Affiliated Groups & Organizations

Aurora Theatre Company Internship Program
Aurora Theatre Company offers a technical, marketing, or development internship program to introduce, develop and inspire young adults who may be interested in a career in technical theatre or arts administration. Working closely with the theatre’s Technical Director, Chris Killion, Marketing Manager or Development Director, selected interns will participate in the fundamentals of assembling a production from their department’s point of view. Contact TDPS’ Production Manager, Katherine Mattson for more information about the internship program, or Chris Killion about Aurora.

Theatre Survey – The Journal of the American Society for Theatre Research
Editor: Professor Catherine M. Cole, TDPS
Theatre Survey, currently with its editorial home in TDPS, is chartered by the American Society for Theatre Research as a theater history journal. Its theatrical and historical orientations are both broadly conceived. Performance-centered studies are welcome from all points across all historical, cultural, and methodological spectra, as are historiographic studies.

Working Group: Dance Studies
Coordinators: Sima Belmar & Ashley Ferro-Murray (Performance Studies Graduate Students)
The Dance Studies Working Group plans is currently focusing on phenomenology and the theory/practice divide. The group meets twice a month: once for a performance or studio class, once for theoretical discussion. Themes include: engaging technology, dance discourse, somatic practice, mapping, memory, archiving, citing, documenting, and perception.

Working Group: “Doing Disability”
Coordinator: Scott Wallin (Performance Studies Graduate Student)
Less than thirty years old, Disability Studies is a burgeoning interdisciplinary field. Hosted by UC Berkeley’s Department of Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies, this working group will meet bimonthly to discuss readings and share personal work. The group is pursuing the following questions: What are Disability Studies’ theoretical genealogies? What are various “ideologies of disability” and how do they travel across disciplines and societies? How can “doing disability” be understood through a lens of performance? What is the interrelation between disability and other critical theories, including minority-based identity politics that address gender, queer theory, post-colonialism, and critical views on race and ethnicity? How might disability be productively explored through a lens of phenomenology? The group also plans to coordinate with the existing Disability Studies program for undergraduate students, including co-sponsoring events during Disability Awareness Week. These events and bi-monthly discussions seek connections with other working groups and the Bay Area’s historic and still-thriving disability rights activist movement.

Working Group: Hip Hop Studies
Member: Godfrey Plata (Performance Studies Graduate Student)
The Hip Hop Studies working group seeks to engage with Hip-Hop culture and music through critical examination of existing scholarship and through the original research of its membership.

Working Group: Voice Studies
Coordinator: Caitlin Marshall (Performance Studies Graduate Student)
The Working Group in Voice Studies, VoxTAP, is an informal ‘confederation’ of professionals and scholars interested in and working on voice. Currently embracing members across the disciplines of Performance Studies, Composition, Otoloarynology, Musicology, and Ethnomusicology, Comparative Literature, and Technology and New Media Studies, the Voice Studies group is an interdisciplinary project to bring the various discourses into dialogue with one another, compare and learn methodologial tools for approaching voice, and examine the various political prerogatives that underpin our knowledge of and intervention in voice.