Open Rehearsal

Open Rehearsal

Background image: Abstract mixed-media collage with bright yellow blocks, handwritten notes, pale blue and gray textures, and red-blue marks, creating a fragmented mood.
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Open Rehearsal is a three-year initiative built around a question the theoretical humanities has long circled but rarely addressed directly: what does it take to sustain contemplative thought as a practice? What might theory or critical inquiry be when it takes itself up as practice?

We are drawn to art's particular genres of study—to the understanding that comes only in the making, and to thinking that understands itself as a rehearsal: open-ended, willing to stay unfinished, worked out slowly across people and institutions. At a time when the university is increasingly organized against durational practices, Open Rehearsal opens a space for scholars and artists working across making and thought.

(Image: Ashon Crawley)
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Artists-in-Residence

The Arts Research Center welcomes Artists-in-Residence whose making is a mode of thought, and thinkers whose work emerges from a practice, all experimenting with what scholarship can look like when it tends toward being made rather than written. Over three years, a shared project holds artists in each other's orbit and in that of practitioners across campus, culminating in a festival bringing together artists, working groups, and wider communities.

Open Rehearsals

Open Rehearsals open a door onto work still in the middle of itself. An artist-scholar brings unfinished work, an animating question, process material, or a place they're stuck—not to present it, but to think with it, out loud. This is a space for contemplation that understands itself as rehearsal. It welcomes thinking undertaken with materials, or as practice. Each public online session is followed by a meeting with a small group of graduate students.

Study + Practice

The Open Rehearsal framework supports conversation, practice, listening, and study groups for a wide range of participants: undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, artists, and the wider communities. These include a public-facing Open Group, an invitational Study Group, and five student-led groups currently accepting members: Black Sound and Music, Gesture and Thought, D23 Gallery, the Sentence, and Elemental Activism Working Groups.
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Blue back ground with black and white artwork of a man in the center

MATRIX 196, by Steffani Jemison

Projection of a scale on a wall with projectors in foreground each side

Still Life, installation by Jasper Marsalis

person kneeling on stairs with papers scattered, bathed in red light

Rupert, by Imani Mason Jordan

people climbing through metal pipes

In Succession (Means), by Steffani Jemison

Topics

AIR topic page