Sara Jane Bailes

This course introduces the student to basic elements of performance art; body and objects, form and content, space and time, and enactment and documentation. The exploration will be encouraged by visiting artists' workshops or field trips to performance events throughout the course. Students develop individual and collaborative projects infusing their own narratives and making real human connections. Primarily a beginner's course but open to all levels of students.

States of Failure is an interdisciplinary studio course that holds the following questions core to its investigation: what might it mean to fail in performance or fail at performance? We¿ll take seriously and playfully the idea that radical new possibilities are revealed when things are agitated through processes that value failure as a way to understand things differently, to practise otherwise, deviating from an already determined logic or prescribed outcome. What happens when an intention fails or subverts the predicted outcomes of an act, an interaction or an object? What might occur when we allow ourselves to take other routes, when we let things slide or just go on too long?
Together we will consider what becomes available when as artists we diverge into disobedient or unanticipated behaviors. What might a material, an object or a state of being, doing or making reveal about its conditions and potentiality when it is not fit for purpose, inefficient, exhausted, collapsing before our very eyes? 
Alongside developing your own practice, we draw on relevant histories of performance and body art, sculpture, painting, theatre, music and sound art, social practice and experimental writing. We¿ll interrogate how the state of something fails and we¿ll scrutinise failure itself (its uses, affordances, terms and conditions). Our work is focused through the lens of performance where failure is understood as vital, generative, unpredictable and inclusive.

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.