Practices for Keeping Time

Practices for Keeping Time combines seminar
readings and discussions with time-based studio
practices to study links between architecture and
dance; the design and choreography of everyday
life; and the divergent temporalities of nature,
history, and digital communication in an intensive
workshop for MFA students and BFA students who are
able to fully participate in graduate-level study.

The workshop will be structured in online and
timed offline segments over four hours each day.
Readings and screenings of course material will be
assigned in advance of the workshop and discussed
within it. The workshop is an inter-school
partnership hosted by the MFA in Choreography
Program in the School of Dance and the School of
Architecture + Planning at the University of New
Mexico. Connecting researchers and practitioners
from adjacent fields and distant geographies,
Practices for Keeping Time explores new pathways
for interdisciplinarity and collaboration.

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many of us to
confront time: from abrupt shifts in daily life to
the hours spent confined at home; from questions
of mortality and survival to the urgency for
radical changes in how we live. We face new
realities of "before" and "after." We experience a
lag between the temporality of a virus and the
speed of capitalism and contemporary culture. The
goal of this workshop is to expand students'
comprehension of contemporary debates on domestic
architecture and within histories of modernism
while building their capacity to more critically
inhabit their own homes through the use of
choreographic strategies drawn from our ongoing
artistic research. We will lead students through a
series of embodied and performative approaches to
analyzing architecture, inhabiting domestic space,
and reflecting on the limits and possibilities of
the home as a site for creation and critical
thinking.