CON/TEXT
May 22 - June 4
Rochester Folk Art Guild, Middlesex, NY
Tuition $600  *includes food and lodging 

Conceived of through discussions between a philosopher, a poet, and a performer, this 2-week session occupies the space where artistic practices intersect with text in embodied ways. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, we will mine territories where artists and writers have offered radical reconsiderations of the materiality and embodiment of language and the written word.

How does a text perform itself on the page? What happens if we put embodied practices in conversation with theoretical practices? What might it mean to read theory somatically? How can movement be a mode of philosophical analysis? How might we challenge our notions of what the primary meaning-making aspect of a text is?

Discrete disciplines – both in the arts and academia – offer isolated responses to questions of textual engagement.  We will not ignore these answers, just politely hear them out and keep walking. We invite applications from all artists, writers, thinkers, and movers interested in pursuing interdisciplinary textual experimentation.

This session will involve three structured components
SEMINARS

Here we will explore theoretical underpinnings of the connection between the written mark and its embodied environment.

Writing can seem to exist distanced from the lived world -- unread, unseen, withheld from action, forgotten; however, this distance is always only temporary. As soon as we engage a text, we return it to the world.  But exactly how do we do this?  How is a text read?  How are our bodies engaged?  How is a text sounded?  Where are we?  Where are you?  What is around us? 

Meetings will involve lecture, discussion of readings, and exper-imental ways of activating theoretical content (including: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Derrida, Plato, Gayatri Spivak, Emile Benveniste, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière).
CASE STUDIES 

A close investigation of works which involve experimentation around text-ual performance. 

Together we will take inspiration from various artistic practices to ask how text disrupts and is disrupted by embodied experience. From CA Conrad’s (soma)tic poetry rituals to Richard Foreman’s stream of consciousness notebooks to the danced philosophical inquiry of Miguel Gutierrez to Laurie Anderson’s performance poems, how does language live in space?

Other artists to consider include Fred Moten, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Spalding Grey, Jenny Holzer, John Cage, Douglas Kearney, Velemir Khlebnikov, Edwin Torres, Tracy Morris, Samuel Beckett, Jackson Mac Low, Antonio Ramos and more.
WORKING SESSIONS 

Each resident will have the oppor-tunity to perform regularly for an audience of fellow residents and discuss their discoveries. These sessions will involve prompts and structures to facilitate unique approaches to textual activation. 

Residents will also have the option of participating in a daily practice of guided free writes, movement, and morning readings.

CON/TEXT FACILITATORS 

Aaron Finbloom

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist and musician.  Much of his work involves re-kindling the connection between the philo-sophical and the performative by creating quasi-structured conver-sations through games, improv-isational scores, booklets, audio guides, dance maps, theatrical lectures, existential therapy and philo-sophic rituals. He is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program.

Alexandra Tatarsky

Alexandra Tatarsky has been called “a hilarious, finely tuned absurdist” by Theater Jones and “frantic, kinetic, manic and mesmerizing” by Theatre Storm. She experienced fleeting fame as Andy Kaufman’s daughter and often performs as a mound of dirt. Her one-man-shows Beast of Festive Skin, SIGN FELT! and Americana Psychobabble premiered at La Mama ETC and have toured around the country. She was a member of X-ID Rep at the New Museum, a theater ensemble devoted to investigating the ethics of intercultural cross-play, and has continued to explore the con-struction of selves and communities in real time with original performances at Bronx Art Space, Queens Museum, Basilica Hudson, Gotham Comedy Club, U.S. Blues, The Brick Theater, Vox Populi, Metro Pictures Gallery, and many other small, dark venues. With a B.A. in Russian from Reed College and 2-year Lecoq clown training at the Pig Iron School for Advanced Performance, her current research focuses on the intersection of zaum writing and mime pedagogy as entryways to the irrational. She has written on spambot lyricism and Russian-Jewish poetics for publications including Hypocrite Reader, The New Inquiry, Calvert Journal and The Reed College Erotic Review. Alexandra Tatarsky is a 2016 Movement Research artist-in-residence.

