SOLIDS:
Solid classes are based in sequential learning, most like a traditional class structure. Students will be encouraged to attend all classes; each class builds on the last.
Britt Billmeyer-Finn (she/they)
Instant Play
Instant Play is a performance art class focused on staging a play. Together as a class, we will literally stage a play that we co-create during our class time. I am inspired by the psychoanalyst, D.W. Winnicott who said, "It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found." This quote communicates the significance of relationships in our lives—both the nourishment they provide and the fear they evoke. By having a class that at its core is about relating, improvisation, embodiment, creative experimentation and communication there is an invitation to hide and be found. Through reading short performance pieces and doing generative writing, improv, visioning, communication and movement exercises we will develop our performance. Though there is an outcome, the play itself, the workshop is about engaging in a process, full of possibility (including failure) that allows us to create connection with each other and ourselves through play-ing.
Kate Grube (she/her)
PARADE STUDIES // Making the Processional Personal
What is a parade? How can we reclaim a processional as a meaningful personal pursuit? How can we use the basic elements of one to stage processionals of any size, with anything, for any reason at all? We will examine the ways that parades have been co-opted and colonized in our society, and strip away what our society thinks parades "need" to be legitimate celebrations, then find a way to engage with them in our own ways, together or individually.
Dharushana Muthulingam (she/her)
Beyond the Hero’s Journey: Storytelling to Make Sense of Care Work, Reckon with the Past, and Imagine Futures
The Hero’s Journey still dominates popular storytelling since first described over 70 years ago. This story structure is deeply rooted in 20th century American culture, reinforcing a deliberately heteropatriarchal, imperialist and individualistic Main Character. What is lost when storytelling is so narrowly conceived? We will explore the limitation of stories that can only cast Heroes, Victims and Villains. Specifically, we look at how this narrow way of storytelling struggles to make legible care work, repair, maintenance—the vast majority of labor that is done, especially by women and the working class. Drawing from postcolonial and liberation movements, we look beyond visibility and representation, to a more radical history that reclaims alternative ways of knowing, being, and sharing, striking into epistemic rebellion. We explore alternative storytelling to reckon with attempted colonial erasure; explore repetition, cycles, seasons to tell the stories of care work; and draw from diasporic speculative fiction for more imaginative futures. We will approach these through facilitated discussion, games, and writing exercises. After identifying the scope, limitations, and sociopolitical context of our culture’s dominant storytelling mode, participants will create possibilities together. Students will leave with a more expansive toolbox of storytelling techniques with which to play and generative writing.
Sabel Santa (she/they)
The Shadow and the Artist
In this class, we will explore the philosophical concept of the shadow self and how integrating this aspect of ourselves unleashes the creative spirit within us. We will use shadow work techniques to meet our inner selves and transform this energy into a creative project.
LIQUIDS:
Liquid classes function as a series of workshops, so each session should be able to stand alone. Students are welcome to attend a different Liquid class each day, or to stick with the same one all week.
Sophie Traub (she/they)
Re-re-re-Make - a Reiteration Workshop
Participants will explore performing/presenting themselves to one another, and then responding to one another's performances with response pieces/performances. Performance will be loosely defined and there will be tight time frames for the creation time and performances. We will explore this process as a framework on critique -- seeing critique as a creative act, we reveal what impacts us by responding to another's work as a catalyst. We will examine our impulses as creators, looking at our approach closely to understand how we make work and what other options are available to us. This workshop is meant to shake up habits, invite us to surprise ourselves, and develop a lot of new material quickly. This workshop is a REITERATION and condensation of a three-week residency I led for The School of Making Thinking in Summer 2015.
Zoe Tuck (she/her)
Read Like a __________
In each session of “Read Like a ____,” we will dig into a different way of reading and what it can open up in our practice. The emphasis of these sections is creativity (Read Like a Poet), spirituality (Read Like a Witch), and activism (Read Like a Revolutionary). In “Read Like a Poet,” we’ll play around with different ways of approaching reading a poem, and how poets read, both in the sense of how a poet’s reading feeds their writing, and how poets read (perform) their work. In “Read Like a Witch,” we’ll read about witchcraft and witches, and also delve into how critical reading can help us cultivate a magical practice and prevent cultural appropriation while doing it. In “Read Like a Revolutionary,” we’ll read about historical revolutionaries with an emphasis on how their reading fed their revolutionary activities, exploring how reading and action feed into each other.
Jonathan Curtin (she/they)
Queer Mobility Autonomy
I will provide tools, all my knowledge and a judgment-free space for students to use any tool they would like. This will include multiple power tools. During this time I will encourage students to inspect, repair, or just view any component of their car they are curious about, with my guidance. ie- were your brakes grinding on the way here? I will help you remove your wheels and show you how to inspect and replace the worn components if need be. Repairs will be limited to time, but the allotted time should allow for a wide range.
Lo Bil (she/they)
Unexpected Arrivals: joyful performance risks
We will make solo and group performances together in our searching for something as-yet-unknown through scores, durational proposals, readings to drop into moving-thinkings. I’m interested in piling images, confusions, laughter, and desires as potentialities to draw from.
What does each artist pull from today in the contrasting materials we generate together and how do we find the lines of flight that interrelate spontaneously chosen movement ideas? Art as animal body. Visceral broken rhythms. Colours of human sound. Playing with layers of memory and opening perception. Setting the conditions for something to happen. Myth, body art, persona, site-specificity, different senses of time, the playfulness of materials, comedic failures, urgency, necessity, the unseen, and what brings us together.
Aware of endless possibilities but knowing there’s a pull in one direction or another that relates to each person’s history of the senses. Can we trace our sensual history by mapping our navigations through everyday micro-decisions? Can we increase the scale of these micro-movements? Can we aim for not repeating even though it’s impossible? Doing something in a way that is so beautiful in the very moment it is lost forever? Waiting for the next dream to occur, we take the risk to do something we have never done because being in this unique time and place offers the potential to see what we have never seen.
Swati Piparsania (she/her)
Body as Site
A body is a central location through which we experience our worlds; move in histories and explore identities. To wholly understand human behavior is to also understand their body narratives. In this course, we will look at physical behaviors related to leisure as a research tool to understand aspects of social environments. We will specifically investigate the green landscape of the SotA Campus that includes ponds, hiking trails, a creek, and many structures. The site will serve as a locus of learning and expand one’s perspective of play and rest. Students will work in groups and design multi-body wearable that offers an alternative way of being together at the chosen site. They will also create a movement design that works in sync with the wearable to holistically present this new body narrative. Topics such as dysfunctional comedy, absurd theatre, collective body, choreography and space as aesthetics will be explored. The idea is to imagine a collective body that focuses on healing, caring, and becoming.
