Becoming Imperceptible: Precarious and Ephemeral Practices in Contemporary Performance, Writing, and Installation

with Lin Hixson & Matthew Goulish
PERFORMANCE 609 001 | 1.5 credits | $100 lab fee
August 3–9, 2025

In this performance intensive, students will be asked to consider the seasons of life, with special consideration of how geography (especially the unique landscape of Ox-Bow) impacts these flows. Engaging the disciplines of performance, writing, installation, and practices of collaboration and response, this course will examine the idea of becoming imperceptible and how it relates to the more than human, reduced behavior, the intertwining of kinship, spaces of disappearance, incompleteness, and lightness of action. The class draws from theoretical writings of Akiko Busch on How to Disappear, Erin Manning on Duchamp’s concept of the infra-thin, the poetry of Ed Roberson, the sculptural interventions of artists Devin T. Mays, and case studies from nature such as the killdeer feigning a broken wing to distract a predator from its nest. Students will work from specific directives to generate individual and group performances, and will compose creative and critical responses to the works of others. We will use our bodies to pick up the extraordinary signals from ordinary surroundings, and translate those signals to an audience, at first each other, and at the end of the week, the entire Ox-Bow community.

Lin Hixson & Matthew Goulish, Scarecrow, 2018, performance by Every house has a door and Essi Kausalainen, directed by Lin Hixson, written and co-performed by Matthew Goulish, photo by Saara Autere. Venue: Mad House, Helsinki, Finland.

Lin Hixson (director) (she/her) and Matthew Goulish (dramaturg) (he/him) co-founded Every house has a door in 2008, to convene diverse, intergenerational, project-specific teams of specialists, including emerging as well as internationally recognized artists. Drawn to historically or critically neglected subjects, Every house creates performance works and performance-related projects in many media. Every house has presented both nationally and internationally including Prague, Helsinki, Glasgow, London, New York, Austin, and Chicago. Their performance works in collaboration with Helsinki-based artist Essi Kauslainen include Scarecrow (2017), and the multi-year Carnival of the Animals project, dedicated to endangered and extinct species. Residencies have included The Bellagio Center, MANCC, and the Rauschenberg Foundation. Their collaboratively written essays have appeared in the anthologies The Creative Critic—Writing as/about Practice and The Twenty-First Century Performance Reader. In 2022, the company co-published Selected Plays of Jay Wright Volumes 1, 2, and 3 with Kenning Editions.