Time Schedule:
Kanta A Kochhar
BIS 450
Bothell Campus
Investigates performance and healing to understand how a variety of performance forms including dance, theater, and music can provide vehicles for personal, social, and cultural healing.
Class description
In this course we will investigate performance and healing in order to understand how a variety of performance forms, including dance, theater, and music, can provide vehicles for personal, social, and/or cultural healing. After acquiring an overview of the history of these phenomena and their main characteristics, we will consider 1) community rituals, 2) art, healing and healthcare, and 3) memory theaters and healing in case studies from Germany, South Africa, India and the US.
Student learning goals
To gain a cross-cultural understanding of performance and healing,
To understand how performance is a vehicle for communicating cultural and political healing through engagement in ritual, cross-cultural performance, and a variety of community-based forms,
To contextualize contemporary interest in performance and healing within a historical and theoretical frame, including seminal figures and important socio-historical moments,
To apply the course findings to individual areas of interest.
General method of instruction
In general this course includes a combination of lecture, film, discussion, observation exercises, and workshop activities.
Recommended preparation
Class assignments and grading
The activities of each section will culminate in a paper or a hands-on assignment that demonstrates a synthesis of questions regarding performance and healing and its significance for that particular section topic. In addition, other assignments will include reading, homework assignments, engagement in class discussion, exercises, midterm, and a final project.
