Queer Theatre Now: History, Politics, Theory, Aesthetics
In 2002, cultural critic Alisa Solomon declared theatre “The Queerest Art.” Two decades later, this claim appears clearer—and queerer—than ever. Theatre continues to depend on the labor of queer artists; to forge queer community; to cultivate queer aesthetics; to document queer pasts; to represent queer desires; and to imagine queer futures. This course will provide students with the historical, political, theoretical, and aesthetic resources to interrogate how this came to be the case. Our focus will be a cohort of leading experimental and popular artists in the twenty-first-century United States, including Half Straddle, Fake Friends, Sharon Bridgforth, Haruna Lee, Dynasty Handbag, Taylor Mac, Jesús I. Valles, Erin Markey, and Daniel Alexander Jones, many of whom work in queerly hybrid forms that stage convergences between theatre and concerts, lectures, solo performances, closet dramas, social media, and daytime television. Analyzing performance texts, documentation, and recordings along with historical and theoretical work on queer social movements, we will examine how contemporary artists animate and extend longer histories of queer aesthetics and politics in the present, paying particular attention to questions of race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class. Together, we’ll ask where the aesthetics and politics of contemporary queer performance come from—and where we go from queer.
SPRING 2024 (2244)
THEA 1903-29053
Number of Credits
3