Scores and Structures for Dance and Performance: Making the Process Visible

(4 Credits)

This workshop offers students of all levels options for creating performances using compositional scores: maps, blueprints, games, and other structures which typically focus the artist on the creative process and produce art reflecting its (experimental) origins. This approach has a rich history: Dadaists and Surrealists of the early 20th century and practitioners of visual, literary, and performing arts since the early 1960s have developed strategies challenging Western art-making traditions, focusing on compositional structure and its relationship to how a piece makes meaning. In this workshop, we will explore and activate some of these strategies and processes to make performances, moving from ideas through actions, using scores variously leading to pre-determined or unpredictable material. We will experiment with models for building scores and structures including chance operations, indeterminacy, improvisation, and works derived from images, objects, intuition, and memory. We will view live and recorded performances; we will support our studio practice with critical, theoretical, reflective, and historical readings by artists and scholars across artistic and academic disciplines. Sources may include John Cage, Yvonne Rainer, Merce Cunningham, Sally Banes, Richard Kostelanetz, Lawrence Halprin, Allan Kaprow, Steve Paxton, Joan Jonas, Simone Forti, Raymond Queneau, and Georges Perec.