Exquisite Corpus is a workshop series collaboratively created and taught by Linda Austin, Tahni Holt and Linda K. Johnson. Open to all artists working in any discipline who are concerned with the materials of performance, Exquisite Corpus will explore a wide range of methods and strategies that address one of the elemental aspects of the performative act - embodiment: what am I doing, how am I doing it, what does it communicate, how do I get present? Subsidized by a grant from PICA’s new Precipice Fund, the workshop seeks to bring together artists from many divergent practices and communities in an affordable, open study performance forum. Throughout our study together, we will move, read, discuss, create, destroy, debate, write, draw, and witness each other.
This workshop series springs from a central shared question arrived at from our lively conversations on current trends in performance in Portland, both in visual art and dance: How do sensing, feeling and perceiving differ, and how can investigating these modalities be useful in refining, articulating and creating with the performative body? Exquisite Corpus offers participants the opportunity to address this question by: waking to ways of being organized in the world; noticing what is of particular interest to the participant's sensibilities; questioning assumptions about what is seen and communicated; exploring approaches to performing presence and of being present in performance; being in relation to others doing the same; talking about what is being experienced.
We recognize the lack of opportunity for those who are looking for first, new and/or deeper ways of experiencing moments of performing, and we strive to enrich, as a group and as individuals, each participant’s performance practice. We are curious about performers’ experiences and choices with embodiment or lack thereof, and want to offer additional and/or unexplored ways to investigate and define this work. Arising from the workshop's main concerns we ask: How does one practice performing? What are different ways a performer can inflect her performing with levels or modalities of presence? How does attention to modes of sensation, feeling and perception affect these modalities of presence? What does it mean to be embodied? How does this state of relationship to self and ideas enliven the actual creation of time-based work and the subsequent moments of performance?
Exquisite Corpus is taught in two, 5-week workshops, to be taken independently or as a series: Saturdays, 12-3p: April 12th-May 10th and/or May 17th-June 14th; $60/$100 for both
Class is limited to 15 | Please email to register: hello@flockpdx.org
Exquisite Corpus is supported by:
Five Lectures on Live Performance
From the origins of Western theater in Ancient Greece to the immersive experiences of Sleep No More, live performances – whether dance, music, theater, oration or some combination thereof – have been both entertainment and a foundational element of civic life.
Public assembly and performance have served as platform for discourse, outlet for social critique, site for communal engagement and tactic for collectively imagining other possible worlds. But what do the terms “performance” and “public” mean in the hyper-mediated, ubiquitously networked, always-on world of the 21st Century? Why do we continue to seek live, social experiences and how is the art of performance changing with the times?
From May 5 – June 9, 2014 critic, curator and cultural provocateur Andy Horwitz will share his iconoclastic views on the practice and position of performance at the intersection of economics, politics and society. Over the course of five weekly lectures, Horwitz will address a wide range of topics ranging from the power of live performance in the digital age to income equality and the economics of cultural production in the performing arts.
Drawing from his extensive body of critical writing on Culturebot.org, the findings of The Brooklyn Commune Project’s report on arts, economics and cultural production in the performing arts, and his years of experience as a curator, producer and artist advocate, Horwitz will weave these disparate but interrelated topics together to offer a uniquely insightful perspective into the current state of performance and its possible futures.
Lecture topics include: The Importance of Being Here: Live Art in the Digital Age, A Decade of Change: NYC as Global City (2004 – 2014), Irrational Exuberance: The Performing Arts Market Explained, Performance at an Exhibition, and Collaboration, Creativity & The American Revolution(s).
Lectures will be held Mondays May 5 – June 9 at 6:30PM in Dean’s Conference Room, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway, 12th Floor, NYC. Admission is FREE and each lecture will be followed by an open discussion.
This series is made possible with support from the Institute of Performing Arts (IPA) at Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. Special thanks to Associate Dean, Allyson Green, and the Department of Dance, Cherylyn Lavagnino and Sean Curran, Co-Chairs. Special thanks also to William Moulton and Paul Galando, Tisch Dance.
LECTURE DESCRIPTIONS
Monday, May 5
The Importance of Being Here: Live Art in the Digital Age
Why is live performance important in the digital world and how do new ideas and emergent technologies provide new ways of interpreting how live performance functions in contemporary culture? Andy will expand on the ideas proposed on his new blog, Ephemeral Objects: Art Criticism for the Post-Material World, for which he received a 2013 Creative Capital | Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant.
Monday, May 12*
A Decade of Change: NYC as Global City (2004 – 2014)
Based on the essay of the same name, Andy will offer an overview of the transformation of the city, the implications for artists living and working in NYC and the opportunities it presents for strengthening regional cultural production.
*Please note, this lecture will be held at 721 Broadway in the Drama Department’s Studio 1 on the 2nd Floor
Monday, May 19
Irrational Exuberance: The Performing Arts Market Explained
An examination of the performing arts market in NYC from 2004 – 2014 as viewed through the lens of the APAP conference and related showcases. Andy will address issues of supply and demand and the relationship between economic and cultural structures in the current nonprofit performing arts, aesthetic bias and resource allocation.
Monday, June 2
Performance at an Exhibition
An exploration of how the “rediscovery of performance” in the visual art market has affected the aesthetics, conditions and discourse of dance and contemporary performance. What are the economic and political implications of the museum’s embrace of spectacle and ephemerality and how has this informed – and been informed by – NYC’s transformation into a Global City?
Monday, June 9
Collaboration, Creativity & The American Revolution(s)
Inspired in part by Joseph J. Ellis’ Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, this lecture will explore the collaborative, improvisatory creative process that led to the invention of America in the immediate post-Revolutionary period and how that appears in the aesthetics and cultural production practices in contemporary American performance. What might this mean for artists in the 21st century, how can collaborative, creative practices inform artistic citizenship and revolutionize democracy in America?