A New Name: The Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies.
Zita Nyarady in character for Bird Brains City Hearts, developed for Theatre Passe Muraille's TPM Everywhere.
We are pleased to announce that the Graduate Program in Theatre Studies at York is now the Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies.
The change in program and degree name to Theatre and Performance Studies represents the culmination of a multi-year review process that has included the revision of our program sub-fields of specialization, changes to degree requirements, the arrival of new faculty, and the expansion of the graduate program membership to include colleagues from numerous departments across the university. We encourage our students to develop an interdisciplinary understanding of theatre and performance by taking courses, and working closely with, supervisory faculty who come from diverse backgrounds in a range of fields.
The Graduate Program in Theatre and Performance Studies offers two degrees, an MA and PhD, both of which emphasize our collective interest in theatre, performance, and cultural politics. For us, this means teaching classes that explore performance both onstage and in everyday life in order to highlight the cultural, political, material, and ideological dimensions of performance practices, both past and present. Studying performances across a broad range of cultural contexts—in theatres, galleries, rituals, the media, the streets, the political arena, mass spectacles, interpersonal interactions, etc.—helps to capture performance's potential to frame critically nuanced responses to public events, and thus to model politically and ethically engaged forms of public life.
Our areas of program specialization, which structure our curriculum and degree requirements, reflect this focus. They include:
- Canadian Theatre and Cultural Politics
- Postcolonialism and Globalization
- Cultural Policy and Theatrical Economies
- Gender and Sexuality
- Embodiment and Cultural Memory
- Environment and Cultural Geography
- Critical Pedagogy and Community Engagement
- Intermediality and Technology
These areas foreground the spirit of political inquiry and practice-based experimentation central to the particular faculty research projects and centres that are connected to our program, including the Centre for Imaginative Ethnography; Sensorium: Digital Arts and Technology Research; Future Cinema Lab, InTensions; and the Performance Studies (Canada) Project.
We take seriously York’s commitment to forging a just and sustainable world through critical and artistic inquiry and encourage our students to do the same.
For more information, please visit our program website.
