The School of Making Thinking in partnership with Abrons Arts Center offers spring and fall classes designed to bring rigorous thinking and making into conversation with experimental pedagogy.
Fall 2023 Classes
COLLABORATIVE
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ONLINE ON ZOOM
Anna Kroll & Chloe Engel
Fridays, 6-8PM EST
October 5th - 27th, 2023
Fridays, 6-8PM EST
October 5th - 27th, 2023
CLASS DESCRIPTIONS BELOW ARE LISTED IN ORDER BY START DATE.
WHERE CAN WE HOLD OUR GRIEF?This class will allow participants to take part in building a fetish of grief; the exercise will allow us to either extend or exorcize our grief into a communally built object. In this interdisciplinary class, we will use textiles, write poems, play games, and learn about each other’s histories.
This class takes inspiration from practices such as Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, Gestalt, and Internal Family Systems therapy which ask participants not only to linger in heavy feelings, but also immerse themselves in an attitude of play throughout. For individuals with trauma, and particularly for those who have been products of generational trauma due to imperialism, being allowed to bring our affective realities into the world is not just a sentimental endeavor. It creates the opportunity for others to witness our historicity and the violence that has been baked into our bodies. Trauma is often indescribable; its true effects can never be revealed, but through this practice we can try to share our histories. As artists, we are not just building out of an invisible, individual self. This class will allow us to join each others’ subjectivities and build a tangible product out of our affective worlds. Content advisory: This class is not facilitated by a certified mental health professional. Please be prepared to care for yourself through this work. THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
AT ABRONS ARTS CENTER: 466 Grand Street, NY, NY MONDAYS 6-8 PM EST October 2nd-30th, 2023 (no class Oct. 9th) 4 sessions $180 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 non-refundable registration fee |
INSTRUCTORSeoyoung Park is a non-binary lesbian gyopo (a diasporic Korean) currently based between Brooklyn, and Seoul. Their work facilitates communal connection, focusing on the transformative power of being “with.” Emotional exploration is crucial to Seoyoung’s work, as an East Asian femme navigating a white supremacist culture that denigrates emotions as frivolous, and depicts and expects East Asians to be stoic. They believe feeling deeply and with others is a form of deep protest against the dominant discourse of “objectivity,” which locks minorities into a single identity, and then discards them once they renounce it. While Seoyoung’s art practice focuses on theatrical and written expression, recently they’ve begun exploring more tangible mediums. They can usually be found at a restaurant, cafe, or bookstore with friends crying, laughing, and talking (a lot).
Image credit: Seoyoung Park
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SWING/STRIKE: SYNCHRONICITIES BETWEEN JAZZ & MARTIAL ARTThis class delves into the shared principles, techniques, and philosophies that connect jazz music and martial arts. Discover the parallels of improvisation, discipline, body movement, and rhythm while gaining a deeper understanding of how jazz and martial arts influence and inspire one another. Through engaging discussions, practical exercises, listening sessions, performance opportunities and collaborative exploration, students will explore the synergy between music and combat, and unlock new dimensions of creativity and expression.
THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
AT ABRONS ARTS CENTER: 466 Grand Street, NY, NY TUESDAYS 6-8 PM EST October 3rd - 24TH 4 sessions $180 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 non-refundable registration fee |
INSTRUCTORAmani is a multidisciplinary artist (vocalist, pianist, drummer)/curator born and raised in Brooklyn, Ny. Both his creations and curation are dual wielded in an effort to free up time + space for perspectives unsung - to create/curate moments that truly move the spirit. Amani’s music centers the nuances of the black experience through his lyrics, he speaks to the listener with a specific intentionality. This point of intention carries over into his curatorial practice, as he feels it a responsibility to himself as well as his community to platform non-traditional forms of expressions.
Image credit: Amani Fela
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HOMING WHAT HAUNTS YOU: EXPLORING POETRY, TIKTOK, AND FREEWRITING"Homing What Haunts You: Exploring Poetry, TikTok and Freewriting" is a generative workshop that will re-imagine how we read, write, experience and express poetry. We’ll examine Junie Désil's question "how to write about what you carry but don't know?" from her collection eat salt | gaze at the ocean. We’ll use this as a portal to explore what we carry emotionally, physically, ancestrally and communally when we encounter a blank page or camera. We’ll think about how poets and performance artists Katie Numi Usher, Rajiv Mohabir, Ariana Brown, Dionne Brand, Gaiutra Bahadur, Aracelis Girmay, Etel Adnan and Shivanee Ramlochan frame the things we carry as hauntings in their poetry and TikTok performance videos.
