Ensembles and Universities

With no assistance from outside their group, several student performance groups devise their own work as a solution to the posted problem. The problem is a mix of text and images arranged on a page. The text and graphic elements are precise, and often not obviously meaningful beyond their ordinary appearance, but after a close read the details of the page may be seen as suggestive toward a response, provocation, or a call for investigation. This is what students must solve through performance.

Over the past seven years, the Post Natyam Collective’s creative practice has transitioned from in-person collaboration to web-based collaboration. Often our process is deeply informed by scholarly engagement, including feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial studies, and subaltern histories of Indian classical dance forms. Collective members often develop promising seeds from our shared processes into diverse products: dance-for-camera pieces, art installations, lecture-demonstrations, performance works, and scholarly papers.

What we really needed—and received—was a place to develop an unfinished work in a professional touring locale with Chicago audiences, and to prototype a student chorus that would be trained to perform in the work. Simultaneously Columbia College had the Double Edge ensemble embedded in its department for nearly a month. Acting students had daily access to training. Directors, playwrights, and actors could observe rehearsal and process regularly.