The School for Temporary Liveness
Experiments in performance, practice, and pedagogy
Vol. 3: April 6–8, 2023
The Rotunda and Slought, Philadelphia
Participate in situations for collective study with Lou Cornum, FORTUNE, Jonathan González & Marguerite Hemmings, Adelita Husni Bey, Niall Jones, Kevin Quashie, Julie Tolentino, Simone White, and more.
Free and open to all — anyone can be a student.
View the program schedule and RSVP for sessions at temporaryliveness.org.
The School for Temporary Liveness invites you to gather in Philadelphia from April 6–8, 2023 for three days of collective study and experiments in practice, performance, and pedagogy. Located at the Rotunda and Slought, STL Vol. 3 operates as a para-site. If the university is typically understood as the place for proper forms of education, then STL offers a space beside the institution—a temporary zone for the unfolding of our improper and uneven assembly.
STL asks: What if we approach performances as invitations to enter into study? Inversely, if we imagine 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? For Vol. 3, a cohort of participants have been asked to generate situations for collective study that extend from their various practices. Learn alongside them and with each other through their generous and emergent offerings.
“Study perverts instruction” — STL is an occasion to partake of this perversion, a situation for gathering where “those who study do not improve but improvise.” When approached as a form that bears the excesses, instabilities, and ruptures of social life, performance renders the ways and means by which we come together, linger, exit, and do it all over again. What minor forms of life are brought forth through these passages? What tentative collectivities emerge in these interstices? Performance, like school, can be an excuse for taking part in dissonant communion.
STL is informed by the work of Black feminist thought, critical pedagogies, queer theory, and performance studies. It is equally informed by the practices in life and art—namely dance, performance, and poetics—that circulate alongside and in conversation with these theoretical traditions. This project is in conversation with historical and ongoing attempts to produce alternative contexts for pedagogy and performance.
Quotations are from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s All Incomplete (2021).
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The School for Temporary Liveness is curated and organized by Lauren Bakst.
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THURSDAY, April 6
4:00 pm: Pull Up, Simone White and Wilmer Wilson IV (R)
5:30 pm: What Might Live in a Word and a Sentence, Kevin Quashie (S)
7:00 pm: djamn, Jonathan González and Marguerite Hemmings (R)
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FRIDAY, April 7
11:00 am: Thinking with Poems, Kevin Quashie (S)
4:00 pm: Critical Infrastructures, Adelita Husni Bey (R)
7:30 pm: Making Life in the Wastelands, Lou Cornum (R)
10:00 pm: Hahaha, 2023, Niall Jones (S)
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SATURDAY, April 8
1:00 pm: Critical Infrastructures, Adelita Husni Bey (R)
4:00 pm: ON TOUCH, Julie Tolentino (S)
5:00 pm: On Necessary Work + I Am Somebody, Adelita Husni Bey (R)
8:00 pm: < p a r t y > (S)
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ONGOING
Come early and stay late to linger in these installations.
The Water Fountain, Organized by FORTUNE (S)
Physical Education, Organized by Andrew J. Smyth (S)
(S) = Slought, (R) = Rotunda