AFRC3663 - Embodied Ethnographies: Performance Art, Ritual Performance and Poetic Praxis

Led by composer, vocalist, librettist, experimental ethnographer and conceptual artist Imani Uzuri (she/they), this course will investigate embodied research modalities (from mundane to ethereal), performance praxis centering Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness and cultural practices outside of the western eurocentric gaze embedded with the politics of agency, marginality, identity, mythmaking, subversiveness and sacredness. During the semester, we will discuss practitioners of these modalities - both emerging and established, well-known and obscured - including artists such as Victoria Santa Cruz, Adrian Piper, Spider Woman Theater, Tehchieng Hsieh, Lorraine O' Grady, Marsha P. Johnson, Gladys Bentley, Ben Patterson, Aida Overton Walker, Guillermo Gomez-Peña, Juliana Huxtable, Marina Abramović, Cindy Sherman, Robert Ashley, Jasmine Togo-Brisby, Allison Janae Hamilton, Sister Gertrude Morgan, David Hammons, and Carrie Mae Weems. Students will also engage Uzuri's own ritual performances, sound art and interdisciplinary works, which often deal with themes of ancestral memory, magical realism, liminality, Black American vernacular culture, spirituality and landscape (including her/their projects Wild Cotton, Come On In The Prayer Room, Hush Arbor: Wade (1, 2 &3), The Haunting of Cambridge, I Am Here (Black Madonna) and Conjure Woman).
The semester will culminate in students creating their own short ritual performances and/or experimental works using aspects of the various methodologies, healing modalities, research modes, multivalent texts and performance praxis explored throughout the semester. No performance experience is necessary.