Although officially designated as “interpretation of drama”, this course shall expand to notions of performance writing, performance texts, post-dramatic texts, and more broadly the relationships between texts, writing, and performance. On one hand, there is a need to explore texts outside the industry of theatre and drama. On the other, there must be a recognition that texts (whether artistic, literary, experimental, or everyday) constitute performances as well. Thus, we shall imagine how texts can be produced, adapted, and situated in performance ontologies and aesthetics. We shall problematize the distinctions between writing and performance but also bridge the gaps or blur the boundaries between what is considered dramatic, post-dramatic, and performative. We will reframe writing and text and embrace its oscillations and transience within these categorizations. To achieve this, we will familiarize ourselves with techniques in performance writing, dramaturgy, adaptation, poetics, and textual-performative experimentation. Different forms and events of texts as performances will be covered— from the printed page to digital screens, from the creative to the “uncreative”, to annotations and diagrams, and even the specific repositories of libraries and archives. Practices such as forgery, artificial-intelligence generation, translation, editing will be discussed as footnotes to ever-growing entanglements of performance and writing.
- Teacher: Rex Sandro Nepomuceno