Open Rehearsal is a three-year initiative convened around a question the theoretical humanities has been circling but has rarely addressed directly. Namely, what does it take to sustain contemplative thought as a practice? Or what does theory or critical inquiry look like as practice?
The framework of Open Rehearsal will hold multiple components, including Visiting Artists-in Residence, Open Rehearsal conversations and groups, and student-led Listening/Study Groups.
Open Rehearsal asks what it takes to sustain contemplative thought as an avowed practice, and what theory or critical inquiry might be when it takes itself up as a practice. We aren't interested in the application of argument or idea to art or artworks; we would rather not treat art as something that merely carries an idea. We are drawn instead to art's own genre of study. That is, to the understanding that comes only in the making.
We are also 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. At a time when the university is increasingly organized against durational practices, 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.
MATRIX 196, by Steffani Jemison
Still Life, installation by Jasper Marsalis
Rupert, by Imani Mason Jordan
In Succession (Means), by Steffani Jemison
(L to R) Example AIRs Jasper Marsalis, Steffani Jemison, & Imani Mason Jordan, and Open Rehearsal artist Misty de Berry
EXTRA TEXT!
We’re not interested in the application of argument or idea to art or artworks. We would choose to defer a consideration of art as material for theory’s exemplification. We are drawn to thinking that understands itself as a rehearsal. Thinking that is undertaken with materials or as practice, and in its improvisational open-endedness, understands itself as incomplete, unfolding over time, and across practitioners and institutions.
As the university is increasingly organized against durational practices, Open Rehearsal gathers scholar-artists, and scholars and artists, who are leaning into the formal and practical innovation that such thinking calls for. One of the guiding concerns of the project is just how to teach, advise, and evaluate approaches which frustrates disciplinary expectations and incorporative impulses. The project exists in order that such exploration finds company.
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.