About The Department

The Department of Performing Arts at Presidency University, was launched June 2016, with a focus on research and critical understanding of performance as dance, theatre and music, within their many interlocking and interfacing worlds. The broad sweep of the program will include both Eastern (mainly, Indian), and Western forms through historical continuums and traditions. Through our courses, students would be introduced to the pedagogy of ‘performance’ which would explore the complex ways in which performances interact with and create different kinds of social practices, and help to integrate society in meaningful ways. Classical and folk, fuse and interfuse, West and East engage in interesting dialogues, social practices and art recall and reinforce each other, in endlessly evolving, transforming and interesting ways.

The students would have the use of our extensive facilities ranging from the library to a black-box studio, which could be adapted for both rehearsal and also used as presentational space. The Department has already been enriched through lectures given by distinguished speakers on the Performing Arts, from all over India, and we look forward to many such lectures, to give our students as enhanced a view as possible of Performance both as Theory and as Practice.

Our B.A. Programme:

The Bachelor of Arts in Performing Arts at Presidency University is a Practice cum Theory based program exposing students to the world of Performing Arts, regional, cross regional and global, in its varied dimensions and expressions. While encouraging the students to engage critically with their own practice and hone their skills as performers, the course shall aim to foster performance-making process by exposing the students to various traditional and contemporary forms of performing art through observation, analysis and critical writing. The curriculum is designed to encourage students to extend their knowledge of performing arts to connect to interdisciplinary dimensions of history, cultural policy, digital media, and films. Students graduating from this program would be able to take their degree forward into performance making, higher degrees in theater, dance and music, arts management, performing arts journalism and specialized areas of performance research.

Our M.A. Programme:

This programme of four semesters is geared towards introducing students to critical concepts both Eastern and Western, through which they would gain knowledge about the formal principles underlying Performance. They would also be taught historical traditions, both East and West, in dance, music and theatre, and encouraged to carry out research based projects through interdisciplinary tie-ups with other Departments.

Our PhD. Programme:

We are interested in national and international research, engaging thematic and theoretical areas distinct to Dance, Music and Theater within different Indian and global contexts. Once again, there would be encouragement towards cross disciplinary and cross cultural dialogues. Students would be allowed to choose whichever theoretical model or models related to cultural materialist, feminist, ethnographical, linguistic, structuralist, post structuralist approaches, that they found congenial. Research might involve community-based projects, performance analysis, archival research, or performance pedagogies or even their many interrelationships.