The School of Making Thinking offers year round classes designed to bring rigorous thinking into conversation with experimental pedagogies.
MASKS!!!
Instructor: Alex Tatarsky
Abrons Arts Center
Wednesdays 7-9PM
February 27th - April 17th 2019
Wednesdays 7-9PM
February 27th - April 17th 2019
INSTRUCTORAlexandra Tatarsky (she/they) is a writer and performer from NYC who makes work at the unfortunate in-between zone of comedy, dance, theater, and deluded rant — sometimes with songs. Trained in Russian Literature (Reed College) and Devised Performance (Pig Iron School at University of the Arts), she often gives talks and workshops that draw upon her background in both performance and literary studies to put in conversation Russian Futurist Zaum (a utopian project to create a universal nonsense language) and the French physical theater pedagogy of master mime teacher Jacques Lecoq as twin practices of embodied resistance to authoritarian thinking. She performs her own work and the work of others at venues including Brooklyn Museum, New Museum, MoMA PS1, La Mama, Performance Space NY, The Kitchen, The Brick, Gibney, and Judson Church. She writes on spambot poetry, shanzhai lyrics, and mimes for publications including New Inquiry, Hypocrite Reader, ArtReview Asia, China Modern Weekly, Garlands, Emerald Table, Encyclopedia, and Folder. Her work seeks the logic of the clown as an antidote to despair and a model of one who keeps trying despite (repeated) failure.
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MASKS!!!Masks are sacred ritual objects, comic, grotesque, monstrous, and deeply human. They play within the generative paradox of revealing by concealing, using artifice and disguise to get closer to vulnerable truths. Drawing from Commedia dell’arte, Balinese mask work, the pedagogy of mime master Jacques Lecoq, and a smattering of contemporary mask-based artists, this will be a crash course in mask-making, mask performance, and thinking through (and with) masks. It will combine theory and practice, oscillating between reading about and discussing contemporary and traditional art practices that draw upon mask work, and actually making our own masks and developing an embodied practice to aid in mask performance.
Questions we will explore both by sitting around talking and by getting up on our feet and moving around: How do masks put us in touch with archetypes, elements, and the logic and feelings of shapes? How can the mask teach us to listen, share, and perform with precision and generosity? How do we breathe life into a mask to discover wild characters and expressions that elude language? We will experiment with making masks out of unexpected materials as well as in more classic styles. By the end of the course, students will have each made and painted a papier mache commedia-inspired mask and have a personal plaster mold of their faces that they can keep to use for building perfectly fitted masks forever! We will have several visiting artists come share with us their own experimental mask practice including Poncili Creacion (who make extravagant masks out of foam), Lord of Beef (whose wild masks are fashioned from stockings and stuffing), and Gina Murdock (trained in intuitive mask-making, and herbalism). February 27 - April 17th 2019
8 Sessions Wednesdays 7-9PM $230 |