Cursos
Um dos objetivos centrais do Instituto é criar novo conhecimento e informar novas maneiras de pensar sobre conhecimento. O Instituto promove seminários ministrados em equipe que combinam a qualidade face-a-face de salas de aulas tradicionais com a colaboração on-line, possibilitando os alunos das Américas comunicarem-se e trabalharem entre si on-line. As áreas de pesquisa desenvolvidas pelo Instituto para estes cursos seguem uma seqüência cronológica e temática, explorando tópicos compartilhados na trajetória histórica das Américas nos últimos cinco séculos: Conquista, Colonialismo, Nacionalismo e Globalização. O Instituto já ofereceu cursos relacionados com Trauma, Memória e Performance; Performance e Ativismo Político; Teatro Latino-Americano e Performance; Performance e/do Indigenismo; e Teorias sobre o Ato de Assistir, entre outros. Oferecemos também um curso de verão anual, ministrado por importantes acadêmicos na área e co-ministrado pelo Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani, o grupo de teatro coletivo mais famoso do Peru. Este curso intensivo de verão está aberto para os alunos das universidades-integrantes do Instituto. Os alunos podem fazer cursos e receber créditos como Estudo Independente em sua instiuição-base.
This course explores the many ways in which artists and activists use performance to make a social intervention in the Americas. We begin the course examining several theories about performance and activism (Brecht, Boal, Ngugi wa Thiong’o among others) and then focus on issues of agency, space, medium, event, framing, and audience in relation to major protests and political movements as seen in the work of major practitioners: the YES MEN, CADA, Reverend Billy, Anonymous, Zapatismo, and others. Video screenings and guest lectures will provide an additional dimension for the course. Students are encouraged to develop their own sites of investigation and present their work as a final presentation and paper.
Summer 2015: Art, Migration, and Human Rights
The crisis around migration in the Americas has reached epic proportions. This course, "Art, Migration, & Human Rights," will explore the violence resulting from dictatorships, neoliberalism, and trafficking of drugs and humans, which has led to an increase both in migration and in the violence that migration itself produces. Taking place in Chiapas, Mexico, the course will introduce participants to the various groups that intervene in the crisis: the Zapatistas, journalists, photographers, filmmakers, human rights activists, scholars, artists, and others who try to bring international attention to the situation and help mitigate the violence. In addition to interacting with local artists and activists, the course will examine current scholarship that explores the history, politics, and potential outcomes of the current situation. Jesusa Rodríguez will lead an intensive performance-activist workshop as part of the course, which will culminate in a collective project that brings together scholarship, art, and activism on these urgent topics.
Spring 2015: Mobilizing Memory
This course explores the politics of cultural memory in the aftermath of the atrocities of the 20th and 21st centuries. Theories of memory, trauma, performance and activism emerging from work on the Holocaust, the dictatorships and neo-liberal violence in Latin America and the post 9/11 US will inform our analysis of photography, multi-media art works, testimony projects and performances, as well as museums, memorials, and street actions. We will ask what role the arts play in combatting the erasure of past violence from current memory and in creating new political visions and new histories for future generations. And we will look particularly at the role of gender and social difference on the workings of power and resistance. At the same time, we will probe the limits of comparative, multi-directional and connective approaches to memory politics and political action.
Spring 2015: Theories of Spectatorship
This course explores the many ways in which theorists and theatre practitioners have thought about the ways in which staged action (whether in film, theatre, or politics) pacifies, activates, interpolates, and manipulates viewers. We will explore concepts such as identification, voyeurism, narcissism, bearing witness, percepticide, spect-actor, and others.
Verão de 2013: Arte e Resistência
Este curso explora as diversas maneiras em que os artistas e ativistas utilizam a arte (performance, pinturas murais, grafite, escrita, música) para fazer uma intervenção social nas Américas. Iniciamos o curso examinando várias teorias sobre a arte e o ativismo (Brecht, Boal, Buenaventura, Ngugi wa Thiong’o e Foucault, dentre outros) e, em seguida, enfocamos temas ligados ao agenciamento, espaço, evento e audiência em relação a grandes movimentos políticos (revolução, ditadura, democracia, globalização e direitos humanos) na visão da obra de proeminentes especialistas.
This course explores the interconnections between trauma, memory, and performance in the Americas by looking at the dark sites and traces left by criminal politics. Instead of starting with the events themselves—the detentions, torture, and disappearances—we look at the spaces in which they have taken place and the paradigms for thinking about criminal politics and remembrance.
Fall 2012: Theories of Spectatorship
This course explores the many ways in which theorists and theatre practitioners have thought about the ways in which staged action (whether in film, theatre, or politics) pacifies, activates, interpolates, and manipulates viewers. We will explore concepts such as identification, voyeurism, narcissism, bearing witness, percepticide, spect-actor, and others.
This course will consider a number of topics related to embodiment and performance. Has the rise of digital technologies changed the ways in which we think of the body and presence? Has embodiment come to complicate or disrupt paradigms of race, class, gender and sexuality? Focusing on embodiment in virtual and actual spaces, we will explore such issues as simulation, affect, trauma, memory, re-performance, activism, and resistance.
Spring 2012: Memory, Trauma, and Performance
This course explores the interconnections between trauma, memory, and performance in Latin America. Starting in the 1960s, we focus on events throughout the Americas—Mexico 1968, Argentina’s ‘Dirty War,’ Chile under Pinochet, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, and other sites in which criminal politics have disappeared citizens and traumatized populations. Does each context have its own unique structure and idiom, or can we think about individual and collective trauma through a translocal, cosmopolitan lens? Topics include: the performance of state power and state sponsored terror; the individual and collective nature of trauma; the study of embodied practices such as testimony and witnessing; the construction of archives of testimony; testimony, its use in literature, museums, and pedagogy, its dramatizations by others, its archivization; the social role of sites of memory (ESMA, Villa Grimaldi etc.); performances of protest and resistance.
Spring 2012: Performance and Revolution
The purpose of this class is to explore a number of topics in Performance and Revolution. It won't be exhaustive by any means, but we'll touch on a number of questions via articles, theoretical and historical texts, and lectures, with the goal of understanding revolution and the role of performance within it, with a special focus on what's going on right now in New York City.