Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

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.

Throughout the course, we will engage deeply with themes of the 'self', exploring the 'I' in the world. Autobiography in performance can encourage self-reflection, creation, and the exploration of one¿s identity as it changes; it also allows us to imagine who we might become in the future. While using personal experience as a starting point, it is essential to forge some distance between yourself and the work when working with autobiographical material. Therefore, students will engage with the self-ish, exploring the interplay between fact/fiction, personal/political, and real/imagined. Autobiographical performance art validates the intersectionality of multiple identities through experimentation with the meanings of identity labels and the potential discovery of ways they intersect, separate, and coincide with race, gender, class, sexuality, and ability.
Throughout the course, we will explore the various modes artists have utilized autobiography. An example of the artists we will examine below: Greg Wohead, Bill T Jones,Bryony Kiimmings, Selina Thompson, Zanele Muholi, Lina Iris Viktor and Lizz Aggiss. Alongside the artistic case studies, the key texts for this course include: Bruno, S. and Dixon, L. 2014. Creating Solo Performance (Oxon & New York, Routledge); Heddon, D. 2008. Autobiography and Performance (Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan); Cavarero, Adriana. 2000. Relating Narratives: Storytelling and Selfhood (Oxon and New York: Routledge); Johnson, J. 2017. Killing Poetry: Blackness and the Making of Slam and Spoken Word Communities (New Brunswick, Camden and Newark, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press).
Course work will vary but typically includes weekly performance responses in the form of studio labs, a mid-term proposal, and a solo final project.

If you had a time machine, what performance would you want to see in real-time? The ephemerality of performance means that every action, score, and gesture is held in a vice between time and space. This studio course explores the following questions: what do we do with the fragments left behind after a performance? How might we use the documentation as a blueprint for making new performances in the present? As artists, how do we play with the limits and boundaries of documenting our work? The class will learn how to utilize practical methods of interdisciplinary performance as a way of research into the documentation of performance. We will visit various archives that will inform our studio exploration. Students will encounter work from artists such as Lorraine O¿Grady, Pope. L, Regina Jose Galindo, Skip Arnold, Anne Bean, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, and Hamad Butt, Kara Walker, and Senga Nengudi and more! Students will re-perform, re-imagine, re-enact, investigate, respond, and discover possible / impossible ways towards the idea of the documented. The course will consist of individual and collective projects investigating a different area of documenting the past: 1) Biographical/Autobiographical 2) Archival/Historical 3) Immediate/Ethnographic field research.

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.

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.