The School of Making Thinking offers year round classes designed to bring rigorous thinking into conversation with experimental pedagogies.
THE BODY IN EXILEEXPERIMENTING THE BODY UNDER MIGRATORY
AND TRAVELING PRACTICES Abrons Arts Center
Wednesdays 7-9PM September 26th - November 14th 2018 |
LAND E(X*)CAPEWRITING FROM THE GARDENS
Abrons Arts Center Thursdays 7-9PM September 27th – November 15th 2018 |
INSTRUCTORVanessa Vargas Brooklyn based dancer, performer, journalist, dance educator and researcher. She works in social practices, behaviours, emotions, and rituals, both in dance and performance as in communication, culture studies and social theory. Since 2002, she has been working for several dance companies in Venezuela, collaborating as a dancer and choreographer. Based in New York since 2014, she continues working as a dancer and performance artist, performing for different New York based dance companies while developing her experience as a dance educator, researcher, and dance maker, presenting her work in New York, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Barcelona. Recently, she received and scholarship to attend the Barcelona International Dance Exchange in Barcelona, Spain in April 2018, and an invitation to be a resident artist, for the first time, in La Caldera, Barcelona, Spain, in June-July 2018.
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THE BODY IN EXILE: EXPERIMENTING THE BODY UNDER MIGRATORY AND TRAVELING PRACTICESIn this course, we will ask participants to explore migratory practices and experiences through different means (from histories, interviews, testimonials, field work, memoir, documentary and journalist documents, to embodied experiments that can be used to inform creative material, in order to create a performance). We will thoroughly think on the body-subject as an open form, an active becoming, a migratory body, at a time both subject and object.
Through texts, video excerpts, and group discussion, supplemented by short reading assignments, class participants will encounter writers and artists who experiment inserting themselves into their own work. Our investigations will focus on the meeting point of texts and body, shifting between text- based, field work and movement-based exercises to approach new modes of analysis and expression. To this end, each class will include discussions, physical improvisation, body exploration and generative performance assignments that consider performance to be 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 with any level of writing and performance experience are welcome. The course is designed for an interdisciplinary group, representative of a wide range of backgrounds and experiences. September 26th – November 14th 2018
8 Sessions Wednesdays 7-9PM $230 |
INSTRUCTORAlex Viteri writes and translates essays, poetry, and drama. From time to time, she performs or directs theatre pieces and collaborates as a dramaturge for choreographers and visual artists. She likes to engage in interdisciplinary projects, nonlinear pieces, and community writing processes. Her work usually deals with migration, hybrid bodies, and ritual practices. She’s interested in nonconventional spaces for performance, in the many ways we can come together, and the ethics and politics of community-based work, social and participative art. In 2015, she moved to New York thanks to a Fulbright Scholarship for an MFA in Columbia University’s School of the Arts. She has worked with artists in Shanghai, New York, Bézier, Bogotá, and Berlin. Nowadays, she is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Theatre and Performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY, and teaches at Hunter College.
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LAND E(X*)SCAPE: WRITING FROM THE GARDENSI would like us to practice landscape as the source of inspiration. I would like us to consider landscape painting as a writing prompt. To look, to listen, to meditate. I would like us to concentrate on the composition, harmonies, patterns, relations, and rhythms resulting from the arrangement of components. I propose to look for components in specific public, private, outdoor, indoor, mental landscapes. Through writing prompts, we will explore the ways speech connects to the visual/affective experience of space. We will experiment with poetic forms and look for tools to speak in/about our artistic practices. For each session, we'll gather in a particular landscape in the surroundings of Abrons Arts Center. (The East Village’s counts with 39 community gardens :) As background readings, we’ll encounter the work of contemporary artists that orchestrate landscapes in their performances—non-Aristotelian, hybrid works where words are brushstrokes, where each phrase is a contemplation, and where paragraphs summon portraits. We’ll also be in conversation with Landscape Dramaturgy and discuss the intervention of eco-friendly guerrillas, the ways architecture performs, and the politics of public space. As we move within the course, we will identify and work on a piece to be shared with the group for feedback.
September 27th – November 15th 2018
8 Sessions Thursdays 7-9pm $230 |