Practice Practice Practice: Repetition and Social Forms
Tourist in Manhattan: "Can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?" New Yorker: "Practice, practice, practice!" This course is about the magic and the tragedy of repetition. We have been told that the way to become an expert at something is to practice it deliberately for 10,000 hours. This implies that repetition, however paradoxically, is the secret to change. At the same time, we've heard that it's crazy to do the same thing again and again and expect different results. We know from experience that our individual efforts aren't enough to uproot and reverse entrenched social forms that have decades and centuries of accumulated force behind them: structures like capitalism, male dominance and its buddy heterosexism, and white supremacy. Where do those structures live in our bodies and minds? How can we practice unlearning them? How can queer and trans and anti-racist wisdom guide us in the effort to practice differently? We'll research repetition in many ways: through somatic work in class, through individual and collective rituals that we will co-create, through looking at art and reading art criticism as well as journalism, philosophy, self-help literature, and cultural criticism. The point is to explore repetition's place in our experience of ourselves and our work in spacetime and in relationship to one another, as both cultural producers and as the products of the histories that brought us here. Readings will address live art and re-enactment; seriality; memorials and monuments; phenomenology (how we make meaning from sensory experience); traumatic repetition; and reparations. Some of this material will be painful to explore and the class will spend time developing, rehearsing, and performing ways to be together in that discomfort.

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