As Woodstock-to-avoid-finals rages on across college campuses, the content keeps on coming (see: my colleague Zach Kessel’s X feed). Some of the better videos to emerge out of the great cacophony of juvenile nonsense showcase student “performance art” as “protest.”
Of these clips, my favorite is undoubtedly Columbia’s “Strings for Decolonization,” but let us not forget “Refugee Camp Rock!” or “Bongos for Hamas” at Yale (okay, yes, I named these latter two).
Before you applaud the creativity of these students, you should know that they are simply displaying what they were taught. Yes — they learned even “decolonizing performance” in the classroom.
As an undergraduate at Yale, I took smug delight in reading through some of the more ridiculous course offerings of the Theater and Performance Studies Department. I had a hunch that other pro-Hamas campuses hosted similar departments with equally absurd courses, and I was not disappointed. I have curated some of the greatest hits for you below:
At Columbia, the site of the much-followed “Communist Coachella,” students of theater can enrich themselves with courses such as Ecologies of Transmedia Performance; Postcolonial Drama: The Canon & Its Other; Critical Histories of Drama, Theatre, and Performance; and Queer Performance.
The course description of Postcolonial Drama: The Canon & Its Other loses its shine when summarized, so here is a block quote:
This class is a close reading of postcolonial plays, both as they form a recognizable canon, and as counters to it. Through a grounding in postcolonial theory, students will explore how the colonial encounter leaves a lasting impact on language and performance. How do these playwrights tackle questions of authenticity, influence, inspiration and agency? What stories do they adapt, translate or reimagine? Also, we read in equal measure male and female playwrights, attending to the ways in which power and authority are negotiated by them. This class looks both at plays that are seminal to postcolonial writing and also newer ones that unsettle the position of the greats. Do we then understand postcolonialism as a historically bound literary trend or an ongoing process of exploration? Fundamentally we ask, in our efforts to decolonize the theatre, how do we find new ways or reading?
I would bet that the Strings for Decolonization folks composed that, er, piece as their final project for this class.
In the same department, students of Queer Performance will explore hard-hitting questions, such as:
What constitutes queer performance? Is sexuality all we mean by queer? What are the historical, aesthetic, and political aspects of queer performance? … Where is queer performance staged and how is it received? How is it produced, fo [sic] whom, by whom, and with what funding? Is queer performance inherently or even necessarily radical?
(To be fair, I would be quite interested to learn who is funding “queer performance.”)
Over at UCLA, where keffiyeh-clad bullies have taken to blocking Jewish students from campus buildings, students may take Theater 19 — Performance, Culture, and Environment: Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics, which provides an
introduction to Japanese way of tea, traditional practice in which food and drink become medium not only of social interaction and hospitality but also aesthetic appreciation and spiritual self-discipline. Medium of tea gathering (chakai) used as lens through which to learn about transnational history of Japan-U.S. cultural exchange, and contemporary environmental concerns of Pacific Ocean that links Southern California with Japan. Study designed in conjunction with Tea Ceremony with Pacific Plastics performance project that will build tea house using salvaged ocean material, and art performance exploring Japanese American history in Los Angeles.
Yes, you read that correctly. As their capstone project, students will perform exploratory histories of Japanese Americans in L.A. by constructing a tea house made of junk salvaged from the ocean because, you know, global warming and racism and stuff.
Meanwhile, those who study “Trans Theater and Performance” will consider
what it means to construct a history of trans theater; how terms trans and theater are defined, and if it is desired to and to what ends; and if there is such a thing as trans (dramatic) form. Historical and literary exploration of theater and performance made by trans, nonbinary, two-spirit, and intersex people in the U.S.
Yale University, not to be outdone, offers courses in Dance, Race, and Social Movements; Green Stages: Environmental Themes in the Theater; Dance and Arts Activism in Southeast Asia; and Feminist Theater and Performance.
The course description of Dance, Race, and Social Movements sounds like it was generated by Google’s Gemini AI bot. Buckle up:
In the wake of COVID-19, the future of Dance Studies seems more unclear and destabilized than ever, as the very act of gathering to dance or watch live performance carries new political meanings and risks. Does dance even matter in our current moment in United State history? To rephrase the question, can the tools of dance history and performance studies–with its attention not only to how individual bodies move but how we form relationships and solidarities by moving together–inform how we respond to the politics of today? This class introduces students to the intersections between dance and politics in 20th/21st century United States and its migratory spheres. Students watch filmed performance and attend live shows to understand how dancers use embodiment to make arguments, enact cultural diplomacy, and shift the grounds of activism. We analyze how our society has made meaning out of dancing bodies that move across stages, dance clubs, and film screens. We use movement analysis and choreography as a lens to understand strategies of organizing and protest. Focusing mainly on new trends in Dance Studies, we center queer theory, performance theory, critical race theory, and transnational history methodologies. By the end of the semester, students are equipped to identify key moments in American concert dance and social dance history, as well as their relation to broader political moments and social movements for class equality and racial/gender/sexual liberation, develop the descriptive and analytical tools to write about movement-based performance, design and create their own work of dance ethnography.
The students raving for Hamas on Cross Campus probably aced this class.
We shouldn’t be surprised when what’s being taught by our universities has consequences in the real world. Education matters. It’s high time we subject the curricula being dished up by our country’s elite schools to scrutiny and make American universities serious again.