This course explores writing as and about performance art as a creative practice. 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 in 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 .

Syllabus