“But the student has a habit, a bad habit. She studies. She studies but she does not learn. If she learned, they could measure her progress, confirm her attributes, give her credit. But the student keeps studying, keeps planning to study, keeps running to study, keeps studying a plan, keeps building a debt. The student does not intend to pay.”
(“The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study” by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten)
I developed the course on “to Study” over a few years, teaching both dance, theater and fine arts students. The aim of this course is to give the students an opportunity to reflect on their role as a student and to navigate the intersections of study, creative work and the institution.
The course offers an introduction to the expectations of being a student, an artist, and the art academy as an institution. We delve into the students motivation for being at the school, what it means to study art as a practice, the history of art education and the academy, what the institution has to offer and how they can make use of their studies in best possible alignment with their motivation. We practice how to study with our bodies, our senses, our fantasy, our logic, our relations, our language and more.
The course counteracts some of the 1st year anxieties that always renders a few students passive, and it levels the playing field for students who do not have a prior knowledge, through family or friends, of what an art academy is. We identify the different expectation on the student and the artist, write our own study plans inspired by the Mississippi Freedom Schools, map the schools’ resources and do a passionate rewriting of the curriculum. The aim of the course is to jump-start their studies and the development of an artistic practice that is sustainable over time.
I have taught the course on “To Study” at The Danish National School of Performing Arts, with the students from the dance, choreography, theater and playwrite departements in Copehagen (2015) and Aarhus (2016) and with the fine arts students at The School of Language, Space and Scale (2016) as well as the BFA students (2020-2023) at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen .
