ABSTRACT
Performance Studies (PS) is a relatively young academic discipline. Performance studies scholars examines events and/or artifacts not only in themselves, but as players in ongoing relationships. This quality of liveness – even when dealing with media or archival materials – is at the heart of performance studies. In performance studies, questions of embodiment, action, behavior, and agency are dealt with intercultur-ally. Performance studies starts from the premise that its objects of study are not to be divided up and parcelled out, medium by medium, to various other disciplines – music, dance, dramatic literature, art history. There are many ways to teach and research PS. Some schools emphasize the arts; some the social sciences; some rhetoric and media; some post-structuralism, gender, queer, and critical race theory; some the performances of everyday life; some performance in business, medicine, and other professions.
