USC Roski Launches New Minor in Performance Art

USC Roski School of Art and Design announces a new Performance Art Minor with interdisciplinary courses in Fall 2021. Performance art is a burgeoning experimental mode of creative expression in which live or mediated bodies perform in theatrical or virtual settings for an audience.  Visual artists have long experimented with time-based aesthetic forms, engaging theater, music, cinema and dance practices to create artworks that challenge disciplinary boundaries and open up new artistic possibilities. In this way they work across genres with artists who experiment on the edges of their own disciplines, expanding what is known, for instance, about where theater appears, what sounds constitute music, or why dance belongs in a museum. A performance art minor provides a nexus of creative and intellectual points of inquiry essential to pulling together arts and humanities faculty and students concerned with time, space, art, and the social sphere.

The USC Roski interdisciplinary minor is designed for students who wish to engage in the experimental discipline of performance art, a mode of creative expression in which live or mediated bodies perform in theatrical or virtual settings for an audience. The minor offers two required courses, one in video and media installation and one in performance art, along with a broad range of electives from Roski and partner schools in Dance, Theater, Music, Cinema, and Dornsife. It is open to any USC student regardless of prior experience, especially those interested in creating new stories, actions or personas or those who want to explore the kind of disciplinary boundary-breaking and individual expressivity that is characteristic of the field. Practitioners in performance art come from a variety of backgrounds and crossovers between performance art with studies in popular culture, social media, community activism, theater, and dance are common. Performance art also highlights intersections among postcolonial and decolonial, ethnic, and sexuality/gender studies, making it an effective medium to explore and express identity and its politics. Total number of units required is 20 (highly recommended at least one topics-based course)

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Curriculum Plan

4 units Lower Division required

• ART 260 Introduction to Video Projection and Virtual Worlds 4 units

4 units Upper Division required

• Art 462 Performance Art Workshop

12 units Upper Division electives (at least one Critical Studies course highly recommended*)

ART 361  Post-Internet Art and Aesthetics, 4 units
ART 362  Ideas in intermedia Units, 4 units
ART 460   Post Studio Roundtable, 4 units
ART 461   Techniques in After Effects,  2 units
ART 463   Performance Art  and the Frame, 2 units
ART 484   Contemporary Issues in Art,  4 units
CRIT 415 Event, Action and Situation  Performance Since Art Since 1960s, 4 units
CRIT 425 Identity and Visual Representation, 4 units
THTR 488 Theatre in the Community, 4 units
THTR 395m Drama as Human Relation, 4 units
THTR 405m Performing Identities, 4 units
THTR 406 Theatre on the Edge/ToE, 4 units
THTR 476m African American Theatre, Dance, and Performance, 4 units
THTR 312 LGBTQ Theatre, 4 units
THTR 456 Latinx Theatre, 4 units
THTR 460 Asian and Asian American Theatre, 4 units
DANC 363  Dancing on the Screen, 4 units
DANC 302g  Hip Hop Don’t Stop:  Exploring Black Vernacular Dance, 4 units
DANC 312gw  African American Dance, 4 units
DANC 333gw  Origins of Jazz Dance, 4 units
DANC 342gp  International and Historical Perspectives on Dance, 4 units
AMST 305 Art and Performance in the Americas,  4 units
CTPR 457 Creating Poetic Cinema, 2 units
IML 477  Embodied Storytelling and Immersive Docu-Narratives, 4 units
IML 328  Sonic Media Art, 2 units
IML 365  Future Cinema, 4 units
CTCS 412  Gender, Sexuality and Media, 4 units
CTAN466  Projection Mapping Design and Production, 2 units
CTAN495  Visual Music, 2 units
CTAN452  Introduction to 3d Computer Animation, 2 units.
CTAN453  3d Animation for Motion Graphics, 2 units
MUSC 320gmw Hip-hop Music and Culture, 4 units