CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Old Ways New Tools explores performance "beyond the rectangle"

Performing Arts Feature | Chicago Reader: The performance department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago began as a place where disciplines met. Founded in the early 1970s by Thomas A. Jaremba, who taught dance and movement at the Goodman Theatre, performance as theorized and practiced at the SAIC was always understood to be a hybrid form. "It was born from dissatisfied artists—dissatisfied with the confines of their own traditional format,"

1 comment:

Jin Oh said...

Somehow, I paid more attention to the short quotes within the interview than the actual explanations of the performances while reading this article. My first favorite part was when they say that people were throwing a question like “what is a performance?” Even before the pandemic struck. This is really true; although the process differ from what people have been doing for the past decades, I now think that in the future, COVID era could be seen as just another step of exploring new possibilities for the improvement of theatrical performances. As much as COVID took away from the performances, it also worked as a catalyst for new discoveries and development of so many different kinds of art and new definitions (“liveliness being redefined!”). And as Smith said later, it even provided the space (almost mandated to be honest) for collaboration between analog and digital, which is very helpful for me for being a digital person.