A person submerged in blankets reaches their hand out

Andy Giovale BFA 23 Title: Sandtimer Photo Credit: Ruby Que

Performance

Undergraduate Overview

Undergraduate Overview

The School of the Art Institute of Chicago's (SAIC) Performance department is one of the only undergraduate contemporary performance departments in the country. We are known nationally and internationally as a center for engagement, research, and experimentation of body-focused performance art practice in an art-and-design school context.

We put a strong emphasis on contemporary art with practices and theories including:

  • Live actions
  • Interactive digital technologies
  • Movement research
  • Tactical and site performance
  • Performance installation
  • Abandoned practices
  • Re-enactment/Reperformance
  • Archiving the document
  • Performance writing

The Performance program's distinguished and professionally active faculty represent a broad range of experimental performance approaches ranging from solo performance and material actions to activist participatory theater, gender performance, experimental movement performance, performance lectures, re-enactment, networked virtual performance/mixed reality, and curating.

Possible Performance Paths

Undergraduate students concentrating their BFA in Performance are encouraged to consider their art-making process as a interdisciplinary practice that can range across various departments including, but not limited to, Fiber and Material Studies; Sculpture; Performance; Fashion Design; Art and Technology / Sound Practices; Film, Video, New Media, and Animation; and Ceramics. Students are encouraged to confer with faculty to map a course of interdisciplinary study that reflects the latest developments in contemporary practices in these fields.

Below are some pathway suggestions to consider:

  • Body/Performance: Intro to Performance; The Performing Body; Performing Next Feminisms; Movement Research/Improvisation; Bodies in Motion; Durations: Long, Medium, Short; and Movement/Presence: Body as Site
  • Object Performance: Material Actions, Puppetry, and Performance and Event Production
  • Media Performance: Performance Media; Mixed Reality Performance; Performance and Video; Live Presence/Virtual Spaces; Performing for the Camera; and Fusions: Film, Video, Performance
  • Installation/Site-specific Performance: Site Practice; Tactical Performance; Event Production; and Performance Installation
  • Collaborative Performance: Systems, structures: Methods of creation; Make it Strange; Collaboration/Directing for Performance; Group Work; and Between Theatre and Performance.
  • Critical/Activist Social and Political Performance: Extreme bodies in Performance; Border Crossing; Performing Next Feminisms; and Tactical Performance
  • Performance Writing: Body/Text; Performative Writing; Scripting/Acting for Performance; and Narrative in Performance
  • Re-enactment/Reperformance: Parasitic Practices; Performing the Document; Performing Fictions; and Performance Documentation

Undergraduate Admissions Requirements & Curriculum Overview

  • To apply to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), you will need to fill out an application and submit your transcripts, artist's statement, and letters of recommendation. And most importantly, we require a portfolio of your best and most recent work—work that will give us a sense of you, your interests, and your willingness to explore, experiment, and think beyond technical art, design, and writing skills.

    In order to apply, please submit the following items:  

    Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Portfolio

    Submit 10–15 pieces of your best and most recent work. We will review your portfolio and application materials for merit scholarship once you have been admitted to SAIC.

    When compiling a portfolio, you may concentrate your work in a single discipline or show work in a breadth of media. The portfolio may include drawings, prints, photographs, paintings, film, video, audio recordings, sculpture, ceramics, fashion designs, graphic design, furniture, objects, architectural designs, websites, video games, sketchbooks, scripts, storyboards, screenplays, zines, or any combination of the above.

    Learn more about applying to SAIC's Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio, or view our portfolio preparation guide for more information.

  • Studio69
    • CP 1010 Core Studio Practice I (3)
    • CP 1011 Core Studio Practice II (3)
    • CP 1020 Research Studio I (3)
    • CP 1022 Research Studio II (3)
    • SOPHSEM 2900 (3)
    • PROFPRAC 3900 (3)
    • CAPSTONE 4900 (3)
    • Studio Electives (48)

    PROFPRAC and CAPSTONE are now required for new incoming students beginning in the 2015-16 academic year.

    		 
    Art History15
    • ARTHI 1001 World Cultures/Civilizations: Pre-History—19th Century Art and Architecture (3)
    • Art History Elective at 1000 level (3)
    • Art History Electives (9)
    		 
    Liberal Arts30
    • ENGLISH 1001 First Year Seminar I (3)
    • ENGLISH 1005 First Year Seminar II (3)
    • Natural Science (6)
    • Social Science (6)
    • Humanities (6)
    • Liberal Arts Electives (6)
    		 
    General Electives6
    • Studio, Art History, Liberal Arts, AAP, or EIS
    		 
    Total Credit Hours120

    * BFA students must complete at least 6 credit hours in a class designated as "off campus study." These credits can also fulfill any of the requirements listed above and be from any of the divisions (Art History, Studio, Liberal Arts, or General Electives).

