can the Subaltern Speak?“ In: Cary Nelson a Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. (EN)
Srnicek, Nick: Platform Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. (EN)

Classification of course in study plans

  • Programme VUM_B Bachelor's 2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional
    2 year of study, summer semester, compulsory-optional

Type of course unit

 

Lecture

13 hours, compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

Mgr. Miroslava Keratová, Ph.D.

Syllabus

    1. Performance as political technology. How do bodies, voices, marches, occupations, and collective gestures become public political instruments? (Bertolt Brecht, Augusto Boal, The Living Theatre; the spectator as “spect-actor”; Occupy Wall Street)
    2. Activism and the aesthetics of urgency. Art, crisis (for example health crises and AIDS), media, public mourning, direct action, and the production of counter-knowledge. (ACT UP, Gran Fury, David Wojnarowicz, General Idea; “Silence = Death” as image, slogan, and performative)
    3. Institutional critique, social infrastructure, and Useful Art. Performance between protest, education, administration, care, and institutional reform; forensic aesthetics in working with evidence, testimony, and publicness. (Tania Bruguera, WochenKlausur, Guerrilla Girls, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Forensic Architecture)
    4. Decolonial and anticolonial approaches. Racialised bodies, representation, exoticisation, ethnographic exhibition, Orientalism, borders, extraction, the right to speak, and the right not to participate. From critique of the image of the “Other” to questions of epistemic sovereignty, ownership of knowledge, and the institutional canon. (Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Coco Fusco; Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Raqs Media Collective, Cannupa Hanska Luger)
    5. Race, diaspora, autobiography, and archive. Voice, testimony, the performance of personal narrative, affect, and memory. Autobiography as political material without reducing the subject to an identity representative or object of spectacle. (Adrian Piper, Lorraine O’Grady, Bill T. Jones, Simon Fujiwara)
    6. Radical choreography and regimes of the body. Intersections of dance, performance, opera, sport, nudity, exhaustion, the attention economy, and collective choreography, including the question of which bodies may become visible. (Anne Imhof, Florentina Holzinger, André Lepecki, Claire Cunningham, Alice Sheppard)
    7. Performance, labour, and post-Fordism. Emotional labour, invisible labour, outsourcing, the gig economy, and the performer as a model of the contemporary worker. (Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Santiago Sierra, Pilvi Takala; participation vs. exploitation)
    8. Mediatisation and the digital body. From video performance and telematics through livestreaming, social media, and influencer culture to hybrid events and platform capitalism. The production, distribution, archiving, and monetisation of liveness in networked media. (VALIE EXPORT, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Amalia Ulman, Hito Steyerl)
    9. Platformised performativity. Algorithmic visibility, image as labour, audiences as data, and TikTok/Instagram as choreographic interfaces; a critical analysis of a specific platform event.
    10. Cyborgs, AI, and synthetic bodies. How do automated systems, generative models, and machine vision transform authorship, embodiment, visual regimes, inequalities of race, gender, and ability, and the conditions of artistic production? (Donna Haraway, Stelarc, ORLAN, Lauren McCarthy, Refik Anadol, Hito Steyerl, Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Umoja Noble, Kate Crawford)
    11. Eco-performance and environmental justice. More-than-human relations, the Anthropocene/Plantationocene, extractivism, landscape, animals, climate, care, and ecological grief. (Pierre Huyghe, Cooking Sections, Liberate Tate, Extinction Rebellion)
    12. Reperformance, exhibition, and institution. Collecting live art, reenactment, instructions, contracts, copyright, and performers’ working conditions. (Marina Abramović Institute, Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy)
    13. Final-project presentations, peer review, and discussion.

 

Seminar

13 hours, compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

Mgr. Miroslava Keratová, Ph.D.

Individual preparation - study of technical texts

16 hours, compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

Mgr. Miroslava Keratová, Ph.D.

Individual preparation - preparing a written work

14 hours, compulsory

Teacher / Lecturer

Mgr. Miroslava Keratová, Ph.D.