The School for Temporary Liveness

The University of the Arts School of Dance will present The School for Temporary Liveness, an eight-day pop-up performance experience staged throughout the Philadelphia Art Alliance building, designed to generate new forms of spectatorship and participation. Reimagining theater through the poetic frame of a school, the project will create a site for the exchange of knowledge through performance, and invite audience members to move between different modes of spectatorship and sociality within three zones: The Library, The Classroom, and Study Hall. Performances will be presented by two internationally recognized artists: choreographer and performer Nora Chipaumire and interdisciplinary performance artist Isabel Lewis. Chipaumire will stage a “live performance album” inspired by her formative years in Zimbabwe and the energy and rebellion of 1980s punk and New Wave music. Lewis will take visitors on a journey throughout the Art Alliance, moving through spaces designed for specific kinds of sense experiences, in a contemporary social ritual she calls “Occasions.” A “school board” of interdisciplinary practitioners offering one-on-one tutoring sessions between experts and amateurs will help audience members connect to the works on view and reflect on their own participation.

Additional unrestricted funds are added to each grant for general operating support.