The Bodied Environment: Performance & the Movement Experience

This seminar will consider the bodily experience of movement in the environment and how designers, attuning themselves to the kinesthetic potentials of the body, might use movement as a generative device. Students from the performative arts and related fields within the larger university are also urged to enroll. Cross-disciplinary dialogue will enrich course investigations of performance as an embodied inquiry and interpretation of environment. Dance will be integral to course content as pure and purposeful movement that is aesthetically intended. The designer as choreographer will be considered, though, rather than examine prescribed movement through preconceived sequence or iconographic narrative, the emphasis will be on a bodily dialogue with the environment – how one informs the other in an open score. A guest choreographer will lead the class in a series of environmental movement exercises for one session. Each class will be conducted thematically. Topics include:-Extensions of the Flesh: The Phenomenal Environment-WALKING: Thoreau, (Richard) Long, de Certeau-Oskar Schlemmer & The Theater of the Bauhaus-Anna & Lawrence Halprin: Experiments in Environment-Happenings and Environmental Performance of the 1960s & 1970s-COLLABORATIONS: Isamu Noguchi/Martha Graham, Flamand/Diller+Scofidio, etc. -MOVEMENT NOTATION: Laban, Halprin, Lynch, Thiel, Tschumi, etc. -The Body & the Social Sciences: Environmental Behavior & Perception-Movement & Desire: The derive, psychogeography & the Situationist City-Movement InfrastructuresClasses will begin with a short lecture followed by discussion related to weekly readings or assignments. A final project (paper, performance, score, design) will be presented to the class in the final weeks. Evaluation will be based on contribution and engagement in discussions and the final project.