PERFORMING • PLAYWRITING
June 13 - June 26
Prattsville Arts Center, Prattsville NY
Tuition $600 *includes food and lodging | tuition and travel subsidies available ​ ​

Writing works of live performance often means 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. Can a back-and-forth between solo and collective development deepen, complicate, and strengthen works? How can performers be skilled contributors and creative agents in the writing process? How can curated, hybrid playwriting and devising processes best serve the piece produced?

Performing•Playwriting will provide a setting for playwrights and performance devisers to develop works in a collaborative environment, with a goal of supporting diverse and ideal play-development processes. We will work within a variety of collaborative structures to develop works in progress as well as pieces anew. Artists will be encouraged to develop imaginative and unique approaches to their writing process, as well as take part in collective development structures and ensemble work.

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). The session will examine and subvert traditional and historical power dynamics within rehearsals, audition rooms, and theater spaces. Workshops drawing on performance techniques (for example: Viewpoints, Clown, Theater of the Oppressed, Action Theater, Meisner, and Grotowski) will explore the process of turning text into action. Mutual mentorship, deep workshopping of material, group staging, solo-writing, devising, and improvisation will be employed in the process of development and creation. There will be an opportunity to show work produced at the end of the residency.

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 (pronouns: they/them/their) is a black, queer, and Transfeminine New York based storyteller working at the intersection of theatre and activism. A native of Birmingham, AL, their work is centered in deconstructing mainstream media forms and rebuilding them to amplify and include the voices of marginalized people in our local and global communities. By day, Ian works with viBe Theater Experience helping young black women create original work about issues that effect them and their communities. As a performer, Ian has worked consistently in productions at NYC venues such as Manhattan Rep, NYC Fringe Festival ’16, Shapiro Theatre, and more. In the spring of 2017, Ian performed an excerpt of their one-person show, On the Train to Nowhere in Particular, at the legendary Joe's Pub. Ian can also be seen on Buzzfeed LGBT, the You Had Me at Black podcast, the #Safewordsociety podcast, and the Is it Transphobic Podcast. When they're not in the theatre or studio, 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. One of Ian's most transformative experiences occurred in the summer of 2017 when they were selected out of over 500 applicants to be one of the 15 US Fellows for Humanity in Action's 2017 John Lewis Fellowship. For the month of July, Ian shared space with and learned from various historic and current civil rights leaders in Atlanta, GA in order to better understand the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement and develop strategies for implementing effective change in contemporary political and social movements. To Learn More Please Follow Them At: https://www.ianfieldsstewart.com.
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Sophie Traub

Sophie Traub is a performing artist, actor, dramaturg, and arts organizer from Toronto, with a second home in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on group process, conflict studies, anti-oppression, improvisation, and embodiment. As a performance artist, Sophie has performed at DUMBO Arts Festival, Dixon Place, White Rabbit Festival, 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), Asterion (Schafer 2013). Sophie has studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, HB Studio, Studio 303, Stonestreet Studios, SITI Company Conservatory, NYU, and is currently working on her Masters in Theatre and Performance Studies at York.

MEANING'S EDGE: Metaphor, Resonance, Play 
June 29 - July 12
Prattsville Arts Center, Prattsville NY
Tuition $600 *includes food and lodging | tuition and travel subsidies available ​ ​​

This two week session will provide residents with a collaborative exploration of Jan Zwicky’s “Wisdom and Metaphor”. Artists and thinkers of all disciplines are invited to develop a creative project which resonates with, actualizes, manifests, questions and/or explores ideas within this experimental text. Our hope is that the session will form a community of inquiry and dialogue which will provide fodder for interdisciplinary thinking and making.

Jan Zwicky’s “Wisdom and Metaphor” is an aphoristic book which explores metaphorical thinking, meaning, and language through a diverse assemblage of philosophy, mathematics, poetry, music, and haiku. We are particularly excited by the ways in which participants will be able to draw artistic inspiration from Zwicky’s multivocal and poetically structured text, which offers multiple points of access and departure, stretches meaning to its cognitive limits, and can serve to disturb the traditional divide between thinking and making.

