Performance: Courses

Frozen IN>TENSITIES will invite 3 International performance makers to each teach a one week intensive workshop experiment. We imagine the experiments to be focused around contemporary concepts around current performance making / concerns from the artists. These include Live Negotiations, prompts and experiments in getting the body to move, the phenomena of the museological, the archival and new interjections of outsider artists and public active participation. At the end of each week, the participants in the class will present the outcome of their working week to the public and in the Sullivan Galleries.

This course introduces the student to a wide spectrum of performance forms including performance in every day life, rituals, folk forms, artists' actions, experimental dance and theatre, activist performance, and intermedia forms. Students learn the history of performance practices, explore theoretical issues , and develop individual and collaborative works. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

What are the concerns that drive one's creative practice? How does one set the terms for its future development? This course offers strategies for the evaluation and communication of students' individual practice as artists, designers and/or scholars. Through essential readings, studio projects, and writing, students will generate narratives about how and why they make art. To do so, they will investigate methods (visual, critical, written, and creative) for the reconsideration of their work and of its aims and priorities. Individual mentoring with the faculty member is a central and dedicated component of the class as a means of fostering the self-identification of goals and priorities. Students will also examine historical and contemporary precedents that relate to their own work in order to consider the ways in which their individual explorations can be brought into dialogue with other perspectives. Students participate in broad ranging discussions about the present status and future prospects of art and design through workshops, dialogues, and collaborations both in the class and in SAIC-wide conversations with other Sophomore Studio Seminars. An important function of this course is to build upon these insights in forming a practical plan that helps students effectively map the curriculum and resources of SAIC into their own needs. For more information see http://blogs.saic.edu/sophseminar/

This course explores the practice of contemporary artists and art movements engaged in site specific performance and interventions; and the impact of performance and the media on contemporary society and cultural memory. Students engage with the community to create 'performance experiments' outside of the School by researching charged sites, discovering historical, political, and personal memory, and transforming perceptions of the site using live performance, sound, or other interventions. Students work together in small groups as participants, documenters, and observers and present their findings to the class as live or media performances.

How do you choreograph a sustained semester-length action? How do you create a movement score watching the night sky, or a gross anatomical body in a cadaver laboratory? This course develops actions, tasks and visual movement that ask how to perform attention/distraction/exhaustion/lightness/repetition/sequence/form/miniature and monumental dances. Art works include Marie Cool, Tehching Hsieh, Simon Whitehead, Writings of Andre Lepecki, Mike Pearson.

What is the event of time? How does slowness implicate perception? Is there a cultural politics of resistance in durational persistence? What is the difference between a work that is timed by the clock and an activity whose length is determined by the time it takes to complete? How do memory, history, and current affairs ghost the time of the event? How does ephemerality migrate and leave its mark? This course examines concepts of time in performative acts and time-based art. It explores the materiality of time and its unruly creativity. Students investigate these challenges in a workshop situation combining studio work, readings, and discussions. The class draws on diverse sources including the writings of Bergson, the ceremonies of pilgrimage, and the study of migratory gestures and its traces.

Exploring and exploding the idea of what it means to be 'real' and 'fake' in performance, this course looks into the creation of artistic alter egos and the utilization of unreliable narratives as a means of reconfiguring and interrogating ones practice. The notion of 'inauthenticity' will be investigated as a performative strategy - from imaginary actions to imaginary oeuvres, what are the implications for the artists identity if a conscious decision is made not to do it 'for real'? Through biographical sleight of hand, and economy with the documented truth, the course will ask you to take your practice into a fictional realm, creating alternative histories and contradictory interpretations of yours and others work.

Students will explore how the body?s presence, movement and language was historically and is contemporarily used to frame, describe, subvert, and oppose normative expectations, legislation, and systems of power. Examining queerness and queer theory, students will explore how tactics of gender bending, shape shifting, flash mobbing, and protesting have been employed as performance acts in which the body becomes a subversive tool inciting dialogue. From Stonewall to Abu Ghraib, Judith Butler to Split Britches, students will learn the history of queered performance practices, and develop individual and collaborative works.

This advanced seminar and production studio aims to examine the politics of tourism and the artistic methodologies available for engaging critically with the discourse surrounding the tourist, and its transformed objects: the city, the street, the ruin, the native inhabitant, etc. Our research will be guided by questions such as: Can we look at traveling itineraries as an art form, as a form of knowledge and experience? How do we 'perform the city'? How do we walk in the city? How do our actions transform the city, and how do we relate our creative processes to tourism, and the relatively new subjectivity of the tourist. How do we mediate the city through our performances? Is our gaze different from the gaze of the tourist? The course is designed for both advanced undergraduates and graduates interested in developing their own projects. Students create performances based on their interests and in response to trips in the Chicago area at different location (touristic attractions, as well as 'ruins', old theaters, the remains of White City, Gary Indiana, etc.)

