Ania Nowak

Media
Performance

Teaching language
English (Polish possible)

Requirements
The workshop is open to everyone, with a special invitation to participants with queer, crip, BIPOC, and migration experience.

In this course, we will practice being un/familiar with our knowledge of the world—its definitions, modes of existence, our and others’ bodies and identities. We will explore desire, attachment, and breakup as performative strategies to tackle the complexities of interdependence, attention, and democracy. If society is broken and we are divided, how can improvisation become a tool for expanding our capacity for delight and discomfort? How can performance support the ruination of forces which stifle us and the activation of multiple, often inconsistent desires? What does disobedience look and feel like today and tomorrow?

The US-American cultural theorist Lauren Berlant wrote, “Cruel optimism is about how people will stay in relation to their object even if it destroys them because they can’t bear giving up the pleasure of knowing the world in a particular way.” In the classroom, we will create tools to embody, move, think, speak, sound, read, and perform with others; in other words, how we stay connected. We will witness each other and seek an appropriate language of feedback collectively and individually.