We anticipate that our session will involve activities such as: shared readings and discussions, philosophical walks, workshops dedicated to testing out methods of textual activation and manifestation of ideas, ample time for individual work and research, and sharing work in-progress. Residents can either arrive with a project in mind or develop one on-site; however everyone is encouraged to develop a project proposal for their work and to set individuated rubrics for one’s own completion.

Preview Zwicky’s “Wisdom and Metaphor” 

MEANING'S EDGE FACILITATORS 

Aaron Finbloom

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist, musician and co-founder of SMT.  Much of Finbloom's creative practice functions as an attempt to expand the scope of philosophy’s pedagogy via structured conversations, dialogical games, improvisational scores, contemplative audio guides and performative lectures.  He has led numerous workshops and performances at places including: matralab, Senselab, The Centre for Expanded Poetics, The Topological Media Lab, and EMERGE Residency Program, He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently working towards a PhD in the Humanities at Concordia University.

Hannah Kaya

Hannah Kaya is a thinker, performer, and activist based in Montreal. Her work offers ludic, participatory, and performative methods of enacting radical imagination. She is a co-founder of the Fishbowl Collective (a rad-femme, glitter-punk clown company promoting insurrectional and intimate dialogue), The Togethering Lab (an ongoing, participatory experiment that plays with ways of being together), and frequently collaborates with the [elephants] collective. Her work has been featured in: Outside the March (Vitals; Outstanding Independent Production and Outstanding Original Play Dora Mavor Moore Award Recipient 2014); The McGill Daily (“Not Quite the Rev, But We’re Getting Closer”); Expat Expo Berlin; the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts; Paprika Festival; Tuesday Night Cafe Theatre; the Edinburgh, Toronto, and Montreal Fringe; the National Arts Centre of Canada; the Great Canadian Theatre Company, etc.

IMMERSION 2.0: "Emplacement" VR Lab
July 7 - July 27
Cucalorus, Wilmington, NC
Tuition $1200 *includes food, lodging and technical support for VR production | tuition and travel subsidies available 

This summer, The School of Making Thinking will run IMMERSION 2.0, in which we will develop site specific and emplaced immersive works. This session will explore at once the philosophical implications of immersive experience and emplacement – as sensual, embodied, social, historical, and colonial – as well as the implications in art making practices and art forms. The first week of the session will be devoted to these investigations as well as workshops, group conversation, and production planning. In the second week, employing our research as source material, we will create immersive pieces of performance and Virtual Reality in chosen locations throughout the city. The third week will be devoted to post production of the Virtual Reality pieces created, building a place-based platform for our work in collaboration with ToasterLab.
What layers of historical, cultural, colonial, personal, oppressive and social fabrics layer our movements in a space? How might we engage these realities actually, and virtually? We will conduct micro research projects within Wilmington in order to develop context and content for the pieces produced. We will engage the history of our surroundings, wonder about the standing communities, observe architecture and local lore, acknowledge the original caretakers of the land, and the legacies of cultural production that make Wilmington what it is today.
In 2017, The School of Making Thinking led our first IMMERSION Lab at Cucalorus in Wilmington, North Carolina. In partnership with ExpectVR, we provided residents access to 360° cameras, intensive workshops on the theme of "immersion”, and curated structures for collaboration. The Virtual Reality video pieces that emerged were tremendous: work born of intensive collective experience, focused idea incubation, and participation in challenging conversations in community.
Prior experience with VR cameras and technology will not be required. Session participants will have access to Virtual Reality cameras as well as technical support.  Pieces created at the residency will be the centerpiece of the VR Expo at the Cucalorus Film Festival in November. Residents will be encouraged to return to participate as exhibiting artists.  

