Vanessa Damilola Macaulay

This 3-week summer intensive course explores the intersection of performance and social justice, emphasizing the body as a site of resistance and defiance. Through lectures, discussions, performance exercises, and exhibition, students will investigate individual and collective strategies of defiance¿including breath, bodies taking up space, joy, rest, protest, and movement in solidarity. These acts, whether subtle or overt, these acts confront systems of power and affirm our existence.

Students will create two performance-based works¿including an installation and live performance¿culminating in a presentation at the SAIC galleries and a final public event in the 280 building. Their work will be documented and made available to students. The course will also feature two national and international guest artists/scholars who will lead workshops, lecture, and engage with student work.

The course explores the relationship between performance and social justice which takes on a greater sense of urgency today as we face what Christina Sharpe would term `immanent and imminent death¿. That is, the persistent threat of domination and the lived experience of marginalized communities. Therefore, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative annihilation through our art practices? How can we use our defiant and deviant bodies as tools for survival and transformation?

Open to credit and non-credit enrollment.

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.

This 3-week summer intensive course explores the intersection of performance and social justice, emphasizing the body as a site of resistance and defiance. Through lectures, discussions, performance exercises, and exhibition, students will investigate individual and collective strategies of defiance¿including breath, bodies taking up space, joy, rest, protest, and movement in solidarity. These acts, whether subtle or overt, these acts confront systems of power and affirm our existence.

Students will create two performance-based works¿including an installation and live performance¿culminating in a presentation at the SAIC galleries and a final public event in the 280 building. Their work will be documented and made available to students. The course will also feature two national and international guest artists/scholars who will lead workshops, lecture, and engage with student work.

The course explores the relationship between performance and social justice which takes on a greater sense of urgency today as we face what Christina Sharpe would term `immanent and imminent death¿. That is, the persistent threat of domination and the lived experience of marginalized communities. Therefore, how do we attend to physical, social, and figurative annihilation through our art practices? How can we use our defiant and deviant bodies as tools for survival and transformation?

Open to credit and non-credit enrollment.

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.