About PSi and Wits School of Arts
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About PSi
Performance Studies international (PSi) is a professional association founded in 1997 to promote communication and exchange among artists, thinkers, activists and academics working in the field of performance.
Over the past decades, performance has developed as an umbrella term for scholarly as well as artistic research engaged with a wide variety of topics. The research conducted under this umbrella term is interdisciplinary and is strongly rooted in the interaction between theory and practice.
It is a dynamic field of encounters rather than a discipline grounded in one particular methodology or tradition. PSi represents this field and stimulates its development by initiating conferences and other events, by means of awards and bursaries, by facilitating the circulation of information and knowledge, through working groups dedicated to important issues in the field of performance research, by means of an archive and oral history project, and with a network and a lexicon aimed towards the further development of performance research and education in a global context.
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About Wits School of Arts
The Wits School of Arts (WSoA) is an arts-based department within the University of the Witwatersrand that houses and offers programmes in Cultural Policy and Management, Digital Arts, Drama for Life, Film and Television, Fine Arts, History of Arts, Interdisciplinary Arts and Culture, Music, and Theatre and Performance. The School of Arts aims to advance excellence in research, teaching and learning as its mission. The Wits School of Arts combines critical inquiry with artistic practice in ways that engage in transformative ways with our contemporary urban, African and global contexts. In advancing world-class research, the Theatre and Performance Department and Drama for Life Department have joint efforts in organising the Psi#28 Conference.
Theatre and Performance
The Theatre and Performance Department at the Wits School of Arts is an internationally recognized department in theatre and performance training that aims to produce graduates who are informed and critically aware practitioners. It's mission is to introduce a range of conceptual and creative vocabularies and practices to students as they pertain to interdisciplinary theatre and performance modes in South Africa. The department embraces students who enjoy intellectual adventure and the complex challenges and rewards posed by indigenous and globally established systems of knowledge and practice. The Theatre and Performance Department values creative practice and orthodox research within the arts that stimulates process driven practices, collaboration, experimentation, co- direction, co-publication, and shared ownership of intellectual property and space.Drama for Life
Drama for Life is internationally recognized as the University of the Witwatersrand’s unique postgraduate academic, research, and community engagement department that brings together the disciplines of Applied Drama and Theatre, Performance Ethnography, Performance Studies, Arts Education, Drama Therapy, and Expressive Arts Therapies within the context of a critical reflexive praxis. The Drama for Life mission is to enhance dialogue for purposes of social transformation and healing through arts-based research, teaching and learning, and community engagement. We achieve this through critical reflexive and therapeutic arts approaches that relate to current social realities and the rich indigenous knowledge of Africa