Adam Nixon accepted to Northwestern Summer Institute in Performance Studies

Congratulations to Adam Nixon, PhD candidate in TDPS, who has been accepted into the 2017 Northwestern University Summer Institute in Performance Studies.

Congratulations to Adam Nixon, PhD candidate in TDPS, who has been accepted into the 2017 Northwestern University Summer Institute in Performance Studies. The theme of this 5-day Institute is: Improvisation, Narrative, & Beauty. It is being held from July 10th to 14th, hosted by Professor D. Soyini Madison. Twenty participants were accepted through submitted proposals, 10 from Northwestern and 10 from other colleges and universities. The Institute will focus on embodied techniques of improvisation, the rhetorical power of narrative and the ethics of beauty. The Institute will engage in the on-going question: In the workshop space how can improvisation, narrative, and beauty merge to embody moments of freedom and justice? Each day seminar participants will work with distinguished artists-scholars in a practice based workshop format.

Nixon’s proposal to the Institute stated that improvisation, narrative, and beauty were fundamental elements in the digital cinema art form. He continues: “My research blends the mediated with the embodied, looking at both the filmmaker and the film in a festival space. The filmmakers I study are building processes that stand apart from traditional Hollywood systems. They improvise from loosely sketched outlines and; they play in front of the camera. Beauty is captured when these filmmakers uncover a truth that is missing in traditional film practice. Like the subjects of my ethnography, I work outside of Hollywood with no money, making digital films that strive to be different while I build my own performative, embodied, and off-camera identity in festival spaces."