Rachel James 

Rachel James is a Canadian artist and poet with a background in social anthropology and experimental ethnography. She has exhibited or performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including at La MaMa, The Watermill Center, MoMA PS1, Spectacle, and Recess in New York, SFMOMA, Totaldobže in Riga, Kamppi Chapel in Helsinki, and The New Gallery in Calgary. As an audio documentarian James has worked with BBC Radio, Radiolab, and This American Life. She completed artist residencies at New Adventures in Sound Art (NAISA), Toronto, Soma, Mexico City, Process Residency, Atlanta, and Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest, Clermont, KY. She has curated exhibitions and performance events in Mexico City and New York, where she lives and works. ​

DIALOGICAL EXPERIMENTS
​April 19 - April 24
Krumville, NY
Tuition $300 *includes food and lodging ​

For this extended weekend intensive, we invite anyone that uses dialogue in their thinking/moving/making practice to create a 4-day dialogical structure, which will be enacted once per day for 4 days.  These structures alongside daily tasks of living together such as gardening, cooking, eating and cleaning will all be folded into an entire world of conversation, the conditions of which will be our dialogical playground.

Many thinking and making practices use, shape and implicate conversation. Those that do, often involve intentionally structuring this conversation – setting how it happens, when, with whom and where.  A symbiotic relationship develops between the content of the conversation and the structure that holds it. We are interested in experimenting with how creating a playful arrangement of conditions and context for dialogue can shape a conversation’s meaning within that relationship.  

Each attendee, will be responsible for designing a 20 minute structured conversation for 1-4 participants and for deciding how their structure will shift from day to day. This will include determining: how many people will be involved in the conversation, where it will occur, what rules or structure will guide it, and what kinds of variables will they alter on each iteration?   Throughout the weekend, the organizers will experiment with multimodal and asymmetric ways of generating material to transfer these conversations into archivable/recombinable content, which will then be compiled into a publication in the coming year.  

People from all backgrounds are welcome to apply including musicians, curators, academics, social practice artists, writers, dancers, activists, cultural mediators, and educators who can propose and engage in creative structures for conversation such as scores, choreographies, prompts for dialogue, interactive interfaces, etc.

DIALOGICAL EXPERIMENTS FACILITATORS 

Aaron Finbloom

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist and musician.  Much of his work involves re-kindling the connection between the philo-sophical and the performative by creating quasi-structured conver-sations through games, improv-isational scores, booklets, audio guides, dance maps, theatrical lectures, existential therapy and philo-sophic rituals. He is currently a PhD candidate at Concordia University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program.

Lina Moreno

Lina is a Latin American artist, educator, and visual researcher based in Montreal. She creates strategies and spaces to explore generative forms of conversations around objects, texts, and images. Her creative and intellectual practice moves between experimental pedagogies, visual research, drawing, writing, and installation. She is interested in curating spaces for these conversations as philosophical approaches to drawing, image production, and interpretation.​

PERFORMING • PLAYWRITING
Aug 2 - Aug 22 (dates revised)
tbd, NY
Tuition $900 *includes food and lodging 

Writing works of live performance often means not just putting words on paper but also making images, arranging bodies in space, incorporating source material, improvising, and devising. Even a text with a single playwright’s name on it must transition from a solo to a collective writing process in design meetings and the rehearsal room. This session will consider, from the very beginning, what it means to incorporate the back-and-forth between solo and collective writing into the process. How does collective writing deepen, complicate, and strengthen works? How can performers be skilled contributors and creative agents in the writing process?

The session will lessen the divide between playwriting and workshopping, and performance ensemble building and devising. We will invite up to five playwrights, who will apply with a project proposal or early draft of a script along with a rationale for how it might benefit from a collective approach to revision. Ten performers will also join the session, both as subjects and as active agents and interlocutors, to simultaneously contribute to the development of the written work and undergo focused performance training and ensemble building. Within a collective writing process, we will be exploring the autonomy of the actor as artist and author, as well as subject. Our session will examine and subvert traditional and historical power dynamics within rehearsals, audition rooms, and theater spaces.

