| Introduction to Performance |
1101 (001) |
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Wed
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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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.
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Class Number
1514
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Area of Study
Gender and Sexuality
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| Puppetry And Performance |
2005 (001) |
Blair Thomas |
Fri
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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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.
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Class Number
2255
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| BODY POSITIVE |
2900 (051) |
Erica R. Mott |
Mon
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
What does one¿s emergent creative practice have to do with one¿s body in the world? How do we maintain the resilience and vulnerability required of artists and art students when we already feel so vulnerable in our everyday lives? How, as audiences and community members, do we share and receive feedback generously while still honoring our own lived experiences?
This course offers strategies for students to explore, reflect upon, and connect common themes and interests in the development of an emerging creative practice that will serve as the basis of their ongoing studies at SAIC and beyond. While the focus of this course will be on both embodied practices and the politics of having a body, it is open to all disciplines and areas of study. Through studio assignments, readings, viewings, and writing projects, students will generate a clearer understanding about how and why they make art, and how to continue making their work authentically.
Prerequisites
Prerequisite: Must be a sophomore to enroll.
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Class Number
1763
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| Material Actions |
3018 (001) |
Ginger Krebs |
Thurs
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
This course is a laboratory for researching physical materials, and the ways that we might or already do interact with them. We will explore the materiality of our bodies by enacting Fluxus scores and inventing our own, experimenting with taste and touch, and investigating material states that elude clear classification, like the viscous. We'll make tools that extend the body's reach and alter its impact, and site performances in material environments that we build.
We'll consider object-oriented ontology (which maintains that objects exist independently of human perception) as we learn strategies for accessing non-human qualities of presence from Japanese butoh, bunraku and clown, which deconstruct human behavior in order to enchant the non-human or highlight the humor inherent in social interaction.
We'll considering the role of ritual objects as repositories for human desire, and reflect on psychological and symbolic relationships to materials in stories by Robin Wall Kimmerer and Franz Kafka. And we'll trace networks through which materials move between our bodies and larger environments, through readings, research presentations and field trips to study municipal infrastructure in the city.
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Class Number
1517
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
MacLean 2M
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| Expanded Line |
3039 (001) |
Jonas Müller-Ahlheim, Camille Casemier Johnson |
Sat
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
In Person
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Description
This course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We explore performance through drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which lines can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied marks and vice versa. We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as an embodied mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Francis Alÿs, Lygia Pape, The Gutai Group, Valie Export, Remy Charlip, Amy Sillman, among many other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown, Raven Chacon, Joan Jonas; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, John Divola and William Camargo, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts, Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, The Aesthetics of the Performative by Erika Fischer Lichte, Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances. All formats will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose.
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Class Number
1522
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Area of Study
Community & Social Engagement, Public Space, Site, Landscape
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| Expanded Line |
3039 (001) |
Jonas Müller-Ahlheim, Camille Casemier Johnson |
Sat
10:00 AM - 4:00 PM
In Person
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Description
This course looks at the role of the observer and the performer through drawing and performance. Both practices respond to each other by mapping movement and moving mappings. We explore performance through drawing as a description, a medium, and a score for an embodied gesture. We use drawing to imagine movement and to move concepts, in which lines can act as tracing and foreseeing. Performances become descriptions and embodied marks and vice versa. We will look at performance art, presence practice, being seen and remarking on what will remain unseen, scores, methods of performance documentation and notation, as well as drawing as an embodied mark making and thinking process. We will look at artists like Francis Alÿs, Lygia Pape, The Gutai Group, Valie Export, Remy Charlip, Amy Sillman, among many other artists at the intersection of drawing as a performance practice like Janine Antoni, David Hammons, Stanley Brown, Raven Chacon, Joan Jonas; Artists in conversations such as Paul Chan and Martha Rosler, John Divola and William Camargo, Matthew Goulish and Lin Hixson. We will work through texts like Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness by Hendrik Folkerts, Walkaround Time: Dance and Drawing in the Twentieth Century by Cornelia H. Butler, The Aesthetics of the Performative by Erika Fischer Lichte, Death of the Author by Roland Barthes, and How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch. Working in and with public space as surface, students should expect to blur the lines between traditional and non-traditional drawings and performances. All formats will be approachable, self determined, nothing more or less than walking if you so choose.
