Open Rehearsals + Groups (draft)

An Open Rehearsal is explicitly not a talk.

Rather, over the coming years visitors will be invited to bring unfinished work, an animating opening question, process material, or things they're stuck in. They may appear in conversation, but that is not the goal. The aim is to specifically break the form of the academic talk. These 90min public facing events will be recorded to build an archive for the project, and be held online or hybridly by default–which makes it feasible for international guests. 

We are drawn to thinking that understands itself as a rehearsal—thinking undertaken with materials, or as practice, which, in its improvisational open-endedness, understands itself as incomplete, unfolding over time and across practitioners and institutions. An Open Rehearsal gathers scholar-artists, and scholars and artists, leaning into the formal and practical experiments that such thinking calls for. Open Rehearsal names the occasion when a door is opened onto work still in the middle of itself. This is what the events will ask of our guests, and what the initiative asks of everyone involved.

In conjunction, ARC will develop three groups interested in the proposition of studying these processes: an Open Group, Study Group, and Graduate Facing Sessions.

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Ashon Crawley

OPEN REHEARSAL (example)

September

February

3pm PST / 7pm EST / 10pm GMT

ONLINE

Candidates under consideration over 3yrs:

Ashon Crawley

Claudia Rankine

Fred Moten

Harmony Holiday

Kodwo Eshun

Misty De Berry

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Ashon Crawley is Professor of Religious Studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. He is author of Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility (Fordham University Press), an investigation of aesthetics and performance as modes of collective, social imagination; and The Lonely Letters (Duke University Press), an epistolary exploration of the interrelation of blackness, mysticism, quantum mechanics and love. He is currently working on a third book, tentatively titled “Made Instrument” (WW Norton), about the impact of the AIDS crisis for black social life. Entering the conversation by considering musicians, singers and choir directors that labored for black churches, “Made Instrument” explores the ways gender, sex, sexuality remain unthought and untheorized but are no less real practices of the living and the dead. A multidisciplinary artist working in the visual and the sonic, Crawley is a Yaddo interdisciplinary arts fellow, a MacDowell interdisciplinary arts fellow, and a New City Arts Initiative Fellow, a LIT (Learning It Together) Artist Fellow and his work has been featured on the National Mall in Washington DC, at Second Street Gallery and Welcome Gallery both in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Bridge Projects and the California African American Museum both in Los Angeles, California. All his writing and his approach to art practices is about what he calls otherwise possibility. Read more about Ashon's art practice here.

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OPEN REHEARSAL GROUPS

Open Group

An open database of people who are interested in the proposition of studying these processes. This group will include students, faculty, community, local, national, and international  scholar artists interested in this work, along with institutions. People can dip in and out across the year. There is no attendance obligation, no expectation that anyone produce anything for the group. The invitation is repeatable rather than binding. This group will be invited to the Open Rehearsal online events. If interested in joining the Open Group, please add your name to the list here.

The study group

Led by ARC Director Fumi Okiji, the study group is an invitational cohort (mainly Berkeley faculty and grad students, but a few further afield) who meet twice a semester to help think through proposals, support, and the shape of the project. This group has actual work: the question of how we support graduate and undergraduate students pursuing this kind of practice, and how we support each other. The work of this group will lay the groundwork for a Designated Emphasis (DE) in___. 

Graduate-facing Sessions

Pending Funding, each Open Rehearsal artist will be paired with a smaller online session for graduate students, following the artist's talk. This will provide graduate students interested in this form of practice with intimate group conversations with practitioners across the world.

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Return to the Open Rehearsal homepage