On Performance | Spring 2020 |
Chicago College of Performing Arts, Roosevelt University
The Course
Designed by David Kjar, the course On Performance builds on studies by Nicholas Cook (2013), Kjar (2021), Christopher Small (1998), William Cheng (2019), Erika Fischer-Lichte (2008), Michael Stepniak and Peter Sirotin (2020), and Anna Bull (2019). Special guests Prudence Holmes, Adrian Dunn, Michelle Isaac, Sean Ellis Hussey, Allegra Montanari, and Nicholas Kitchen also visited our class. Through these studies and visits, we explored interdisciplinary frameworks for understanding performance as a wide-ranging phenomenon hinged upon various notions of aesthetics, analysis, social practice, identity, and purpose. By comprehensively considering performance as an integrated social-cultural-political phenomenon shaped through performer, composer, and listener’s experiences and perspectives, we cultivated a new critical awareness of ourselves as transforming and transformative 21st-century artists. Throughout the term, we reflected on the frameworks by creating audio reflection-paper fragments, or ARPs. These fragments, which blended various soundscapes, dialogues, monologues, interviews, and musicking, were the core critical scholarly-artistic means for our self and group investigations. This Installation Designed by those of us that took the course, this artistic research installation employs our ARPs and can be experienced in different ways. In some frames, the ARPs remain intact but are further contextualized while, in others, the fragments have been manipulated and, in one place, you are invited to refashion the ARPs to your liking. You can begin with the first framework and make your way through in a linear experience; or you can choose any frame to explore, crafting a unique experience of your own. Space is provided throughout the pages for your questions, reactions, reflections, and creations. The installation provides an immersive and creative way for understanding our epistemological approaches to music and our artistic research this term. Best Wishes, The On Performance Class of Spring 2020 |