ENROLL HERE!
The party is one of the most powerful and least examined human technologies. Something happens at parties that resists description: a loosening, a possibility, an encounter that couldn't have been planned. And yet parties have shaped history more than most textbooks admit — movements are born at parties, love affairs that changed the world began on dance floors, political formations crystallized around a shared table.
This course turns radical attention toward the party as a social and political form. What defines it? What separates a party from a gathering or a scene from a moment? How can parties be designed to encourage certain kinds of attention — and what kinds most naturally emerge? We'll build a shared vocabulary across study and practice — examining parties that made history, from Studio 54 to Harlem rent parties to Enlightenment salons — while also prototyping our own. Embodied exercises, creative experiments, and close reading sit alongside each other, with thinkers like Saidiya Hartman, Jose Esteban Munoz, adrienne marie brown, and Rirkrit Tiravanija guiding us. You will leave with both a theory of the party and something worth throwing.
Led by Kyle Barnes, performer and worldmaker who knows how to have a good time.
Thursdays, 6:30-9:00pm
June 11th-25th
Our courses cost $250, with an Advanced rate for students with an income above 100k. We also offer a Discounted rate for students with constraining circumstances.
Please see our Refund Policy HERE.
Additionally, we offer three tuition-waiver scholarships per course. To apply for a scholarship, click HERE.
Image credit: “Studio Party (Soirée)” by Florine Stettheimer, via public domain.