Goat Island
COURSE SIZE: 24 Participants
Goat Island’s performance work is a series of responses: to the exercises we give ourselves, to our surroundings, to the events of the world but, mostly to each other. We perform responses for each other back and forth. The conversation goes further than were we just talking. At the end of the conversation we have a piece in front of us and it's ready to show. These conversations take place over a long period of time. As in a chess match, each response is carefully considered. Time, and therefore dreams and reverie, are part of the conversation. These conversations can be two years long. This gives time for a history to grow and for us to interpret it, for distortions to take on their own meaning, their own demands.
The idea of response has become very important to the culture of Goat Island’s teaching. In workshops, each presentation of work is met with some kind of artistic response: a work of art that could not have existed without the work it is responding to. These responses are individual contributions to a conversation that stretches throughout the week. In this way work begets more work and all of the work is inextricably linked. This practice destabilizes the boundaries between critical and creative modes in order to enrich them both.
The Goat Island workshop aims to provide an opportunity for artists to work and study together in a structured, creative environment. Participants are invited from the visual arts (including video, architecture, and other forms of visual/spatial/durational expression), live and performance art, music, dance, and theatre. Disciplines of performance, installation, writing, movement, music, research, publication and documentation are examined in various forms and combinations dictated by the interests of the participants as well as those of the instructors. Sessions combine theory and practice, investigating forms of thought and presentation, styles of collaboration, historical and philosophical perspectives and methods of individual and collective expression and creativity. The emphasis of the workshop is on the development and encouragement of new theory and practice in art/performance.
Goat Island is a collaborative performance group based in Chicago, USA. Since their inception in 1987, Goat Island has created nine performance works and toured the US, Canada, UK, and Europe; in 2005 the group performed their latest completed work at The 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. They have produced a number of publications, focusing on both their performance and educational work. They have also produced three film projects developed out of their live performances. Goat Island has received six U.S. National Endowment for the Arts grants and was the subject of a Public Broadcasting Service documentary in 1996.