Showing of original student performances and installations, FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC.

RC HUMS 334, Personal, Present and Immediate: Making Performance on Socio-Political Questions, is a composition workshop-style course is a generative laboratory to make rigorous, experimental works that open reflection on socio-political issues. Our seminar involves: a study of other artists' work and ways they engage with wide-ranging political matter through performance, animation, sculpture and other media; an embodied exploration of compositional elements at different sites in the Residential College and U-M's campus; and creative assignments that employ various methods to interrogate sociopolitical material of your own choosing. We'll be examining the immediate, present, and personal relationship of the body to performance in a very expansive way, studying William Kentridge's stop-gap animation, Diego Rivera's Detroit Industry murals, and Maya Lin's Vietnam Memorial, for example, alongside more traditional understandings of performance in theater, dance and film. Questioning assumptions of performance, genre, audience and politics will form an important part of our work in this interdisciplinary class, as will a detailed examination of compositional elements common to multiple art forms. We will gain practice and experience with different approaches to making performance and different ways to deploy compositional tools, depending on your objectives. No previous experience in performance or socio-political action necessary, and all bodies, abilities, and backgrounds are actively welcome on this journey; experimentation, adaptation and play with formats and tools that may be new to you will be encouraged. The course will culminate in a public showing of original student work.