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What is Performance Studies at the University of Sydney?

This page will introduce you to the discipline of Performance Studies, the discipline as we have developed it at the University of Sydney, the relationship between performance practice and the Department, and to the kinds of careers that graduates of the Department have followed.

Use the tabs at the top of the page to find out more. The Feature Panel on the right of the page will direct you towards some current happenings in and around the Department

At the Department of Performance Studies we set out from the premise that performance is not limited to those forms traditionally marked as "artistic", and that any theory of performance must, accordingly, be capable of being general-
ised to a wide range of performative practices, across and between cultures, history, and conventional social categories.

Performance Studies, then, focuses on the broad spectrum of practices and cultural performance, including theatre, spectacle, dance and ritual, and draws upon disciplines including anthropology, history, sociology, semiotics, architecture, and theatre studies (among others) in order to approach, describe, analyse, theorise and understand performance, in all its variety, as complex cultural process.

We examine how cultural performances are linked to everyday interactions. Performance Studies includes such diverse topics as Brazilian carnival, Sydney’s Mardi Gras, post-modern and avant-garde performance, popular music as well as what you might think of as more ‘conventional’ theatre, dance and drama.

Unlike other tertiary theatre studies departments, we are
not primarily concerned with either actor training or with theatre history, but with performance practice. We situate European theatre and dance traditions in relation to performance traditions from other cultures, and we are constantly exploring possibilities of engaging with performance practice in ways that neither marginalise the work of the professional actor nor displace the critical and theoretical perspective that is fundamental to an academic discipline.

Essential to Performance Studies as it is being developed at the University of Sydney is collaboration with practising artists across many performance genres, and in these collaborative projects the students’ task is to observe, document, analyse and theorise about the performance practices they witness.

In shifting the focus of the work from textual residue to the oral and embodied meaning-making processes of performance itself, from theatre or dance history to performance practice, and indeed from product to process, the crucial factor has been finding performing artists and companies who are willing to open up their work processes to scrutiny. We provide them with rehearsal space (and sometimes a small amount of funding) in return for the opportunity to observe and document their work process and resulting performances.

Students acquire hands-on experience with documentation of both rehearsal process and performance; they undertake the detailed analysis of performance (both live and recorded) and current ethnographic practice is used to explore modes of writing about performance.

The aim of our program is to provide a theoretical background which provides students, whatever they end up doing, with insights into how and why people behave the way they do in a range of complex social exchanges. Some Performance Studies students move into professional theatre and dance, while others use the insights from the discipline to inform their careers in a range of directions and industries, from the law, to medicine, PR, film and television, arts policy and management, event management and so on.

Credits for images

On front page:

• "Nerve 9" at The Performance Space, Sydney
  Performer: Tess de Quincey
  Visual Poem: Amanda Stewart
  Photograph: Russell Emerson

On this page:

• Top: "The Gravity of Dante" de Quincey/Lynch 1998, Rex Cramphorn Studio.
  Photograph: Russell Emerson
• Bottom: "Madeline Lee" (Haddock/Campbell); directed by Michael Campbell, Opera Australia October 2004. Creative development in the Rex Cramphorn Studio.
  Photograph: Judith Fay Taylor