Day Three

As often happens with subjects I like and seem to know a lot  about, or at least have thought about a great deal, I talk too much and say too little. Today was a sort of sample Dada day. Not a deep dive, but pulling a few key ideas out of the movement as exposition for the class. We did the same thing with the Futurists. As opposed to the Aesthetics of Dissonance class where the hope is that the students will begin to understand and process the ideological implications behind these movements, for the performance Art class they are really just context. But shifting to context allows us to mine these movements for specific ideas about audience interaction, technique, process, and goals. As foundational elements of the 20^th century Futurism, Dada, and Duchamp offer a nice snapshot of rejecting authority, including the standard notions of  arts and aesthetics. So, yea, exposition. I started them out with a quick dada poem exercise where they picked a couple of sentences, shopped them up into individual words and randomly arranged them. Always some interesting combinations com out of this. This enabled us to talk a bit about chance and about the devaluation of skill and technique. I’m delighted that a couple of the Solo olos dancers from last year are in the class as that gave us a bit more to talk about in terms of chance and indeterminacy. One of the things that I am trying to set up is the notion that “performance” may have those elements built into the framework. Duchamp was a nice addition to this conversation as his shifting frameworks with his readymades gave us a chance to discuss how we view works and the importance of the audience for definition and reception. The students will be presenting their first projects on Tuesday in which they have to help us see an everyday object, event, or action in a new way. Follows on Duchamp, but also has some interesting indeterminacy built into it.