Washington MFAIA Visiting Day
Greetings!
Please join us for a taste of our residency experience in this day of workshops and discussions led by Goddard Faculty, Students, Alumni, and guest speakers. You are also invited to join the Lead Faculty member JuPong Lin and Renée Almatierra from Admissions for a brief meet and greet session in the morning preceding the workshops.
The description of the sessions you are invited to attend are below. Please register here and you will receive a separate email closer to the date of the event with the zoom links.
Tuesday, February 16 • 10:00am – 10:30am PST
Prospective students are invited to meet with the MFAIA Washington program Faculty Chair, JuPong Lin, as well as Admissions Counselor, Renée Almatierra
Tuesday, February 16 • 10:45am – 11:45am PST
GROUP STUDY: Making as Thinking, Thinking through Writing
Artmaking is a form of knowledge-creation. Creative process is a way of thinking, being and knowing. So many artists struggle with the written word, especially “academic writing.” Whether you are someone who struggles with writing or embraces it, this group study will offer a peer writing support group in which we can explore how to write from the ground of holistic, embodied, transformative energy and authentic voice that we bring to making art. This CoLLab (Collaborative Learning Laboratory) is designed for artists who know in our bones that making is how we come to understand the world, and how we dialogue with or “co-respond” to the world. Even in the context of an MFA, a construction of settler universities, nonverbal artistic expression is often marginalized or made invisible. Shaping artistic ideas and translating them into the language that is understood and accepted by academic institutions (or any settler institutions, for that matter) is a powerful skill. The even greater challenge is how to translate our ideas without compromising or eroding the integrity and authenticity of who we are. That takes practice and a supportive community of co-llaborators. Join this community of co-makers, co-thinkers, co-writers who will be made up of MFAIA students, faculty, and alumni.
JuPong Lin, Lead Faculty
Tuesday, February 16 • 1:00pm – 2:15pm PST
GROUP STUDY How Dialogue Informs Performance Creation
Can our performance process foster mycorrhizal growth, creating channels that persist beyond the process itself and connect us in a web of relations? How can we approach the creation of performance as an interdependent act, seeking to decolonize the framework that glorifies the artist as independent, and instead become visionary in our reliance on each other? The purpose of this study group is to focus on dialogue as fuel for the creation of performance, seeking to explore ways we artists can strengthen, support and give to each other’s performance development through a series of meaningful small dialogues.
Participants will commit to holding at least four individual dialogues throughout the semester, and posting recordings to a shared study-group online platform. At the end of the semester, each participant will submit a summary of their reflections to the group forum, and we will meet to share our insights in a closing circle.
This is an experiment in using the dialogic process on a small scale to understand how it affects performance work, and how it can be used to facilitate performance creation. This group study will offer participants an example for decentralizing their work, and fostering interdependence, with an eye to decolonizing praxis.
Hathor Vergotis with Devora Neumark, PhD (Faculty Lead)
Tuesday, February 16 • 3:45pm – 4:45pm PST
The Shapes of Language, with faculty member Ty Defoe
An embodied practice to indigenize and decolonize communication in storytelling through movement. Embracing indigenous worldviews to connect ideas across cultures, time, and space. Please bring a glass of water.
We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday, February 16th!