IMMERSION FACILITATORS 

Naima Ramos

Naima Ramos-Chapman is from Brooklyn, New York. She 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 juxstaposes them 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 and screened in both national and international competitions. She was awarded Best Director of a Short Narrative at the Tacoma Film Festival, is a Sundance Institute 2017 Fellow, a teaching Artist-in-Residence for a Narrative Filmmaking Lab at Reel Works Teen Filmmaking in New York City, and facilitated a Virtual Reality Intensive for the School of Making Thinking. She is currently in post-production for her second short film--a surrealist thriller PIU PIU and is developing a feature film and digital series. Naima trained at the following institutions: The Alvin Ailey School for Dance, The Barrow Group for Acting, Howard University and Brooklyn College (CUNY) where she holds a B.A. in Journalism. Ramos-Chapman’s work has been featured on Roger and Ebert, Nylon, Essence, Fandom, No Film School, Colorlines, Saint Heron, Postbourgie, The Nation, The Center for American Progress, and Huffington Post to name a few.

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Sophie Traub

Sophie Traub is a performing artist, actor, dramaturg, and arts organizer from Toronto, with a second home in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on group process, conflict studies, anti-oppression, improvisation, and embodiment. As a performance artist, Sophie has performed at DUMBO Arts Festival, Dixon Place, White Rabbit Festival, 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), Asterion (Schafer 2013). Sophie has studied at the Neighborhood Playhouse, HB Studio, Studio 303, Stonestreet Studios, SITI Company Conservatory, NYU, and is currently working on her Masters in Theatre and Performance Studies at York.

DIALOGICAL EXPERIMENTS v2
​April 19 - April 29
Krumville, NY
Tuition $500 *includes food and lodging | tuition and travel subsidies available ​ 

Many thinking and making practices use, shape and implicate conversation. This often involves intentionally structuring the conversation – setting how it happens, when, with whom and where. A symbiotic relationship develops between the content of the conversation, the structure that holds it, the lives of the participants within it and the setting around which it occurs. We are invested in playing with and investigating this relationship.

For this intensive, we invite anyone who uses dialogue in their creative practice to create a dialogical structure which will be enacted 5 times throughout the session. These structures will exist alongside creative collaboration, workshops, opportunities for revision, daily tasks of living together such as gardening, cooking, eating and cleaning, which will all be folded into a collectively lived conversation.

Each attendee, will be responsible for designing a 30 minute structured conversation for 2-10 participants which will be slightly revised and adapted after each iteration. Things to consider are: 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 session, we will experiment with multimodal and asymmetric ways of generating material to transfer these conversations into archivable/recombinable content.

​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, musician and co-founder of SMT.  Much of Finbloom's creative practice functions as an attempt to expand the scope of philosophy’s pedagogy via structured conversations, dialogical games, improvisational scores, contemplative audio guides and performative lectures.  He has led numerous workshops and performances at places including: matralab, Senselab, The Centre for Expanded Poetics, The Topological Media Lab, and EMERGE Residency Program, He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently working towards a PhD in the Humanities at Concordia University.

Sharon Mashihi

Sharon Mashihi makes movies, radio, and performances.  Her work can be heard on the podcasts The Heart, Stranglers, United States of Music, The New Yorker Radio Hour, Snap Judgment, Unfictional, and many others.  Her performances and installations have been featured at The Painting Center, The Wassaic Project, Tapefest, The Hearsay Festival in Ireland, and Moogfest.   Sharon is co-writer of the 2017 feature film, The Ticket, and story editor of the forthcoming film, Madeline’s Madeline.  As an editor, Sharon was a 2017 Peabody Award Finalist.   She is a passionate supporter and former board member of SMT.  

SCORES: Propositions for Notating Performance 
May 21 - June 3
Rochester Folk Art Guild, Middlesex, NY
Tuition $600 *includes food and lodging | tuition and travel subsidies available ​ 

A score provides instructions for how something should be performed, played, realized and manifested. However a score is not entirely defined by the performance it instructs and exists in its own right – often as a visual or physical object separate from the lived performance. This session explores the unique set of questions scores pose around repetition, continuity, authorship, ownership, and context.

While scores have a long tradition within music practices; during this session we will explore non-traditional scoring practices. Examples include CA Conrad, Carolee Schneemann, Pauline Oliveros, Fluxus, and Sol LeWitt. We invite artists interested in working with scores across mediums and disciplines including but not limited to scores for performance, reading, writing, dance, thought, movement, dialogue, theatre, digital arts, experimental music practices, and the sciences.