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Class Number
1522
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Area of Study
Community & Social Engagement, Public Space, Site, Landscape
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| Generative Seminar: Writing from the Body |
3046 (001) |
Ginger Krebs |
Tues
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
This class explores the relationship between language and physicality. It is designed equally for performance makers who want to develop their writing, and for writers who want to experiment with liveness.
Students will write in class - out of meditative bodies, out of sweaty bodies, out of self-conscious bodies, out of exultant bodies. They will also bring in found and original texts, and work with the body to activate and recontextualize them, to find correlations and contradictions that throw new light on their words.
The class aims to invite surprise by disrupting habitual postures and ways of moving and writing. By changing speed, scale, duration and context, the writing process will be strategically interrupted by action, and physical actions will be 'perforated' with opportunities for reflection. Attending to different sites in their bodies will offer students potent portals to memory, and readings that range from phenomenology to disability studies will offer further perspective and inspiration.
Class sessions will involve collaborative word games, instruction-based events, experiential anatomy, splicing together live and recorded speech (text to speech, live captioning, latency, and more), and traveling outside of the classroom to explore interactions between bodies and architecture.
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Class Number
2450
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
MacLean 2M
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| Performing Identities |
3070 (001) |
Sungjae Lee |
Wed
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
The slogan ¿the personal is political¿ sounds obvious today. Artworks rooted in diverse identities, cultures, and stories have been actively produced, and some have received global attention. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Ana Mendieta, and contemporary auto-fiction writers such as Ocean Vuong, Brontez Purnell, and Saeed Jones. It's empowering yet confusing since they are mostly sad, tragic, and heartbreaking. Should our lived experiences be traumatic since they are sellable? What is the less exploitative way to materialize our bodies and narratives in art practices? How can we talk about joy and happiness when we haven't learned culturally? In this course, we will investigate the power of identities and personal narratives, and safe ways of sharing them in art, with the aim of acknowledgment, grief, healing, and eventually celebration. This multidisciplinary course explores the wide spectrum of identities and autobiographical stories in visual art, literature, pop culture, and social media. Anchored on the conversation on how their identities and narratives have been consumed in the market, we will research how to process, reframe, and visualize our pain in order to picture a better future--referencing José Esteban Muñoz¿s queer futurity. Local artists and curators will visit the class and share their experiences of materializing stories for artworks or exhibitions. Along with assignments such as readings and research writings, students develop, produce, and present their live performance pieces as midterm and final projects.
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Class Number
2113
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
MacLean 2M
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| PERF: Professional Performance Practice |
3921 (001) |
Joseph Ravens/Rabensdorf |
Thurs
8:30 AM - 11:15 AM
In Person
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Description
How does a performance artist create a sustainable career and create a sustainable community in the world after college? This course will provide the nuts and bolts of how to build a career as a performance artist. We will delve into the politics of curating and representing diverse practices. Students will create their own public performance festivals in public or in site-specific spaces learning the mechanisms of getting funding and writing proposals.
Prerequisites
Prerequisite: Sophomore seminar course
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Class Number
1592
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| PS:Dragging Performance |
4005 (001) |
Ále Campos |
Mon/Wed
6:45 PM - 9:15 PM
In Person
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Description
This course will consider the ways in which performance practices can be queered - particularly through the lens of drag performance. While we will cover a selection of queer theory texts, a history of drag performance both in and out of the US, and consider contemporary examples of drag artists or artists employing drag in their work throughout the semester, students will not be expected to perform in drag (unless they so desire to!). Rather this course will encourage students to use drag as a conceptual and/or practical framework for thinking about and generating live performance work. We will think about the idea of the mask or the filter as a means for materializing personas or ¿altered/enhanced¿ states of performing, a ¿bodied¿ presence and playing with the gaze. We¿ll explore how drag can encourage us to harness the anecdotal and moments of extreme intimacy, hypervisibility and vulnerability as well create distance and opacity. Image making, music/sound, text, movement and time will all be equal ingredients in our work. Drag is in constant mutation, always reflecting/confronting society and politicizing the body; this should encourage us to understand the ways in which we can hold up performance as a mirror to the world around us. Some examples of artists, groups and texts we will look at will include Sin Wai Kin, Glitch Feminism by Legacy Russell, The Chicago Black Drag Council, Zorroridrag, Pacha Queer, Drag: A British History, Joan Jett Blakk, Vaginal Davis, Audre Lorde¿s Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power, Linda Simpson¿s Drag Explosion, Meredith Heller¿s Queering Drag.
