School for Temporary Liveness

The School for Temporary Liveness (STL), Slought, and the Rotunda invite you to gather in Philadelphia from April 6–8, 2023 for three days of collective study and experiments in practice, performance, and pedagogy. Join us and participate in situations for collective study with Lou Cornum, FORTUNE, Jonathan González & Marguerite Hemmings, Adelita Husni Bey, Niall Jones, Kevin Quashie, Julie Tolentino, Simone White, Wilmer Wilson IV, and more. The school and its programming are free and open to all — anyone can be a student.

STL Vol. 3 operates as a para-site. If the university is typically understood as the place for proper forms of education, then STL offers a space beside the institution—a temporary zone for the unfolding of our improper and uneven assembly. STL asks: What if we approach performances as invitations to enter into study? Inversely, 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? For Vol. 3, a cohort of participants have been asked to generate situations for collective study that extend from their various practices. Learn alongside them and with each other through their generous and emergent offerings.

"Study perverts instruction" — STL is an occasion to partake of this perversion, a situation for gathering where "those who study do not improve but improvise" (Harney and Moten, 2021). When approached as a form that bears the excesses, instabilities, and ruptures of social life, performance renders the ways and means by which we come together, linger, exit, and do it all over again. What minor forms of life are brought forth through these passages? What tentative collectivities emerge in these interstices? Performance, like school, can be an excuse for taking part in dissonant communion.

STL is informed by the work of black feminist thought, critical pedagogies, queer theory, and performance studies. It is equally informed by the practices in life and art—namely dance, performance, and poetics—that circulate alongside and in conversation with these theoretical traditions. This project is in conversation with historical and ongoing attempts to produce alternative contexts for pedagogy and performance.