In this course, queer solo performance - text and media - are playfully considered “forbidden acts” because they commonly strive to work toward social change by exploring different forms of transgression. These acts give voice to and, at once, subvert a wide range of identities conventionally defined by race, ethnicity, HIV status, class, gender, and sexual practice. Often autobiographical at their point of departure, queer performance and theater seem intent on troubling the comfort of community even as they invest in it. This rich, albeit problematic, ambivalence stems from the fact that the term queer, itself, connotes primarily a locus of refusal, an unbinding and destabilizing term of defiance, of provocation via polysemy. As such, queer performances seek to open up new vistas of multiple, shifting, polymorphous identities. What social, political, and cultural implications might these queer texts dramatize? What may be the ramifications of instilling the notion of personal identity with collective aspirations for greater social justice? How would the students enrolled in this class spin the term queer to encompass their own sense of individual difference and empower their own vision of creative defiance? In attempting to respond to these questions students taking this course will be invited to share their own forbidden acts: to approach theoretical refection through performative exercises, to merge the analytical realm with the crafting and execution of monologues, to test the limits (if there are any) between theatrical play and ideological engagement.
- Teacher: Fabio Ferrari