The Performance Studies Laboratory creates student and faculty work that treats performance as an experiment. Our work draws from literature, cultural ritual, rites of passage, political action, civic engagement, and visual culture. The Lab was launched in 2013 by an interdisciplinary group of scholar-artists to produce performances, host festivals, and collaborate with local, national, and international artists.
All of our projects view performance from two perspectives: as an object to be analyzed (as if in a scientific laboratory) and as a way to share our creative research with audiences. Recent projects include:
- Institutionally Aggravated — an ensemble-devised performance staged as both a conversation and a physical debate between Bayard Rustin and Brendan Behan, two historic civil rights advocates from opposite sides of the Atlantic, that reflects their underlying strategies and methods for revolution: nonviolence or violence.
- Here Is Where You Turn Back – a stage adaptation of two New Orleans-based short stories (Arna Bontemps “Talk to the Music” and Alice Dunbar Nelson’s “The Goodness of St. Rocque”) and an excerpt from Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo.
- River Psalms – a one-woman environmental justice performance by Lexus Jordan told from the perspective of the Mississippi River, in collaboration with Cripple Creek Theatre and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.
Our annual season runs from September through April and includes a series of performances staged at Xavier, other sites in New Orleans, and national performance festivals. In February, the Lab will host the Patti Pace Performance Festival with featured artist Kaneza Schaal at the Contemporary Arts Center.