Performance Making

Course

Helen Paris

This is a studio course focused on creative processes and generating original material. Students will be encouraged to think critically and creatively about the relationship between form and content. Each week we will explore different ways of generating original material for live performance. We will often work with a set theme in tandem with a compositional form. The emphasis is on process and weekly experimentation in the creation of short works, which is reflected in the weighting of the assessments. This class is for all students who wish to work both individually and collaboratively on exploring creative processes and generating material for performance.

Student Evaluations

“Dear future student, PLEASE TAKE THE COURSE. There is always a take away from all of Helen’s classes. She will make sure to work with you individually, and that is a rare opportunity. She will continue to challenge you to think, to be open minded and bring your individual curiosities to the studio space.”

“Performance Making took my creative work to a new level and taught me approaches that I’d never encountered before. Helen gives us a ton of individual attention and feedback. Students came from a variety of backgrounds and levels of experience, and the course was able to accommodate each of us and give us space to grow.”

“Performance Making was stellar, and it was a great laboratory to experiment and grow. Helen’s teaching was outstanding, and the amount of personalized feedback we received was wonderful. Often, the feedback we got on our performances and assignments was overwhelmingly positive, which helped us feel supported as we experimented.”

“The course was magnificently designed with a variety of stimulating exercises that contributed to our growth as performers by way of expanding our palette of performance making tools—as soloists and collaborators.”

“I learned so much– how to trust myself to work with physicality, how to think past prettiness in stage pictures involving my body. Mostly I developed a sense of trust in myself — in my ability to make interesting work, trust that my life and experiences are worth making performances out of, that my body in a physical space is powerful and deserving. Much of what we did was scary in that ‘well, this will be embarrassing’ way, but I feel like I have really gotten past that. There is so much meat past embarrassment, and I’m so glad to feel free of that worry.”