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Ryan Platt

Assistant Professor

Ryan Platt is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Theatre & Dance. He holds a BA in Theatre & Dance and French Studies from Amherst College and a doctoral degree from Cornell University, where he studied 20th-century and contemporary performance in the context of French and German literature and theory. He has also studied at the Université de Paris VI and at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin with the support of a DAAD Research Fellowship. Ryan’s writing has appeared in PAJ and Theatre Journal. 

His primary field of study concerns the relationship between live performance and technology. Movement provides the lynchpin for this work, which articulates an emergent aesthetic paradigm based on a traditionally static construct, the screen. In contrast to conventional notions of televisual technology, he reimagines "the screen" as both an actual partition and a concept generated by a formal process that employs motion to mediate phenomena excluded from theatrical representation. The development of this theory proceeds through close readings of artists who explore the disciplinary margins between dance, installation art, and film, including Chantal Akerman, Yvonne Rainer, and William Forsythe. His current research considers this emergent mode of aesethetic mediation in literature and performances that use translation as a theme to explore the experience of individuals relegated to cultural margins, especially women and immigrants. These artistic applications of translation also lay the groundwork for an upcoming project on sound art and sonic performance.

Ryan maintains a website on the subject of performance at http://ryanplatt.net/.

Regular Classes

DA/DR100 History of Performance

DR200 Experimental & Expanded Cinema

DA211 Historical Perspectives in Dance

DA/DR224 Contemporary Performance: 1950-Present

DA/DR326 Performance Studies

DA/DR327 Feminist Performance

DA/DR329 Queer Performance and Body Politics

Courses

  • DR100 – History of Performance

Education

    B.A. Amherst College, 2001

    M.A. Cornell University, 2007

    Ph.D. Cornell University, 2010

This is the Department of Theatre and Dance