Performance Summer Institute – Chicago

Abandoned Practices – something out of the ordinary
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
July 6-24, 2009

This New Performance Summer Institute 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.

Week one: Abandoned technologies.
Mode: installation.
Forgotten machines, crafts, stagecrafts, thought as craft, the place of the hand in art making, player pianos, slowness as resistance.

Week two: Abandoned concepts.
Mode: writing.
The archive as repository of outmoded ideas; the pastoral; the senses.

Week three: Abandoned behavior.
Mode: performance.
Forgotten labor practices; town criers; discontinued social customs.