    BFA With Distinction—SAIC Scholars Program: The SAIC Scholars program is a learning community of BFA students pursuing rigorous study in both their academic coursework and their studio pathways. There are two opportunities for interested students to apply to the SAIC Scholars Program: at the time of admission to the school, and after they have completed 30 credits of study at SAIC. Students pursuing the latter option are required to formally submit an application to the Undergraduate Division. Once admitted to the SAIC Scholars Program, students are required to successfully complete a minimum of six designated scholars courses. Students who complete the program will graduate with distinction.

    BFA in Studio with Thesis Option (Liberal Arts or Visual Critical Studies): BFA students may complete a nine-credit, research-based academic thesis as part of their studies within the 126 credits for the BFA in Studio degree. BFA with Thesis course sequences are offered over 3 semesters through the departments of Liberal Arts or Visual and Critical Studies (VCS). Students who are interested in one of the thesis options should follow the steps outlined below in the beginning of the junior year.

    Requirements for the BFA: Studio Art with Liberal Arts Thesis

    Step One: Students are required to meet with the Chair of the Liberal Arts department in the beginning of their junior year. 

    Step Two: With the Department Chair's approval, the student enrolls in the following courses beginning in the spring term of their junior year:

    • SOCSCI or HUMANITY 3900 Academic Research and Writing (3 credits)
    • LIBARTS 4800 Undergraduate Thesis: Research/Writing I (3 credits)
    • CAPSTONE 4900 Liberal Arts Undergraduate Thesis: Research/Writing II (3 credits)

    Step Three: The completed thesis must be approved by both the Thesis II instructor and the Chair of Liberal Arts. Students must make a formal presentation and participate in the Undergraduate Thesis Symposium in their senior year. 

    Requirements for the BFA: Studio Art with Visual and Critical Studies (VCS) Thesis

    Step One: Students are required to meet with the Visual and Critical Studies Undergraduate Coordinator in or by the beginning of their junior year.

    Step Two: With the VCS Coordinator's approval, the student enrolls in the first of the three-course sequence beginning in the spring term of their junior year:

    • VCS 3010 Tutorial in Visual & Critical Studies (3 credits)
    • VCS 4800 Undergraduate Thesis Seminar: Research & Writing I (3 credits)
    • CAPSTONE 4900 VCS Undergraduate Thesis Seminar: Research & Writing II (3 credits)

    Step Three: Completion of thesis must be approved by both the Thesis II instructor and the VCS Undergraduate Coordinator. Students must make a formal presentation and participate in the Undergraduate VCS Thesis Symposium in the senior year.

    Total credits required for minimum residency60
    Minimum Studio credit42

Course Listing

Title Catalog Instructor Schedule

Description

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.

Class Number

1797

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

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.

Class Number

2314

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course serves as an introduction to the puppet as performing object from traditional forms to contemporary practice. The class will focus on performance techniques with only basic instruction on fabrication. Students will create short form works centered on the puppet or informed by the language of the puppet. Additionally techniques of co-performance with the puppet and the puppeteer are introduced exploring themes of the doppleganger and the other. Students are exposed to work in the field by attending 3 productions outside of class and viewing of video documentation work such as Handspring, Giselle Vienne, Geumhyung jJeong and Bread & Puppet. Additional readings on contemporary puppet theory are included. The first half of the semester specific performances techniques are introduced such as Guignol hand puppetry, overhead projector and screen and rod shadow puppetry and three-person and one-person Bunraku style doll puppetry. Also introduced are rod puppet, scroll theater, Cantastoria and toy theater performance. Each technique then includes a theme and focus for the creation of a short original work. The second half of the semester focuses on the creation of work of the student?s choosing.

Class Number

1795

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

Motion Lab is a hands on learning laboratory for movement. Students will learn different choreographic improvisation and somatic strategies including Laban and Alexander Technique, Graphic/visual and poetic scoring. Students will experiment, share and stage completed movement works. Pulling from the movement strategies of Internationally recognized choreographers and physical performance practicioners such as Johnathan Burrows, Deborah Hay, The Judson Church, SITI Co/Mary Overly/Viewpoints, La Pocha Nostra and Katherine Dunham, students will view critical works, test choreographic strategies and develop their own works. All assignments and exercises are movement based leading to the development of fully realized and staged works by the end of the semester.

