Roberto Sifuentes

From Ron Athey and Kira O’Riley, to Gwendoline Robin and Stelarc, this class explores tactics and politics for using the ‘extreme body’ in contemporary performance. Pop-culture, media, and contemporary politics are examined through the lens of performance, as well as contemporary performance practice. Performance experiments, group discussions, on-going critiques, and written work are engaged as a strategy to merge art practice and theory. This is a practice-based course with material driven by the subject matter and the students’ own work. Artists and themes explored may include: The Technological Body, The Sexual, Erotic, Pornographic Body, The Altered/ Prosthetic body, The Religious/Ecstatic body, Deprivation/Endurance/Duration, among others. In this class you will: Connect with the artist’s body (yours) as the raw material for performance. Explore various strategies for individual and collaborative performance. Learn to operate in ‘Performance mode’ with exercises to heighten your awareness of present time paired with a sense of total body performativity, and consciousness of the viewer’s presence. Develop a collective performance vocabulary.

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.

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.