Why I Teach Theatre and Performance Studies

The arts, and particularly the performing arts, have always been for me the most essential gateway we have for understanding how the world works. My particular passion is dance studies, which involves closely attending to how dance over time and across global communities records the most profound aspects of ourselves, how we think, feel and process information and share that with others through the moving body.

I’ve come at this again and again from different angles professionally. I studied a range of dance techniques in the studio, but found that over time I wanted to debate more about “why” and “how” so much more than just physical exercise seemed to be going on when one learned, performed, choreographed or watched movement. I spent 10 years as a dance and arts journalist, writing criticism for a metropolitan daily newspaper, and twice that long as an academic, expanding across the length of books important histories about our identities, selves and bodies, uniquely coded in dance.

Performance Studies and Dance Studies are both young and interdisciplinary fields that combine expertise in the actually doing of dance, theatre, and performance with rigorous critical, political and historical analysis of how our bodies get retooled into unique and profound markers in the world. Performance Studies sits between history, philosophy, anthropology, technology, and psychology and uses methodologies from each to unpack a live event and astound us with what the world looks and feels like, under glass.

Janice Ross

Professor (Teaching) of Theater and Performance Studies

If you have a Stanford Story you would like to share, contact melissas@stanford.edu.