By expanding the pedagogical realm of scoring we will collectively consider: What notation techniques are available for scores (graphic, sonic, linguistic, etc...)? How does the way a score is presented affect its performance? Historically, how have artists across disciplines employed scores in their practices? How do scores complicate notions of authorship by changing the relationship between the artist and the performer?

Alongside structured workshops in which we will explore these questions, this session will give each participant a chance to work on an individual score. Time and support will be provided for individuals to perform, revise, collaborate, and experiment as they develop their scores. Our hope is that by the end of the session residents will have a chance to both perform their score and include a written or visual component of their score in a co-authored book

SCORES will take place in Middlesex, NY near the Finger Lakes region, named for a series of 11 long glacial lakes that resemble human hands. On the property itself, participants will have ample space to explore outside as well as work in two indoor workshop spaces (movement friendly) as well as various smaller indoor spaces. There is access to wifi throughout the property, a pond to swim in, and an outdoor sauna.

SCORES FACILITATORS

Georgia Wall

Georgia Wall is an artist based in New York. Wall’s videos have been exhibited at Team Gallery, Document Space, Faena Art Center, Anthology Film Archives, Spectacle Theater and Flux Factory. In New York she has presented her performance work at New York Live Arts, HERE, US Blues, Dixon Place, Movement Research at Judson Church, Ortega y Gasset Projects and CATCH at The Invisible Dog. Her work has been written about in publications including, ART-News, Mousse Magazine Online, The New Yorker, Hemispheric Institute E-Misférica and Time Out Chicago. Wall also has a curatorial practice and is part of Bottom which has organized events at Abrons Art Center, Spectacle Theater, Glasshouse Projects and Essex Flowers. Wall holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Aaron Finbloom

Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, performance artist, musician and co-founder of SMT.  Much of Finbloom's creative practice functions as an attempt to expand the scope of philosophy’s pedagogy via structured conversations, dialogical games, improvisational scores, contemplative audio guides and performative lectures.  He has led numerous workshops and performances at places including: matralab, Senselab, The Centre for Expanded Poetics, The Topological Media Lab, and EMERGE Residency Program, He holds an M.A. in Philosophy and Art from SUNY Stony Brook and is currently working towards a PhD in the Humanities at Concordia University.

Rachel James 

Rachel Jamesis an artist and poet with a background in cultural anthropology and experimental ethnography. She has exhibited or performed throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including at Essex Flowers, La MaMa, Situations, Spectacle, and Recess in New York City, The New Gallery in Calgary, Totaldobze, in Riga, and Kamppi Chapel in Helsinki. She is an MFA Candidate at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate School for the Arts and curates exhibitions and performance events in Mexico City and New York, where she lives and works.




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Vince Johnson (visiting artist)

Vince Johnson is a Philadelphia based artist with a BA from Villanova University in Continental Philosophy and Africana Studies. His movement foundations are martial arts and hip hop dance. He was a principle dancer for Rennie Harris Puremovement. Since RHPM, he has worked in various artist sectors. He toured with pop artist, Raven Symone and has worked on a television pilot with Cartoon Network.. He has also worked with companies specializing in corporate entertainment, most notably, featured in an Navy Exchange tour, providing entertainment for soldiers stationed on international Navy bases. He has performed under the direction of performance artists and contemporary dance makers like Jaamil Kosoko, Jumatatu Poe/Idiosyncrazy Productions and Brian Sanders Junk. He studied clown under Emmanuel Delpech and has attended workshops at L'Ecole international Jacque Lecoq. Along with painter, Adam Lovitz, he co-founded !!!!!!!!!!!Keepitup, an artist collective dedicated to the production of video and live performance. He is a 2012 Live Arts/Philly Fringe Lab Fellowship recipient. He was a resident at MANCC Forward Dialogues' inaugural choreographic laboratory along with his peer cohort, Jazz composer and musician, Francois Zayas. He is founder and owner of Movemakers Philly and Urban Movement Arts, teacing kids and adults, respectively, hip hop dance styles, North American and Hispanic dance folklore, movement culture, tai chi and yoga.