The performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago began as a place where disciplines met. Founded in the early 1970s by Thomas A. Jaremba, who taught dance and movement at the Goodman Theatre, performance as theorized and practiced at the SAIC was always understood to be a hybrid form.
At SAIC, these modes of collaborating have been developed in parallel with the process of teaching. “In my classes, I’ve had students from China, Tel Aviv, Michigan, Tennessee, Seattle, Chicago,” says graduate coordinator and associate professor Mark Jeffery. “The student in China collaborating with the student in Seattle, a 16- or 17-hour time difference, synchronously, was such an extraordinary experience. Somehow I’m teaching a class with 13 people or 11 people or 18 people, and I forget I’m talking to myself alone in my house. Here I am in my house, and I ask a student to do an activity, and they do it. Somehow connectivity is still being made. I keep thinking of Tehching Hsieh and his year-long pieces“—a series of austere durational performances exploring confinement, deprivation, and time—”We’re all doing it,” notes Jeffery.
“We [have been] asking ourselves ‘what is performance?’ even before the pandemic,” says Plotnikova. “We keep asking. We keep answering. It’s a process of exploring. Someone is doing. Someone is watching that someone else is doing. Same questions. It’s not a new question. We’re just exploring it in the Zoom now.”
“But there’s something beautiful to accidents and mistakes,” says Campos. “Mistakes still happen in a virtual world. If people choose to stick to live, witnessed performance, it’ll only be better after this.”
2/19-2/21: Fri 5 PM, Sat 8 PM, Sun 2 PM; see website for complete schedule. Register at oldwaysnewtools.com, F.
