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Sara Jane Bailes

Assistant Professor

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Bio

Education: MA and PhD in Performance Studies (Fulbright Scholar), Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, 1998/2005. BA Theatre and English, University of Lancaster, UK, 1988.

Sara Jane Bailes is a performance maker, writer, and educator who collaborates with artists internationally and across disciplines as dramaturg, mentor, and co-creator. She’s interested in the political and ethical modes of friendship that develop through art practice and pedagogy, and the temporary collective, social agreements that can be generated through making and teaching. Among numerous publications, she’s the author of Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011) and co-editor of Beckett and Musicality (2014). She writes in long and short form, creatively and critically, publishing widely on contemporary experimental performance, theatre, and live art practices in print, live, video, and web-based contexts.

Awards

Macgeorge Fellow (International Arts Fellowship), University of Melbourne; Arts Council England (ACE); Arts and Humanities Research Council; Outstanding Teaching Award (University of Sussex); Willy Gorrissen Award (Writing Centre, NYU); Fulbright International Scholar.

Publications

Selected Works: 

“Disappointment Island” in Things That Go Through Your Mind When Falling: The Work of Forced Entertainment. Berlin: Spector Books, 2023, pp.286-289

“In Motion” in Black Body Amnesia: Poems and Other Speech Acts, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko. New York: Wendy’s Subway Document Series, 2022, pp.149-172

“‘All We Have is Words, All We Have is Worlds’- language, looping and the work of Tim Etchells” in Live Art in the UK: Contemporary Performances of Precarity (ed. Maria Chatzichristodoulou). London: Bloomsbury Methuen, 2020, pp.21-44

“‘Ten Ton truck stuck on a hill’: reflections on a decade or more of failure” in 7 Invitations: Two years of Glasshouse, New York. (eds. Lital Dotan and Eyal Perry). New York: Glasshouse ArtLifeLab. December 2014, pp.50-61

“‘Dear Participant’ – training, rehearsal and response in the work of Goat Island Performance Group and Francis Alÿs.” Theatre, Dance and Performance Training. Vol.4(1), 2013, pp. 4-29

“Floored”, “How to Avoid Accidents”, “Last (and First) Minutes of the Year” for Quick Fictions (performed live and archived with commissioned short film), Myriad Editions (2008-14)

1001 nights cast: a durational performance (live, written, web-streamed and web-archived), Barbara Campbell, 21 June 2005 - 17 March 2008. Texts contributed: 692, 795 and 911. http://1001.net.au/

The Last Performance [dot org]. A constraint-based collaborative writing, archiving and text-visualization project responding to the theme of lastness, 2007-2009. Judd Morrisey, Goat Island & 183 additional contributors. 35 texts contributed. Funded by the Andy Warhol Foundation

“Distracted,” commissioned for The Institute of Failure, May, 2002, by Tim Etchells and Matthew Goulish (Shooting Live Artists project, funded by The Culture Company, Arts Council England, BBC and European Regional Development Fund).

Personal Statement

I maintain a daily writing practice and am interested in performance and writing, or, performance as a way of writing (how does performance 'write'?). I'm interested in all kinds of composition and time-based arts (how and where do we begin? How do we end?) and the ways text can show up in performance, and how language translates from word to gesture to choreographic system, sound and spatial dramaturgy. I enjoy working at the intersections of different practices, for example, performance and sculpture, drawing and painting, fiber and materials and sound. I'm trying to finish a book on chairs and performance.

Courses

Title Department Catalog Term

Description

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.

Class Number

1514

Credits

3

Description

This course examines a variety of conceptual approaches to the notion of the 'script' as a performative tool. Students study and interpret many forms and strategies that write performance, including plays, monologues, text more broadly, poetic form, choreography (as a practice that defines and articulates space), found narratives, instruction-based events, scores, diagrams and public actions. Working with audio, video artists' books/writings, sited work and live writing, the class engages with an expanded understanding of 'scripted text' not only as a medium for inspiration and future transmission but also as documentation. Emphasis is on developing a writing practice through research, ongoing exercises to develop your writing, and live presentation. You¿ll produce original writing for performance both collaboratively and individually.

Class Number

2157

Credits

3

Description

This studio course examines concepts of time, duration and endurance in
performative acts and time-based art. It explores the materiality of time and its
surprising and sometimes unruly creativity in performance, in everyday life activities
and in mass geopolitical events. How does slowness, super-speed or arrested
movement alter perception? Is there a politics of resistance in durational persistence
and endurance? How does memory, history and the flooded simultaneity of the
present haunt our experience of time?

You¿ll consider the effects of different events where time unravels or remains
fundamental to the structure and potentiality of the event - from pilgrimage and
procession to enforced acts of migration and translocation, from 35 second to 24
hour and year-long performances. Choosing performance as our lens and object
of study we¿ll consider the way time alters our perception of experience and the
memory of events.

Students investigate propositions and ideas in a workshop situation. Course work
includes the creation of 3-5 individual works, weekly reading/viewing and writing
responses, as well as creative response to the work of others.

Class Number

2187

Credits

3

Description

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.

Class Number

2520

Credits

3

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.

Class Number

1088

Credits

3

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.

Class Number

2320

Credits

3 - 6