Participants will consider the methodology of playwrights, directors, and ensembles that incorporate some form of collective writing into their work and performance (for example: Mary Zimmerman, The Civilians, Cornerstone, She She Pop), and experiment with applying various techniques to their own voice and practice. Workshops drawing on performance techniques (for example: Meisner, Viewpoints and Suzuki, Clown, Theater of the Oppressed, Applied Theater, Action Theater, Butoh, and Grotowski) will explore the process of turning text into action, the possibilities of performance as activism, and the actor as advocate for social change.
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Mutual mentorship, deep workshopping of material, group staging, devising, re-imagining, and improvisation will lead to the development of pieces of theater and live performance over the course of the residency. There will be an opportunity to show work produced in NYC in the Fall.

PERFORMING • PLAYWRITING FACILITATORS 

Cory Tamler

Cory Tamler has created and participated in research-based performance projects in the United States and internationally, and translates German and Serbo-Croatian performance and art-related texts. As a Fulbright Scholar, she focused on post-migrant and collaborative theatre practices in Berlin. Currently a doctoral student at the CUNY Graduate Center, her scholarly work focuses on site-based, participatory, and civic performance projects. Cory is a lead artist with In Kinship, an ongoing series of performance actions, dialogues, and community-artist partnerships shaped by Maine's Penobscot River.

Ian Fields Stewart

Ian Fields Stewart is a black, mixed race, gender-nonconforming story-teller working at the intersection of art and social justice. Their career is dedicated to deconstructing main-stream media forms and rebuilding them to reflect marginalized voices in our local and global communities. By day, Ian works with Girl Be Heard and viBe Theater Experience helping young women create original work about issues that effect them and their communities. Ian has worked consistently in productions at NYC venues such as Manhattan Rep, NYC Fringe Festival ’16, Shapiro Theatre, and more. As a director and choreographer, their work with Girl Be Heard has been seen at NYC organizations, the United Nations, and the Pitchwise Festival in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Ian also made their Off-Off Broadway playwriting debut as a part of the Judson Arts’s Magic Time Series with their play, A Dying Breed, which is a dystopian exam-ination of gender. Ian can also be seen on Buzzfeed LGBT (“Dressing Beyond the Binary”), the You Had Me at Black podcast ("Black Cinderella"), and the Is it Transphobic Podcast ("Mixed Nuts" / "The Danish Girl pt 1/2"). When they're not in the theatre, Ian serves on the council of the group @Salon which is a monthly discussion group that invites thought -leaders to introduce LGBTQ-centered topics through personal narrative. To learn more please check out their website

Sophie Traub

Sophie Traub is a performing artist, actor, teacher, dramaturge, and arts organizer from Toronto, currently based in Brooklyn. She has studied performance and performance technique extensively, with a focus in much of her work and studies on improvisation, group process, movement, classical theatre, and embodiment. As a performance artist, Sophie has performed at DUMBO Arts Festival, Dixon Place, White Rabbit Festival at Red Clay Farm, the Norman Felix Gallery, Artscape Gibralter Point, the Microscope Gallery, Medicine Show Theater, and The Last Weekend Arts Festival. Film credits include Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Decker), Fugue (Torres-Torres), Mother's Day
(Adina Smith), Bite Radius (Parsons)
Tenderness (Polson), and The Interpreter (Pollack). Theatre acting, devising, and directing credits include This Is How I Don't Know How To Dance (SITI Company/Barrow Street Theatre), Won't Be a Ghost (Prelude 2014, Dixon Place 2015, The Brick 2016), The Beach Eagle (Dixon Place 2013). Sophie has studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, HB Studio, Studio 303, Stonestreet Studios, SITI Company Conservatory, NYU and 
​University of Toronto.

IMMERSION 
July 10 - July 30
Wilmington, NC
Tuition $900 *includes food and lodging 

What captivates us about immersion? Why are encompassing aesthetic experiences, such as immersive theater (Sleep No More, Then She Fell, Doomocracy) and Virtual Reality (VR), so popular? What is it to be immersed, and why is it so compelling? In what ways does our inherent immersion -- in our collectivity, and our sensual and sensing bodies --  inform and complicate a more artificial immersion?