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Class Number
1515
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
MacLean 2M
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| PS:Site Practices |
4005 (002) |
Erica R. Mott |
Fri
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
This advanced performance class is intended to give the department the flexibility to offer specialized topics as needed. A wide range of aesthetic and practical concerns are addressed, reflecting contemporary forms and issues in the performance field. See the current topic description for a description of the topic to be offered in the particular semester.
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Class Number
1516
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
MacLean 2M
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| PERF: Performing Acts of Kindness |
4912 (001) |
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Mon
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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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: Professional practice course
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Class Number
1163
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Area of Study
Class, Race, Ethnicity, Community & Social Engagement, Gender and Sexuality
Location
MacLean 2M
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| Graduate Performance Seminar |
5016 (001) |
Roberto Sifuentes |
Thurs
12:15 PM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
A laboratory for experiment in terms of thought and action, this interdisciplinary critique seminar explores a series of key contemporary themes and issues in the area of live art. The course aims to be both topical and provocative, and as participants, you are invited to take a position (or play devil¿s advocate) in relation to a series of burgeoning topics and issues that are currently forming contemporary discourses concerning art and performance. In particular, this class will have a specific emphasis on interrogating presentational modes and discursive techniques. Through readings, discussion, and presentations, students will have an active stake in the form and nature of these discussions. The course is structured in two parts. In the first part, classes will focus on the activation and physicalization of what we have read. We will undertake practical workshops, embodied theory, provocations, and performance actions as a means of enacting the discourses we have explored. Students will examine their multidisciplinary work through the lens of performance. In the second part of the course, each student will present their current practice in the form of a performance, studio visit or other mode best suited for their work. Various guest artists, scholars and curators will be invited to participate in these final studio critiques.
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Class Number
1967
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| Encounters with the Past |
5040 (001) |
Vanessa Damilola Macaulay |
Tues
9:00 AM - 3:00 PM
In Person
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Description
What happens when the past disrupts the present? In this course, students engage in studio practice to explore how archival traces can be reanimated and transformed. Archival gestures may serve as scores for improvisation; silences may become performative landscapes; fragments may be disrupted, recomposed, or recontextualised. These explorations raise critical questions: How can we transform archival fragments into new performative works? What role does documentation play in preserving, transforming, or reinventing performance? As artists, how do we navigate the limits and boundaries of documenting ephemeral work? Graduate students will undertake individual and collaborative projects, integrating archival research with performance methodologies, critical reflection, and interdisciplinary experimentation. By the end of the course, students will have created original performative work that shows nuanced engagement with the archive as a tool, a provocation, and a site of aesthetic, ethical, and historical inquiry.
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Class Number
2112
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Credits
3
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Department
Performance
Location
280 Building Rm 012
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| Grad Projects:Performance |
6009 (001) |
Vanessa Damilola Macaulay |
TBD - TBD
In Person
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Description
Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.
Prerequisites
Open to MFA, MFAW and MAVCS students only
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Class Number
2319
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Credits
3 - 6
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Department
Performance
Location
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| Grad Projects:Performance |
6009 (002) |
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TBD - TBD
In Person
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Description
Taken every semester, the Graduate Projects courses allow students to focus in private sessions on the development of their work. Students register for 6 hours of Graduate Project credit in each semester of study.
Prerequisites
Open to MFA, MFAW and MAVCS students only
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Class Number
2320
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Credits
3 - 6
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Department
Performance
Location
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