Subject Area: Theatre & Performance Studies
This course can also be studied in the following specialisation: Media, Culture and Technology

'Reading Performance', one of the two core Level 1 courses in the Theatre and Performance Studies Major, offers an introduction to the exciting emergent discipline of Performance Studies. This course looks at a wide range of human activities through the idea of 'performance', from mundane everyday rituals to extra-ordinary theatre, film, video and dance practices. It presents different ways of theorising, analysing and interpreting a broad spectrum of cultural behaviours - whether they occur on the stage or on the street.

Performance Studies is a contemporary discipline that has most often been described as being 'between theatre and anthropology'. It embraces the study of both the 'everyday' category of cultural performance, and the 'aesthetic' category of contemporary theatre-making. This course addresses both realms of Performance Studies and how they interconnect. It focuses on how behaviour can be read as a text - whether the behaviour be the awkwardly staged gestures of a politican, the rituals of a bride and groom, the fluid movements of a dancer or the warm-up routine of a footballer. It also demonstrates how a heightened attention to the multiple performances around us, through methods such as ethnographic fieldwork, helps us to read the values, beliefs and politics of both local and global cultures.