Dr. Gary Balfantz led a seminar on Performance Studies on Tuesday, October 17, as part of the University Forum series. Balfantz told the audience, composed of mostly faculty and administration, that he would be speaking about What we do in my departmenthow we fit in as a discipline, what we do to our performance studies students and how we do it.  
Dr. Balfantz began the seminar with a group reading of the poem Mag by Carl Sandburg, in the same format he uses when students are working on a new performance piece.  He then spoke about how Performance Studies has evolved as a discipline and what the four approaches are to performance studies.  These approaches include the act of communication, whereby the performance attempts to convey a message to the audience; the act of self-discovery, which allows audience members to gain knowledge about themselves; the theatrical and dramatic act, which is guided by aesthetic principles; and finally, the act of literary criticism, where the performance functions are an act of criticism. Next, Dr. Balfantz spoke about productions on campus, explaining that there are generally two or three traditional productions performed each year and that the other half of performances done are non-traditional, such as last years performance of A Small Good Thing by Raymond Carver and the upcoming production of Incident at Thompson Slough and Other Stories by David Lee. Because Balfantz is the only professor on campus that teaches performance, he began the Superior Festival as a way To bring other academics and scholars to campus performing for the sake of dialogue and pedagogy.  
The final activity of the afternoon was Dr. Balfantz revisiting Mag and explaining how performers use dramatistic analysis, which asks questions of performance pieces and is designed to elicit responses from the performer that will shape their performances.  The seminar ended with performances by two of Dr. Balfantzs students, Stacy Charbonneau, who performed Of War and Irony by Aaron James Roberts, and Alani Mechel Weathers-Staten, who performed Aint I a Woman, Sojourner Truths famous speech.  