Class Number

2144

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality, Playwriting/Screenwriting, Public Space, Site, Landscape

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

This studio course will examine the ways that disabled artists use their experiences of impairment to create their work. Through showings and critique, group discussions, engagement with work by and about disability art, and critical reflections, we will explore disability and access as political, social, and deeply embodied phenomena. Together, we will embody and explore practices developed by disabled artists, ultimately reaching toward a disability-informed method of making, rehearsing, and producing performance. We will engage with disability art emerging across various mediums and historical moments, such as work by Kinetic Light, Sins Invalid, Finnegan Shannon, Kayla Hamilton, Alex Dolores Salerno, Andy Slater, Matt Bodett, Jerron Herman, Molly Joyce, Shireen Hamza, Alison Kopit, Christine Sun Kim, Risa Puleo, Larissa Velez Jackson and others, as well as historical sites of disability performance such as freak shows, institutions, and medical spaces. Course work will consist of engagement with assigned materials, a personal Access Statement, one presentation on a disabled artist of your choosing, participation in class discussions, and three short performance projects.

Class Number

2145

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Art/Design and Politics

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course will examine the miraculous and menacing faces of fantasy: from proms, propaganda, internet romance scams, science fiction and Caffeine Free Diet Coke, to transformative and even healing collective rituals. The body’s vulnerability to awkwardness and fatigue often seem to contrast air brushed visions of the spectacular and miraculous. Art works that use live presence to address the imaginary can therefore encourage critical reflection about the nature of longing, even as they sweep us away. How does fantasy function for human beings? Discussions about belief, desire, nostalgia, fetishism and the sacred will be guided by readings from Slavoj Zizek, Byung-Chul Han and Hito Steyerl, and artwork by Frances Stark, Miranda July, Ligia Lewis and Jacolby Satterwhite. In this class a broad range of methods for performance practice will be considered, including those that incorporate media to access the fantastic, and those that re-invent the long history of art-as- ritual. Vocal and movement improvisation games, creative writing exercises, creative responses and small-scale assignments will support students to generate three, more substantial, projects that further their individual interests and goals.

Class Number

2138

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This course will explore the conventional divisions between Theater and Performance Art. What is behind the oft-heard claim from Marina Abramovic that “to be a performance artist one has to hate theater” and the assertion that Performance Art is “real” whereas theater is “fake?” Where did this seemingly hard edge between 'Theater' and “Performance Art” come from and has it in some cases discouraged cross-pollination between communities and disciplines? Artists and practitioners in both disciplines are making groundbreaking work that prompts urgent discussion. What potentials can arise if we create a space where practitioners of this inherently interdisciplinary medium, Performance, explore its close relative, Theater, as more than its uncanny sibling or oppressive ancestor. Students will look at artists and theorists on both sides of the 'divide' as well as those who cross lithely over the boundaries or refuse to acknowledge them at all. Students will read scripts by playwrights theorists and practitioners such as Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins, Young Jean Lee, Annie Baker, Bertolt Brecht, Katori Hall, Lynn Nottage, Samuel Beckett, Mickle Maher and Theater Oobleck, Anna Deveare Smith and others. We will look at performances by Wooster Group, Robert Wilson, My Barbarian, Terry Adkins, Colin Self, Curious Performance, Paul Chan, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Forced Entertainment, Jacolby Satterwhite and others. Students will examine and experiment with modes and practices such as: linearity; abstraction; text, script and score; the ensemble and the individual; direction; rehearsal; narrative; acting and action; music and dance; and more. The course will culminate in a collaborative performance that is devised from a text. In effect, students, having experimented with modes of presentation and formation throughout the semester, will mount a 'performance' of a 'play' that may or may not look anything like a play or a performance. While creating a collaborative work, students will have the agency to decide how collaborative, linear, abstract, experimental, textural, 'real' or 'fake' this culminating presentation might be.

Class Number

2305

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

If you had a time machine, what performance would you want to see in real-time? The ephemerality of performance means that every action, score, and gesture is held in a vice between time and space. This studio course explores the following questions: what do we do with the fragments left behind after a performance? How might we use the documentation as a blueprint for making new performances in the present? As artists, how do we play with the limits and boundaries of documenting our work? The class will learn how to utilize practical methods of interdisciplinary performance as a way of research into the documentation of performance. We will visit various archives that will inform our studio exploration. Students will encounter work from artists such as Lorraine O’Grady, Pope. L, Regina Jose Galindo, Skip Arnold, Anne Bean, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Hamad Butt, Kara Walker, and Senga Nengudi and more! Students will re-perform, re-imagine, re-enact, investigate, respond, and discover possible / impossible ways towards the idea of the documented. The course will consist of individual and collective projects investigating a different area of documenting the past: 1) Biographical/Autobiographical 2) Archival/Historical 3) Immediate/Ethnographic field research.