Explore the connections between fashion, costume, performance, and production. This summer course works toward the goal of exhibiting works created in class at the Art Institute of Chicago in conjunction with the opening of Impressionism, Fashion and Modernity for the Benefit Gala. Alternative methods of garment construction is used as well as established methods. Focusing on four elements: time, space, the performer's body, and costume, students work both within and between the areas of fashion, costume and performance art.

This course introduces the student to a wide spectrum of performance forms including performance in every day life, rituals, folk forms, artists' actions, experimental dance and theatre, activist performance, and intermedia forms. Students learn the history of performance practices, explore theoretical issues , and develop individual and collaborative works. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

This course introduces the student to a wide spectrum of performance forms including performance in every day life, rituals, folk forms, artists' actions, experimental dance and theatre, activist performance, and intermedia forms. Students learn the history of performance practices, explore theoretical issues , and develop individual and collaborative works. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

As an introduction to the practice of contemporary puppetry, this class presents the vocabulary and language of the puppet as a means to theatermaking. Design practices and performance techniques are presented for the basic traditions of puppetry: the hand, rod, shadow, string puppet, bunraku and larger-than-human puppets. From this perspective, original works for the theater are created through, conception, design, improvisation and script development. Students build and perform original works for the puppet theater.

This course considers ways in which objects can be literally and symbolically animated by performance contexts, and how we lend objects agency when they act as repositories of our dreams and desires, and as symbols of power. At the same time we?ll look at the various ways in which bodies are objectified, 'onstage' and in the wider social sphere, from decoys and prosthetic limbs to exercise fads, religious practices and advertising. What are the implications of these kinds of objectification for violence, devotion and performance presence? We use durational, nomadic, collaborative, and ritual formats to investigate these questions, in conjunction with an exhibition of performances and performance installations in the Sullivan Galleries. Points of reference for the course is Marcel Mauss? theory of gift economies, Georges Bataille?s notion of ritual sacrifice and Steven Connor?s Cultural History of Ventriloquism.

How do you perform a letter of exchange or a performance caught on tape 20 years ago? This class will work between the studio and Special Collections housed at SAIC. Students will work at the Video Data Bank, The Randolph Street Gallery Archives and the Roger Brown Study Collection. Working on location at these collections, students will re-perform, re-imagine, re-enact, investigate and discover possible / impossible ways to look at an archive.

This course explores how one can successfully collaborate and produce collectively. What does it take to create collaboratively? What does it take to establish a participatory production? How are these relationships initiated, formed, build upon? How does one create trust, a sense of authorship, or authenticity? How does one go about working together? How does one set intentions, define roles, look at potential? In this class we focus on performance and video based practices and look at different models and strategies for collaboration and participation. The goal is to develop throughout the semester works of a collaborative nature. This can mean you are working together with your fellow students on one piece or develop a community based project, or any type of project that has been co-created and finds its meaning exactly through that careful process of give and take, mutual interest and open engagement.

This course will consist of a series of after hours maneuvers - from workshops and discussions on insomnia and somnambulism, to offsite activities such as urban stargazing and people watching in all night diners, students will create and experience performances, walks and installations, both site specific and time specific. How darkness can be used as form and content? How can the presence of the night enable the exploration of forgotten and overlooked spaces in urban and rural contexts?

This studio class draws on an eclectic blend of original 'Pocha Nostra' research-based performance exercises investigating 'living dioramas', experimental performance methodologies, Suzuki, dance, ritual practice, conflict resolution techniques and other strategic forms. The techniques evolve from sacred and intimate spaces of human presence, to baroque, highly aesthetic and politicized performances of living murals, human altars, and performance jam sessions. Students create 'hybrid personas,' short performances, spoken word texts, and/or visual media pieces based on their own complex identities and personal sense of politics, race, and gender. Readings and discussions focus on performance theory, popular culture and cultural politics.

This seminar provides a forum for in-depth dialogue and investigation of students' individual work within the contemporary context of performance practices and studies. The focus this semester will be on the aesthetics and politics of ?action? within the present socio-political context. What constitutes an action? How do we articulate the meaning of actions in relationship to performance? How are we constituted by actions? How do we become agents in relation to our work? The class will explore topics like: action theory, public address, forum theatre and legislative theatre, dance theatre, gender performativity and tourism through readings by Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Augusto Boal, Peggy Phelan, Judith Butler, Donald Davidson, Boris Groys, Juan Roca I Albert, etc and will look at works by Allan Kaprow, Ana Mendieta, Pina Bausch, Tania Bruguera, Sharon Hayes, Ai Weiwei, Daniel G Andujar, Artur Zmijewski, Francis Alys etc. Group discussions, readings, writing, and presentation will be engaged as a means for students to construct a critical discourse of their work and develop a sustainable art practice.