The School for Temporary Liveness

The School for Temporary Liveness reimagines performance through the poetic frame of a school.

The School for Temporary Liveness is a week-long series of performances, workshops, talks, conversations and new formats for study inhabiting the poetic frame of a school. Presented by University of the Arts School of Dance and supported by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, the School for Temporary Liveness brings together an international roster of artists and scholars working across disciplines and subjects of inquiry. Housed within the Philadelphia Art Alliance and open to the public from 4 to 10pm daily with a 24-hour cycle over the weekend, the School for Temporary Liveness invites anyone who participates to consider themselves a student, and to engage in new forms of spectatorship and ways of being together.

The School comprises three zones of encounter—The Classroom, The Library and Study Hall—each of which engage different modes of viewing and participation. For The Classroom, artist Isabel Lewis has created a new site-specific work that takes the form of an “expanded sensorial walk,” prioritizing the movement of the visitor through space as a mode of (un)learning. Engaging the site of the Philadelphia Art Alliance and its surrounding areas as a focal point, the work proposes new methodologies for living with the material entanglements of place and history. The Library presents nora chipaumire’s three-part live-performance album #PUNK 100%POP *N!GGA, a triptych that reimagines the sonic archives of punk, pop, and rumba through chipaumire’s unapologetic quest for self-determination. Experience each part in succession or as independent entities alongside a newly-created zine and radio station, broadcast live by chipaumire and her collaborators from the Philadelphia Art Alliance. Study Hall will host talks, workshops, and conversations led by Rizvana Bradley, Jarrett Earnest, Brooke Holmes, Tiona Nekkia McClodden, Colin Self, Jackie Wang and Simone White, as well as a Reading Room curated by the Philadelphia-based bookshop Ulises. As the week progresses, Study Hall will increasingly become a site for emergent and collective study, mobilizing the roles of the student, teacher and witness in participatory formats for knowledge-exchange. All events are free and open to the public—attend one event or build a schedule for study over the course of a single day or throughout the full week.

The School for Temporary Liveness places the experimental pedagogies living within the School of Dance at University of the Arts into conversation with the city, with artists, and with a new public. 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? The School for Temporary Liveness engages the theatre of a school while looking to performances themselves as sites of knowledge, so that we might engage with the public in critically reflecting on and imagining what a school can do and be.

This school is free and for the public. Anyone can be a student.