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)
    		 
    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

1563

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

1568

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Gender and Sexuality

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

Body As Site is a laboratory for body-based research. Students will be guided to expand the range of ways they move and the kinds of presence they can bring to live art by experimenting with balance, breath, vision, speed, continuity/interruption, and more. The class also introduces research and compositional strategies for generating and developing movement for performance. Working back and forth between improvisational and choreographic modes, students will develop projects that further their individual interests and goals.

Course work includes compositional games like the Viewpoints and somatic practices like contact improvisation and butoh. We will look at work by artists including Milka Djordjevich, Tatsumi Hijikata, Tere O?Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili and Jacolby Satterwhite, and documentaries like Paris Is Burning, Pina and Rize. Occasionally short readings will be assigned by writers like Eugenio Barba, Coco Fusco or Susan Rethorst.

Students will build performances by responding to objects, sites, rhythms, human collaborators and local live performances. By the end of the semester, students will have presented three substantial performances for critique, and produced many in-class ?micro-performances?- nearly one per week.

Class Number

2155

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

2162

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

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

Location

280 Building Rm 012

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

2157

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Art/Design and Politics

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

This course offers various topics in contemporary performance. These topics could social practice (e.g. relational art, activism, community-based performance, vernacular performance, performance in everyday life), immersive theatre (e.g. environmental design, interactive architecture, augmented reality), site-specific performance, and art-science collaborations

Class Number

1567

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

This course offers various topics in contemporary performance. These topics could social practice (e.g. relational art, activism, community-based performance, vernacular performance, performance in everyday life), immersive theatre (e.g. environmental design, interactive architecture, augmented reality), site-specific performance, and art-science collaborations

Class Number

2159

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

Description

Combining both medieval and contemporary performance practices, this class probes the possibilities of object and figure theater performance in the outdoor setting. We will examine the Renaissance spectacles of Piero di Cosimo, the Eastern European Happenings, the public ceremonies of Welfare State International and the street protest of Bread & Puppet Theater. Exercises will explore the making of large-scale graphic image making, such as Cantastoria, Banners and Scrolls. Through group collaborations the class will learn giant puppet making techniques and construction. The class will culminate in an all class outdoor spectacle.

Class Number

2291

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

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.

Class Number

2260

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Community & Social Engagement, Public Space, Site, Landscape

Location

280 Building Rm 012

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.

Class Number

2260

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Community & Social Engagement, Public Space, Site, Landscape

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

1566

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Area of Study

Community & Social Engagement

Location

MacLean 2M

Description

This studio class draws on an eclectic blend of original 'Pocha Nostra' research-based performance exercises investigating 'living dioramas', experimental performance methodologies, Suzuki, dance, ritual practice, conflict resolution techniques and other strategic forms. The techniques evolve from sacred and intimate spaces of human presence, to baroque, highly aesthetic and politicized performances of living murals, human altars, and performance jam sessions. Students create 'hybrid personas,' short performances, spoken word texts, and/or visual media pieces based on their own complex identities and personal sense of politics, race, and gender. Readings and discussions focus on performance theory, popular culture and cultural politics.

Class Number

1560

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

1561

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

280 Building Rm 012

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.

Class Number

2074

Credits

3

Department

Performance

Location

MacLean 2M

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

Class Number

2342

Credits

3 - 6

Department

Performance

Location

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

Class Number

2343

Credits

3 - 6

Department

Performance

Location

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

Class Number

2344

Credits

3 - 6

Department

Performance

Location

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