In March 2024, SALYER + SCHAAG are offering a two-week intensive workshop culminating in a public site-specific performance at the Leach Teaching Gardens.
Using humor, illusion, and curiosity, “Andy and Kate’s Garden Party” will invite participants to immerse themselves in altered environments and expand their perceptions of the situational ecological contexts they find themselves within.
SALYER + SCHAAG will orchestrate an evening of multi-sensory performance art within the framework of a surreal garden party, weaving student-generated work into a series of vignettes that invite participants to explore ecological entanglements and more-than-human kinships.
During the workshop, students are devising original text, image, scene, personae, and embodied performance for the project, engaging collage as a method on micro and macro scales. Meanwhile, guest faculty directors are devising additional scenes with students. As Andy and Kate, SALYER + SCHAAG will act as hosts and MCs for the evening, welcoming guests to the garden party and (dis)orienting them to an evening of strange and delightful events.
This project has been supported by a Fulton County Arts & Culture Distinguished Creative Residency Fellowship at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts & Sciences, as well as a Carnegie-Rockefeller Arts Division Priority Award at Spelman College.
About the Artists:
SALYER + SCHAAG makes site-specific performance art, social practice projects, tableau installations, scripts, and videos. Their site-specific performance art uses theatricality as material in social situations; haunted by the theatre, they explore the edges of symbolic representation vs. constitutive performative ritual. Over the last 11 years they have created relational performance works that playfully navigate the edges and excesses of life and art, oscillating between conversational, dramatic, and structural. Engaging theories of subject positions, social relations, and performance in everyday life, their work shifts the focus from art objects to aesthetic, social, and political contexts, situations, and processes.
They have exhibited and performed nationally and internationally at venues including Chazen Museum of Art, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, La Fonderie Darling, Stanford University, University of Paris-Sorbonne, University of Aarhus, University of Bergen, Commonwealth Gallery, Madison Public Library, University of Tennessee Downtown Gallery, and Herron Galleries. Documentation of their performances has been published by Ugly Duckling Presse, and their playscripts have been staged at Hemsley Theatre.
SALYER + SCHAAG is Andrew Salyer and Katie Schaag. Andrew Salyer, who earned his MFA in Fine Art and PhD in Art Theory & Practice at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the School of Literature, Media, & Communication at Georgia Tech. Katie Schaag, who earned her PhD in English Literature with a distributed minor in fine art and creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is an Assistant Professor of Theatre & Performance at Spelman College.
