How does group music making lend itself to communal feeling? How have dance movements contributed to social movements? And what of music and dance’s perceived powers to fracture social groups as well as to cause them to cohere? This course explores discourses, practices, and experiences of power and politics in performances of music and dance. We draw on contemporary interdisciplinary literature related to individual and group performances, considering topics such as the relative "agency" of musical improvisers, the widely reported experiences of collectivity in social dance, and national cultural policies that attempt to shape relations between performance and politics. The course prepares students for focused ethnographic case studies in the second half of the class by providing a theoretical introduction to concepts of "performance" and "power" in the humanities and humanistic social sciences in the course's opening weeks.