The School of Making Thinking offers year round classes designed to bring rigorous thinking into conversation with experimental pedagogies.
THE SUSPENDED BODYAND OTHER METAPHORS OF MEDIA
Tuesdays 7-PM
Cycle 1: March 2nd – April 3rd |
HEALING TIMECREATING LIVING ARCHIVES
Wednesdays 7-9PM
Cycle 1: March 2nd – April 3rd |
CONSENSUAL COLLABORATION
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THE LANGUAGE INVENTION WORKSHOPTuesdays 7-PM
Cycle 2: April 20th – May 22nd |
INSTRUCTORVanessa Vargas Venezuelan, Brooklyn based dancer, performer, journalist, dance educator, and researcher. Her work focuses on dance and performance, from practice-based research to communication, cultural studies, and social theory. Since 2002, she has worked for several dance companies in Venezuela, collaborating as a dancer and choreographer. Based in New York since 2014, she continues working as a dancer, while developing her experience as a dance educator researcher, and choreographer, facilitating workshops and performing in Venezuela, Barcelona, México, Perú, and Argentina, Her work has been presented at Triskelion Arts Center, Dixon Place, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Performance Mix Festival. She also has facilitated performances at MoMA for exhibitions and artists including Lygia Clark, James Lee Byars, David Lamelas, Yoko Ono, and Simone Forti’s “Dance Constructions” as a part of the exhibition “Judson Dance Theater: The Work Is Never Done”.
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THE SUSPENDED BODY: AND OTHER METAPHORS OF MEDIAWe will ask participants to explore body practices related to the use of media (whether it is mass media, social media, or journalist-ish exploration). We will think on the mediated body, the body as medium and the medium as a body, simultaneously.
How is the body shaped by media? How do we embody these representations? How are these ideas framed in media? Can our bodies in movement change agendas? Do GIFs, memes, attention span, technological gaps, intimacy, the loop of images, shape our body practices? We will explore and improvise using visual content found on social media, focusing on the notions of repetition, attention span, and contemporary visual tendencies and the speed of such images as related to movement. We will focus on the meeting point of media and body. Each class will include discussions, physical improvisation, and performance propositions that understand performance as a form of research. Our last meetings will focus more heavily on creative/artistic responses, giving participants the opportunity to develop a final project in the medium of their choice. Participants interested in dance and performance practices are welcome. The course is designed for an interdisciplinary group, representative of a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. March 1 – April 3
5 Sessions Tuesdays 7-9PM $165 |
INSTRUCTORCatherine Feliz is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curanderx, born and raised in Lenape territory (NYC) to parents from Kiskeya Ayiti (Dominican Republic). Intersectional feminist theory, archival research, and earth-based healing inform their practice. Employing framing, opacity, desire, and language, they work in a variety of mediums including installation, bookmaking, video, text, and fabric. In 2017 they received a BFA in Photography from SUNY Purchase College of Art + Design. Catherine Feliz is also the co-founder of Abuela Taught Me, a modern pop-up botanica, and a founding member of Homecoming, a QTBIPOC birth justice collective.
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HEALING TIME: CREATING LIVING ARCHIVESAn archive is a system that makes an order of memory, knowledge, and that which is marked valuable for record-keeping. Healing breathes fullness and harmony into our bodies, existence, and societies. In this class, we will explore the cyclical nature of time by reaching into the past to transmute energy and working across creative disciplines to re-make archives that respond to change. Drawing from studies in decoloniality, and Black & Indigenous & Queer feminist theory, this class will re-center the medicine of grief, ritual, spirit guidance, and informed trauma healing in memory-keeping. We’ll explore the work of makers and thinkers such as Lonnie Holley, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Ana Mendieta, and Oswald de Andrade as models of experimental practices that in the words of Saidiyah Hartman “recruit the past for the sake of the living”. Participants are encouraged to choose an “archive” of significance to work with for this five-week course; it can be a manuscripts collection, family snapshots, place, or musical album for example. Each week we will share on our process/practice, discuss readings, artist works, and introduce a new healing methodology to explore within the creative process of engaging the archives, eg. automatic writing, divination, somatic meditation, earth-based ritual
March 1 – April 3
5 Sessions Wednesdays 7-9PM $165 |
INSTRUCTORRotten Spring is Amber Hopkins, Julia Gladstone, Fred Schmidt-Arenales, Sophie Traub, and Akeema-Zane. Rotten Spring came together in 2016 in the wake of the US election results in order to develop a performance within a horizontal structure that addressed each of their concerns and urges within their respective contexts. The process that emerged was centered on asking questions about the conditions of coming together, exploring each other's techniques, and creating a space that could hold and challenge all of us. The result is a living archive which documents the process the artists endured in order to create a contract of experienced agreements. These questions continue to be central for each artist as they work independently and within various other collaborations. This class will be taught by Amber, Akeema, Julia, and Fred.
