Ars Theoretica: On Scholar-Artists

Interdisciplinarity is one of the hallmarks of performance studies, and integration of scholarly research and creative practice is at the core of our educational mission in TAPS. In this seminar, we will investigate the promise of mutual enrichment between these two areas. In exploring the work of scholar-artists who are working in theater and performance, we will ask what are some of the principles, methods, and procedures artists are using in their studios that can be productively employed in scholarly work, and vice versa: how scholarly research can support and engage the process of artistic creation. Interdisciplinarity thrives on collaboration, so accordingly, we will make efforts to explore the modes of collaborative scholarly work. In doing that we will try to perform, rather than just study and observe, the intersection between theory and practice in our discipline.