Registration Now Available for The School for Temporary Liveness
September 25–October 2, 2019
at the Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts

University of the Arts School of Dance presents The School for Temporary Liveness, featuring a new commission by Isabel Lewis and a live performance album from nora chipaumire, September 25-October 2, 2019 at the Philadelphia Art Alliance at University of the Arts, 251 S. 18th Street, Philadelphia, PA. This project marks the Art Alliance at University of the Arts' programmatic debut. The events are FREE and open to the public. Registration for events is now available at temporaryliveness.org.
 
The School for Temporary Liveness is a week-long series of performances, workshops, lectures, and conversations inhabiting the poetic frame of a school. Supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, The School for Temporary Liveness brings together an international roster of artists and scholars working in dance, visual art, poetry, music and more, including nora chipaumire, Isabel Lewis, Colin Self, Simone White and Jackie Wang, among others. Open to the public from 4 to 10pm daily with a 24-hour cycle over the weekend, The School for Temporary Liveness consists of three zones of encounter: The Classroom, The Library and Study Hall, and invites anyone who participates to consider themselves a student, and to engage in new forms of spectatorship and ways of being together.
 
"If we think of the whole operation of a school as a performance, how does that change the ways we teach and learn, or what we think of as knowledge?" said curator Lauren Bakst. "The School for Temporary Liveness engages the theatre of a school while looking to performances themselves as sites of knowledge, so that we might engage with the public in critically reflecting on and imagining what a school can do and be."
 
The Classroom hosts a new commission by Isabel Lewis, who will create a site-specific piece bringing together the work of Berlin-based musical entity LABOUR, scientists from Monell Chemical Senses Center, and local musicians and Philadelphia-based dancers. The Classroom is a contemporary social ritual through which various bodily and sensorial knowledges are discovered and experienced. 
 
The Library is home to nora chipaumire's #PUNK 100% POP N!GGA, a three-part live-performance album inspired by chipaumire's formative years in Zimbabwe during the '70s, '80s and '90s. It explores the sonic ideologies of punk, pop and Congolese rumba, through the iconic artists Patti Smith, Grace Jones and Rit Nzele, respectively. Each part is embedded with a lecture or history lesson that explores how knowledge can be shared through live performance.
 
Study Hall includes workshops, lectures, conversations and new formats for study led by practitioners considering the constraints and possibilities of liveness, living and life from various perspectives. Watch, listen, speak, practice and reflect with Rizvana Bradley, Jarrett Earnest, Brooke Holmes, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Colin Self, Ulises, Jackie Wang, Simone White and others. 
 
The School for Temporary Liveness allows participants to create class schedules for themselves and compile a series of performances and events they attend throughout the week. The School for Temporary Liveness re-positions spectatorship as an active learning (or un-learning) process and performance as a site for the production and exchange of alternative knowledges. Anyone can be a student.
 
The School for Temporary Liveness is presented by University of the Arts School of Dance. This project has been supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
 
The School of Dance at University of the Arts, under the leadership of Donna Faye Burchfield, is a community of 300 talented, expressive students and an exceptional faculty of accomplished professionals with abilities and experiences that are diverse and far-reaching. The School of Dance reimagines and reinvigorates curricular approaches to reflect the ever-expanding landscape of dance while training and supporting the futures of young dance artists. Students are encouraged to discover their interests, articulate their perspectives and situate themselves as participants capable of developing new critical approaches to dance and performance. The curriculum takes the depth and rigor of a discipline-based dance conservatory while actively interweaving practice and theory, as well as maintaining international collaborations and exchanges on undergraduate and graduate levels. 
 
The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage is a multidisciplinary grantmaker and hub for knowledge-sharing, funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, dedicated to fostering a vibrant cultural community in Greater Philadelphia. The Center invests in ambitious, imaginative and catalytic work that showcases the region's cultural vitality and enhances public life and engages in an exchange of ideas concerning artistic and interpretive practice with a broad network of cultural practitioners and leaders. pewcenterarts.org