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CONSENSUAL COLLABORATION AND MICRO-CULTURECollaboration is a negotiation of dynamics that mirror the culture in which we participate.In this class, participants will develop and expand their capacities and tools for engaging in collaborative process with an emphasis on consensual and explicit agreement. Sessions will consist of group movement, devising, writing exercises, reading, discussion, and establishing collaborative methodologies. Each facilitator brings a different set of tools, both theoretical and practical, and will alternate guiding class sessions. This class is oriented towards artists coming together to create work within a context of shared authorship and horizontal leadership. That said, those who are interested/used to working in more delineated hierarchies are also very welcome. A central theme in this course will be the development of a contract among the participants, that provides mutually agreed upon ways to approach decision making, leadership, and conflict resolution. This document can take many forms (or be immaterial!) and will be returned to and updated throughout the five weeks.
March 1 – April 3
5 Sessions Thursdays 7-9PM $165 |
INSTRUCTORNate Flagg From a young age, I have been fascinated with language. I began learning Chinese at seven years old, and as I grew older I added other languages to my repertoire; among them German, Russian and Japanese, as well as a few of my own invention. I entered college with the goal of studying linguistics, but soon discovered that I understood language differently than the proposed analytical methods I encountered seemed to. I felt strongly that, rather than learning by processing data as a computer might, language was learned through embodied performance and poetic metaphor– In a sense, by seeing more than what was strictly real. I graduated college with a degree in Anthropology and quickly found that rather than writing on my ideas about language, I was more deeply compelled to make artwork about them. I found that my practice of inventing languages served as a useful method for artmaking and, soon enough, my compulsion revealed itself to be my calling. I graduated from the Yale School of Art with a Masters in Painting and Printmaking three years ago and have been investigating language in the New York area through artmaking, performance and teaching ever since.
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THE LANGUAGE INVENTION WORKSHOPIn the past month, as our society has been brought to its knees, we have been forced to reckon with the language of a new reality. We must grapple with new meanings for health, intimacy, labor and the environment at the same time as we have had to reckon with new phrases and euphemisms: “sheltering”, “distancing”, “essential”, “hero” and “relief”. Isolated from each other, we are unable to feel the full, warming sonority of each other’s voices and settle instead for surrogates in the forms of the buzz of a phone receiver or an electric ghost on a screen. What words can we use to feel close to one another when we are separated? How can we reassure each other and ourselves?
Though while some realities are suspended, new potentials have emerged. Discussions of the weather gain a sensitivity rarely explored. We mark our progression through the season with the appearance of budding flowers, fresh leaves and the patterns of migrating birds. Our dreaming is more vivid. The terms of our reality have transformed, and we are given an opportunity to change our language to transform with it. Every person’s native language is the language of response – the iterable and constant negotiation of the self relative to its context. Every speech act is a total description of reality, addressing both the speaker’s history and the situation at hand. During the COVID-19 Pandemic, the Language Invention Workshop’s purpose is to investigate how language operates within our consciousnesses and how it can be shaped to metabolize our abruptly altered reality using the full range of expressive and sensory awareness. We will accomplish this through deep listening, group vocalization, dramatic exercise and “Walks Without Language” where we give names to things in our environments as if for the first time. As the class progresses and participants’ languages become more elaborate, participants are introduced to greater tools for understanding the components of language and explore the creative potential within them. We begin with vocal articulation, and continue on to the grammatical parts of speech, temporal and spatial distinction, noun classes and case systems. We round out the curriculum by developing alphabets and other systems of recording that reflect the principles specific to each invented language. The workshop culminates in longform compositions composed in participants’ languages that are shared with the public in a final online showcase. April 20 – May 22
5 Sessions Tuesdays 7-9PM $165 |