Summer Performance Institute
3-week intensive class: Abandoned Practices – something out of the ordinary
July 12th - 30th 2010

Teachers: Lin Hixson, Mark Jeffery, Matthew Goulish

Visiting Scholars:
Rebecca Schneider, Brown University. Associate Professor. Chair, Department of Theatre Arts and Performance Studies
Dr. Paul Clarke, GWR Fellow, Performing the Archive: The Future of the Past Bristol University, UK

This class looks forward by looking backward, researching, enacting, and embodying practices that for one reason or another have been disregarded in the wake of progress, and relegated to the archives of history. Students will participate in individual and collaborative projects involving writing, installation, documentation, and live performance. Teachers and visiting scholars will lecture on related subjects. Available for credit or non-credit enrollment.

Abandoned practices constitutes an emerging a field of inquiry pioneered by Alan Read of King’s College, London, author of Theatre, Intimacy, and Engagement: The Last Human Venue (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). The course focus will allow a thematic meeting place that confronts the common accelerated temporalities of the 21st century, whether in the form of economic and artistic globalization, technology’s ceaseless upgrade, or the general shifts in understanding of the word local.

The course does not propose that we share a mutual past, but rather that we might mutually discover a shared strategy of thinking about our pasts, a strategy of reimagining and reenacting the different abandoned practices that once defined the ordinary.