We’ll take directions from poems. We’ll eat something salty and gaze at water while reading poems aloud to each other. We’ll think of poems as shapeshifters that can exist as words, brushstrokes and pixels. We’ll rewrite poems in different shapes and experiment with translating written words into a different medium. Participants will create a TikTok video or leporello book to store their poetry-experiments. THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE IN PERSON
AT ABRONS ARTS CENTER: 466 Grand Street, NY, NY THURSDAYS 6-8PM EST October 5th-26th 4 sessions $180 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 non-refundable registration fee |
INSTRUCTORNadia Misir is a poet who would rather paint than write. Born, raised and still living in South Ozone Park, Queens, she posts more on Instagram than she submits to literary journals. Her writing has been published in Poetry, Kweli, Papercuts, The Margins, No, Dear Mag, and QC Voices. Her creative practice has been supported by fellowships and residencies from the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Louis Armstrong House Museum, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, and Queens College, CUNY’s QCVoices. She has facilitated writing workshops in collaboration with South Asian Feminism(s) Alliance, Queens Memory, Reimagine, Five Boro Story Project and others. She received her BA in English from SUNY Oswego and an MA in American studies from Columbia University. She also holds an MFA in fiction writing from Queens College, CUNY. She is in transit more often than she is at home.
Photo credit: Barbara Tiwari
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SOMATIC SMELLSCAPINGSomatic Smellscaping will be a course that weaves together scent chemistry, somatic exercises, and the basics of scent composition in order to give participants an entryway into sensing the world and their soma through smell. We will study the molecular overlaps of all kinds of species and matter to understand how, at a molecular level, we are intimately connected to Earth and oneness in ways we may not be privy to in our occularcentric society. We will breathe together, observe interspecies kinship through odorant molecules, observe our own bodies in new ways, learn about materials and extraction, and share tools for working with scent.
The course will merge scientific knowledge with meditation practice and etheric principles to help us weave together new material-ephemeral understandings of our world through scent and invite you to begin an olfactory practice. The modality will be online, with a lecture-based and conversational approach and incorporate meditation and remote smelling exercises throughout. THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.
THURSDAYS 6-8 PM EST October 5TH - 26TH 4 sessions $180 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 non-refundable registration fee |
INSTRUCTORagustine zegers is a Chilean olfactory artist and writer. By way of queer and microbial methodologies, zegers deploys care practices that reach microscopic dimensions by incorporating bacterial communities, aromatic molecules, and food absorption in their artistic projects, creating tools to reflect about cohabitation, interspecies and intrahuman belonging, and care itself. Their work has been exhibited and published internationally at venues such as the Venice Biennale, Galería Jaqueline Martins, Sharjah Art Foundation, the Institute of Queer Ecology, and DIS Magazine.
agustinezegers.com Image credit: agustine zegers
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COLLABORATIVE IMAGININGWHAT IS IT?
An online game campaign in which you and a group of strangers engage in a role-playing story. The first session you enter as your avatar. With cameras off, you choose what you are: a cloud, an alien, a tree. We begin with the mechanics of the game: how to build the world we play in and how to propose physical contact. Every session begins with grounding exercises and then, we play. Each player is given individualized prompts to utilize. At the end of each session, we map what happened so we can do a recap at the beginning of the next session. WHY DO IT? Looking to try a world-building game, but feeling a little scared? This is a space to imagine and experiment, surrounded by support. We give you a container, drawing upon our work as teachers, improvisers and play therapists so you can dive into fantasy while maintaining a sense of self. Through multiple sessions we observe the evolution of the story and how it might mingle with “real” life. This is a space to practice being present, listening and responding to something emerging. These are skills for collaboration and co-authorship with one another. THIS CLASS WILL TAKE PLACE ONLINE.
FRIDAYS 6-8PM EST October 6TH - 27TH 4 sessions $180 Tuition BIPOC sliding scale available + $25 non-refundable registration fee |
INSTRUCTORAnna Kroll & Chloë Engel are interdisciplinary artists, improvisers, listeners and long-term collaborators. We swear we make dances, but they’re also phone calls, choose-your-own-adventure vignettes, living installations, games, and/or oracles for predicting our ecological destiny. Our work has been presented in Tendon magazine, re:semblance at New Media Artspace (NYC/ online), Spark IV: A New World? (Baltimore / online) and Mind on Fire (Baltimore/online). Our current project is an immersive tabletop game called The Space is a Body and You Are In It. We facilitate collaborative imagining workshops independently and through The Deep Play Institute (2021).
Anna’s work has been shown at No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY), in Philadelphia theaters, rivers and subway underpasses, at FringeArts’ Scratch Night, Open Call Guerilla Outdoor Performance Festival, Invisible River’s Schuylkill River Arts Day, Cathy Weis' Sundays on Broadway (NYC), and Danspace's Draftwork series (NYC). MFA in Intermedia and Digital Art from UMBC. Chloë’s performance work has been shown at Lifeworld (Brooklyn, NY), AUNTS (Brooklyn, NY), Open Performance at Movement Research, No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY), Little Berlin (Philadelphia, PA), Middlebury College, and Bennington College. They work as an assistant play therapist and early childhood educator. Image credit: Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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