Class Number

2137

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

This studio seminar examines an evolving discourse around socially engaged artworks as they intersect with live performance. With particular emphasis on Chicago and its extended community of social practitioners?both artists and activists?and informed by the legacy of Chicago's own Jane Addams and John Dewey, this course investigates the social and communal realms of performance through the works of both local and international artists. Through the class, students will become familiar with the fields of performance and social practice and gain skills for engaging communities in their own practice. This course considers a variety of sources including the writings and scholarshop of Erving Goffman, Arnold Van Gennep, John Dewey, Shannon Jackson, Tom Finkelpearl, Mary Jane Jacob, and Grant Kester as well as the creative practices of Tania Bruguera, Michael Rakowitz, Suzanne Lacy, Rhodessa Jones, Augusto Boal, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Emmanuel Pratt, Theaster Gates, Rick Lowe, and others. Course work includes the creation of two individual performance projects, a mid-term research presentation with written critical response, readings and screenings with attendant discussion and written reflections.

Class Number

2139

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Community & Social Engagement

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

From Ron Athey and Kira O’Riley, to Gwendoline Robin and Stelarc, this class explores tactics and politics for using the ‘extreme body’ in contemporary performance. Pop-culture, media, and contemporary politics are examined through the lens of performance, as well as contemporary performance practice. Performance experiments, group discussions, on-going critiques, and written work are engaged as a strategy to merge art practice and theory. This is a practice-based course with material driven by the subject matter and the students’ own work. Artists and themes explored may include: The Technological Body, The Sexual, Erotic, Pornographic Body, The Altered/ Prosthetic body, The Religious/Ecstatic body, Deprivation/Endurance/Duration, among others. In this class you will: Connect with the artist’s body (yours) as the raw material for performance. Explore various strategies for individual and collaborative performance. Learn to operate in ‘Performance mode’ with exercises to heighten your awareness of present time paired with a sense of total body performativity, and consciousness of the viewer’s presence. Develop a collective performance vocabulary.

Class Number

1792

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

EVENT/PRODUCTION is a collaborative workshop in which participants will self-produce two public performances. In this class we will hone our production skills to present and contextualize individual and group performances. Considering future-audiences, we will work through notions of genealogy, community/collectivity, and “the public'. Through collaborative research and by welcoming visiting performance practitioners, producers, and curators in the classroom, we will explore histories of DIY performance, artist-led spaces and institutionalized performance presented in the ‘Fine Art’ context of the museum or gallery. Solo and group performance works will evolve through focused study of technical production skills including stage lighting, sound, cueing software (Qlab, OBS) and projection/live-feeds and streams. With emphasis on accessibility, we will program and present two public festivals of new performance.

Class Number

1794

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

How do we perform acts of kindness for our communities and ourselves? What does and can, kindness and care look like as an act and actions of expanded performance. How do we create and cultivate practices of everyday life that shift and transform? What inspires a stranger to be kind to another? What motivates someone to step out of their bubble and go out of their way to help a person they don’t know? This Capstone class will create unconventional collaborations inside and outside of SAIC, considering careful and caring ways to work with each other and other members of our community in the city of Chicago. People we will look at in this course include William Kentridge, Doris Salcedo, Carrie Mae Weems. Michael Landy, Christine Sun Kim, Tania Bruguera, Catherine Sullivan. Podcasts On Being, Hidden Brain, and writings of Katherine May, Sharon Brous, Lisa Samuels and Early AIDS Epidemic Nurses Ellen Matzer and Valery Hughes. We will also work with AIDS Foundation Chicago and Howard Brown Health Centre. Coursework will include: 1. Present a proposal with your CAPSTONE intentions that considers models of kindness and actions of self and others in the community 2. Complete a focused body of work that is presented at Howard Brown Health Centre or AIDS Foundation Chicago 3. Develop exit strategies for how to sustain a practice outside of the institute through public community engagements.

Prerequisites

Prerequisite: 3900 course

Class Number

2326

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality, Class, Race, Ethnicity, Community & Social Engagement

Location

280 Building Rm 012
A person sitting on the floor using various materials while being recorded.

Freshman and Transfer Deadline: June 1

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Camille Casemier, “Wait, Weight Sit.” Photo by Eugene Tang