Ryan Platt
Assistant Professor of Performance Studies Colorado Collegea few words about Ryan
Ryan Platt is Assistant Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of Drama and Dance at Colorado College. 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 during a DAAD Research Fellowship in Berlin. Ryan’s writing has appeared in PAJ and Theatre Journal. His current roster of classes includes an introductory course on Performance Studies, an advanced survey of theatre in critical theory, a writing seminar on representations of AIDS, and “Locution, Location, and Locomotion in Modern Drama and Contemporary Performance,” a course which investigates artistic connections between language, space, and movement.
His recent research explores the relationship between theatre and technology in movement-based performance. Movement provides the conceptual lynchpin of his dissertation, which articulates an emergent aesthetic paradigm: screen performance. In contrast to traditional notions of televisual technology, this study proposes the screen as a conceptual model that mediates phenomena excluded from the formal construction of theatre and film. The development of this theory proceeds through close readings of artists who explore the disciplinary margins between dance, installation art, and cinema: filmmaker Chantal Akerman and choreographers Yvonne Rainer and William Forsythe. His current research considers literary examples of screen performance in texts 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 lay the groundwork for his next project, which will study “sonic performance” in sound art, language-based plays, and experimental musical theatre.
Research interests: Theatre History, Dance Studies, Performance Theory, Media Art and Theory, Sound Art, Gender Studies, Poetry and Performance, Translation
