School for Designing a Society

Performance Courses

Performance as Social Design: Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

A performance lab, where the "theater exercises" rehearsed are our actions in everyday life. An extension of Performers' Workshops. This lab starts with the premise that our actions in everyday life can be viewed as performances, and are thus changeable, in that, as with theater/music performances, our behaviors exhibit intention, choice, and have consequences. A survey of the components of presentation of self are examined: dress; gesture; words; inflection patterns; emphasis; movements; intensity; sequence; timing. We'll read excerpts from the works of Erving Goffman and Eugenio Barba. Participants will be asked to bring "material" to class: behaviors/habits they wish to change, amplify, or have alternatives to. No "stage" performance or theater experience required.

Movement Theatre with an Utopian Twist

In this series of workshops participants study the structure of live observable human behavior (movement, gesture, speech, interaction of all sorts) in an experimental studio setting, in order to invent techniques for performance of behavior organized in new ways, new form. The purpose is to serve the author-composer of theatre in turning the daily life material of human action into behavior not observable in daily life, yet possible to perform. Patterns of such invented behavior can be used in compositions, motivated and informed by the ethics of the author-composer.

The work will be of several types. First, basic skills for movement and acting will be learned through physical and conceptual exercises. Second, an interconnected set of concepts and techniques that already have a history of use in theatre pieces will be explained, discussed, demonstrated and tried. People will work in groups of 3 or 4, taking time to develop responses to specific experimental set-ups and perform for the others in the class. Third, groups will extend known techniques, invent new techniques, make notations and scores for experimental works, and make and perform original compositions.

Some names of concepts used in the workshops are: contradiction in gesture, paradox in behavior, manifesting absence, the movement repertory of reverse action, two-second plays, movement as time-objects, off-stage space on stage, anomalies of simultaneous actions and sequential actions, composed coincidence, pivoting between frames of time and place, putting the frame into the picture, the framing of gestures – the gesture of framing, the gesture of the frame, composition through theatre-montage, composed non-sequitur, pivot-patterns using the technique of pivoting, solo and ensemble pivot patterns, simultaneous non-intersecting events, counter-intuitive behavior, speech and gesture disengaged and realigned, counter-intuitive distribution of speech and gesture, orchestration of behavior, 3-D time and 1-D space, inventing notations, making scores for otherwise impossible events. A large space, mobile flats, books, articles and discussion are all part of the work.

Performers' Workshops

Students (musicians, actors, poets, speakers) are invited to prepare a performance on which they would like comments. An audience is invited to witness and make comments on these performances. Performers are asked to orient the audience by stating the experiment of their performance. The audience is asked to address their comments to the performance they witnessed---not to their thoughts on performance in general, not to the handed-down homilies telling how such music, that author, or this piece ought to be interpreted. Rather, the audience is invited to address their comments to the performance they witnessed, by making an instruction which can be tried out by the performers there and then. The patience and committed enthusiasm with which the performers try out suggestions (made by "mere" listeners), and the skill with which audiences make them, grow with the realization that a seemingly irrelevant instruction can, against all expectations, generate the desired performance.

House Theaters

Together with citizens of the hosting town, the touring group prepares a weekend of House Theater: performances designed to take place in---and use the idiosyncrasies of---a house turned into a cabaret. You are invited. You walk up the stairs of an unfamiliar home. A child with a top hat greets you: "Welcome to House Theater!" You see amidst the knicks and knacks of the home, a small stage. Some 40 chairs are arranged around small tables lit with candles. You take a set. You face neighbors and colleagues. From the staircase, someone seems to be arguing with someone upstairs. At first confused, you realize the performance has begun. . . In house theaters, the audience is treated to an intentional mixture of new music, political theater, and the paraphernalia of a household environment, before being asked to make connections between the pieces in a discussion with the performers.

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