History

Summer Writing Progam 2005
Week Four: July 25 —July 31

Community/Performance/Hybrids/Collaboration

This is the Summer Writing Program's traditional week of exploratory poetics that changes the frequency of how we discuss our work and take it off the page. Collaborating involves a risky give and take; performance can push the edge for writers. Can we write and perform in a vacuum? How do we bring new hybrid strategies together? How do we extend toward other disciplines - of dance, music, film? What are some of the cross-genre examples for us? Celebrated co-founder of the still-active Living Theatre, Judith Malina, will be on hand, as well as legendary writer-performer, filmmaker Carolee Schneemann.

Experiments in Performance
Michelle Ellsworth
We will make performance pieces with media we are unqualified and untrained to use. Inexperience, bodies, collaborations, snacks, plaster, and computers will all be employed. We will question our assumptions about performance, audience, and language and try to make something that gives us a wee bit of pleasure.

Living Workshop in Collective Creation
Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov
This 4-day workshop is designed to teach acting and staging methods developed by The Living Theatre while creating a play to be performed at the conclusion of the week's work. Together with directors Judith Malina and Hanon Reznikov, participants will study elements of The Living Theatre's decades of experiment in theatrical technique and will invent their own texts and actions for an ensemble piece on themes of their choosing.

Day 1
rite of encounter (the Chord) - breathing and voice - principles and history - documentary video - improvisation - discussion: the actor's commitment

Day 2
rite of sensibilization (orgone energetics) - Artaud: the plague - ensemble and spatial kinetics - discussion: form and content - formation of groups

Day 3
rite of gathering (processions) - Meyerhold: biomechanics - corporal expression and gestuality - discussion: utopian possibilities - collective poetry: exquisite corpse - scenework

Day 4
rite of transcendence (opposition of forces) - ensemble actions: Bacchus Dance - final rehearsal and discussion - performance

The Poetics of Social Cultural Consciousness
Victor Hernandez Cruz
How have different poets dealt and expressed issues of social and cultural consciousness? How does the nomadic spirit of the poet maintain his/her artistic freedom while at the same time adhering to the social responsibility inherent within language? In this workshop, we will look at how poetry resembles and describes a time and a place and a people - as well as how it does not - exploring links between Latin American poetics and the northern cultural writing sphere.

Performing Poetry
Tracie Morris
This workshop will begin by considering the distinctions between spoken and written sound techniques. We will then examine how articulation supports, and collaborates with, written poetry. The workshop will conclude with supporting the voice to begin creating poems based primarily in sound. The class will complete the week with a performed reading.

Hoaxes, Hetronyms & Other In(ter)ventions
Laura Mullen
Where "I" appears an Other emerges, shifted over, re-cognized in the mirror of language with an effort. But who (all) is really there? In this workshop we will locate at least one Other among the multitudes we contain and set them about the business of making a name for themselves: a name not ours. We will look at historical precedents (Ossian, Pessoa) and consider contemporary examples, weighing the issues involved while enjoying the permission (think mardi gras and masked ball) of performance. All genres welcome.

Pressed for Time
Brad O'Sullivan
William Everson considered the broadside to be the medium in which "the art of the printer and the art of the poet come together most sublimely." Drawing inspiration from historical and contemporary examples, we'll wrestle with this often impractical yet enduring medium as we design, hand-set, and letterpress print our own limited edition broadside.

"I Am Gasping as Hosts" - Text-based Performance as Rapture/Rupture
Akilah Oliver
What is rupture? Rapture? Can language, poetry, the collapsing of text in public spaces/ performance spaces create an/other text that transmutes, holds to, witnesses, traces, and recreates itself? What is performance text, spoken word, performance poetry? Where does the body, [an unstable site of desire] enter this discourse? This workshop invites participants to come play in the field of language both on and off the page. We will collaborate with one another, work with visual images, play with electronic/computer sounds, work with live musicians and build from our own texts to investigate rapture, rupture, and the transformative possibilities of language performed.

Chance and Poetry, Collaborating With Everything
Bin Ramke
Writing begins as collaboration--between mind (not fully under the writer's control, is it?) and language (definitely not) and ends collaboratively, too. And if it is alive it performs (on the page, in the mind, in the space between). How language is essentially collaborative will be the focus of our writing, reading, and discussion--and there will be guests during the week. Primarily for poets, but open.

A Community of Poems
Elizabeth Robinson
Jack Spicer said, "Poems should echo and reecho against each other . . .They cannot live alone any more than we can." In this class, we will examine aggregations of poems and then collaborate as editors, making student work into chapbooks.

"Dream/Space/Object" Workshop
Carolee Schneemann
This workshop will develop collaborative interactions based on each individual's current work-learning and merging the perspectives of the participants. Dreams and political menace will offer themes to be investigated by the group as sources which both block and provoke creative motive. Our work will integrate written texts and their imagistic extension into varied materials, including actions within the surrounding landscape.

Song Writing Workshop
Steven Taylor
The workshop is part historical survey, part lyric factory, part band. The first two class sessions are devoted to listening to and discussing various forms and genres in English language song from the Renaissance to the present. By the third session we all have a song to contribute to the ensemble. The third and fourth sessions are devoted to arranging and rehearsing a program of songs to be performed for the larger community at the end of the week. You don't need to be able to read music, but you must be willing to sing. If you have an instrument, bring it.

Performing a Living Force
Cecilia Vicuña
How can we perceive society itself as a performance, and our work within it as a living force for change? How can our own transformation feed back the dream and open the way for a wider collaboration with the world? We will consider these questions in the light of ancient and contemporary examples of collective and ritual action.

Post-Image
John Yau
The class will focus on writing that goes beyond image, and will be encouraged to write works which elude (but do not necessarily deny) the mind's eye. The challenge is to write works that are pictorial without being picturesque, works that both elude and challenge sight. There will be daily assignments. There will be discussions about contemporary poetry and art.

Week One | Week Two | Week Three | Week Four

Previous Summer Writing Program Information

2006
2005
2004
2003