ECC Performance Art Workroom

This course introduces students to forms of performance art documentation and archiving. Through key theories and practical examples, it investigates into how ephemeral practice is translated into physical material, its meaning for the discipline and ways of use in artistic and curatorial practice.

This course investigates the intersections between performance art and video. Through the study of key works, selected readings, as well as physical exercises and writing activities, the course tackles questions such as “how are artists pushing the boundaries and expanding the definition of performance art and media? How does performative video and performance on network technologies communicate and participate in social and political discourses, meanings, and values?"

This course explores absurdity as a methodology and inspiration for performance art. In addition to historic and contemporary case studies, participants learn about the meaning and purpose of absurdist strategies such as cycles and repetitions, nonsensical language or imagery, humour and slapstick, or unconventional combinations of bodies and objects and discover how they can employ absurdism for their own purpose. 

Through a variety of practical experiments, discussions of case studies, and selected readings, this class examines the practice of using task-led activities as a means to conceive and compose performance art.

Who is your audience?  What do you expect of them? What do you want to tell them?  What do you want to learn from them?  This course focuses on the relation between performance art and its audience. Through practical exercises, discussions and readings, participants will explore a spectrum of ways to interact with their viewers and engage them in the work. 

Focusing on the role of physical action and bodily creativity in performance art making, the course introduces students to the philosophical principles, the processual forms, and the techniques needed to work with their own body as a starting point of the process of creating performance art.

This course will explore writing as and about performance art. It is aimed at practitioners who use writing as part of their work, as well as those who need inspiration when writing about their own, or another artist’s work. Through a series of structured discussions and a number of writing tasks, we will experiment with how to write as/about/alongside performance art: your own or someone else’s.  As a starting point, we will explore a range of different kinds of writing, including performative writing (Hannah, Black, Tim Etchells, Tracy MacKenna), site-writing (Jane Rendell), art writing (Maddee Clark, Lorraine O’Grady), and auto-ethnography (Unoma Azuah, Mary E. Weems). We will think about how we might use writing not only to document live work but to invent further. We will explore what might come first: the performance or the text, body or language. We will experiment with form and content. We will explore relationships between text-based work and other media and discourses. The overarching aim of the course is to inspire students to get writing as part of their own practice in innovative and generative ways.

Using the regions of Latin America as focus point, this course explores performance art as a political tool. Through the study of case studies, readings, as well as practical exercises, participants will learn about political performative strategies such as protest and the use of public space, satire, cabaret as well as digital possibilities and how to utilize them to express their own, individual political agenda, be it social, cultural, or personal.

This intensive online workshop is dedicated to performance-based filmmaking's conceptual, aesthetic, and practical aspects.