This session will explore at once the philosophical implications of immersive experience -- as sensual, embodied, and social experiences -- as well as in art making practices and art forms. During the first week of the residency, we will delve into these inquiries through theory, embodiment practices and group exercises. We will explore texts from David Abram, Sarah Ahmed, Caroline Jones, Matthew Ghoulish, and Brian Massumi among others. We will generate ideas and seeds of content through encountering and responding to our own and one another's work. PLEASE NOTE: We will ask applicants to include source material in their application. We are particularly interested in material concerned with social justice and human rights. This source material can be a book, a body of research, a person of inspiration, artifacts, videos, fields of interest, or some other form you might use as a “source”, which will provide the groundwork for the content of the pieces made.

The second half of the residency we will produce immersive theater and VR pieces, drawing on our emergent culture and think tank of the previous week. Prior experience with VR cameras and technology will not be required. We will approach this work with a broad definition of what immersive theater means, and providing opportunity for invention within the young field of VR. Some, if not all, of the pieces will be realized in both mediums.
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Session participants will have access to Virtual Reality cameras as well as technical support.  Pieces created at the residency will have the opportunity to be submitted and shown at Cucalorus Film Festival 2017.  

IMMERSION FACILITATORS 

Josephine Decker

Said to be ushering in a “new grammar of narrative” by The New Yorker, Josephine Decker aims to spark curiosity and wonder in audiences. Part of Time Warner's 150 incubator, a recent alum of the Sundance Institute's New Frontier Lab and one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, Josephine Decker premiered her first two narrative features at the Berlinale Forum 2014 to rave reviews. The films were listed #2 and #10 on The New Yorker’s Top Ten List of 2014, played about a hundred festivals around the world (including Torino, London BFI, BAM Cinemafest), won Sarasota Film Festival’s Independent Visions Award, Tangerine Entertainment’s prize for a rising female director and many other awards.  Josephine recently developed video content for the Museum of the City of New York's new Future of the City Lab, has directed content for United Way and other non-profits, and helped to produce documentaries for A&E and Discovery before moving into indie film with her feature documentary Bi The Way (SXSW, MTV’s Logo and Netflix).  Her adaptation of a dancer’s dream – in which she explored formerly incarcerated individuals’ surreal first days out of prison (part of collective: unconscious) -- premiered in Narrative Feature Competition at SXSW 2016 and has received over 500,000 views as part of its innovative free release on BitTorrent and Vimeo.

Her third narrative feature, starring Molly Parker and Miranda July, is currently in post-production, and this fall, she incubated a dance-theater-film hybrid at Princeton University with butoh choreographer Vangeline.

Naima Ramos

Naima Ramos-Chapman makes movement with body, word, image, silence, sound, and technology, that tell stories of transformation and understated bravery.  Her stories stem from true events, incorporate magical realism, and seek to render psycho-spiritual realities we can not see and fits that un-neatly alongside the brutal mundanities of everyday life. Her first short, AND NOTHING HAPPENED, explores the psychological aftermath of sexualized violence and premiered at the 2016 Slamdance Film Festival.
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Sophie Traub

Sophie Traub is a performing artist, actor, teacher, dramaturge, and arts organizer from Toronto, currently based in Brooklyn. She has studied performance and performance technique extensively, with a focus in much of her work and studies on improvisation, group process, movement, classical theatre, and embodiment. As a performance artist, Sophie has performed at DUMBO Arts Festival, Dixon Place, White Rabbit Festival at Red Clay Farm, the Norman Felix Gallery, Artscape Gibralter Point, the Microscope Gallery, Medicine Show Theater, and The Last Weekend Arts Festival. Film credits include Thou Wast Mild and Lovely (Decker), Fugue (Torres-Torres), Mother's Day (Adina Smith), Bite Radius (Parsons), Tenderness (Polson), andThe Interpreter (Pollack). Theatre acting, devising, and directing credits include This Is How I Don't Know How To Dance (SITI Company/Barrow Street Theatre), Won't Be a Ghost (Prelude 2014, Dixon Place 2015, The Brick 2016), The Beach Eagle (Dixon Place 2013). Sophie has studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, HB Studio, Studio 303, Stonestreet Studios, SITI Company Conservatory, NYU and University of Toronto.