School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3
- School for Temporary Liveness
- School of Arts & Sciences, Weitzman School of Design (PennDesign)
School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 1, Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts, 2019. Photo by Constance Mensh.
The School for Temporary Liveness, Vol. 3 convenes artists, scholars, and students around experimental practices in performance and pedagogy for three days and nights of collective study in Spring 2023. A modular and accumulative experiment in reimagining performance through the poetic frame of a school, the School mobilizes the ethical dimensions of practice that animate experimentation in the fields of dance, performance, writing, and critical theory. Generating situations for study, the School is anchored in the premise that performances entail a pedagogy of liveness, in that for a bracketed period of time, they engender a set of conditions for how to live. In this sense, the School reorients the public from a paradigm of spectatorship and consumption toward that of participation and pedagogical exchange. The School for Temporary Liveness also acts as a para-site to the university, staging and enacting other possibilities for learning that fall outside traditional modes of academia. Centering dance and performance practices as modes of intellectual research, the School creates a space for study that is not institutionalized at Penn. This project is also, most crucially, a bridge between the city and the university, seeking to connect with and form a temporary community that overflows the bounds of the institution. Lauren Bakst, who is currently a second-year PhD student in the Department of English, is the Curator and Director of the School for Temporary Liveness.