Course Description
Summary
This class examines what it means to perform the identity of a good artist, from the perspective of the performer, and how the tenets of good citizenship get in the way of doing our most radical—from the root—work.
By making this inquiry, we reclaim the performance process as both a medium and a model for building relationships that cause radical social re-design.
This class is for artists who believe material change in the world starts with our bodies, land, and the imagination with which we relate to these things and build community around that imaginary. This is what I call the performance process: the capsule where we tend to the tensions between our emotional life, creative work and public offerings. We have that conversation by anchoring it in the body as the site of ancestral origin, and therefore, the hyperlocal site of social change.
In spring 2022, we began with the question, “how can I use my performance process to repair my root system?”
The question grew to, “how do I design a performance process that makes me feel cared for?”
Now after finishing another module this fall, I’m asking “how do I design a performance process that transforms power into something beautiful?”
*This class now includes a money clinic where we start with a discussion of agency, and translate that to an embodied reclaiming of materiality, facilitating income, and accessing grant and fellowship resources.
