2009: Workshop Retreats
The Millay Colony for the Arts offers five-day retreat workshops on Colony's sylvan setting. Each class includes twelve hours of workshop time, all meals, and ample time to work, ruminate and explore our lush natural surroundings. Private bedrooms and spacious private studios are available for all participants.
These workshops offer artists a chance to delve into their work, explore new ideas, meet extraordinary teaching artists and collaborate with others while spending intense work-time on our gorgeous campus. Fragrant with blueberries, thyme, and wildflowers, the quiet loveliness of our campus provides uninterrupted calm and inspiration—the perfect retreat for creativity and relaxation.
April 29th to May 3rd
Poetry & Pop-Music
Instructor: Chris Stroffolino
Most accounts of the history of poetry (both lyric and epic, or narrative), as well as the history of 'popular song' show the two have a common ancestor, or were one and the same. Despite the contemporary specialization between these genres, lyric poetry and song lyrics still share many of the same assumptions, on the levels of both form and content. This workshop will explore whether the boundary between these two genres (poetry and lyrics), especially as conceived of during the "American Century," has largely outlived its usefulness, and will consider seriously (and hopefully with pleasure as well) whether any discussion of "American Poetry" of the last 100 years ("modern") can even come close to being representative if it doesn't include "Ain't That A Shame," at least as much as, say, "The Red Wheelbarrow."
We will strive to approach these issues in a non-dogmatic way. Depending on the needs & interests of the workshop participants), possible assignments include "translations" (from song-lyrics to poetry, and vice versa), music-criticism-as-an-artform, poems 'about' songs, songs 'inside' poems, formal issues, 3-dimensional scansion, phonemes, music as metaphor, metaphor as music. "High" vs. "Low" culture; the raw and the cooked, Dada, didacticism, performance, persona, identity, nature. Students are encouraged to let the teacher know in advance their particular interests; I'll do my best to accommodate.
Chris Stroffolino is the author of 7 books of poetry, and prose criticism (including Spin Cycle (2001), a selection of essays on mostly contemporary poetry, and with Dave Rosenthal, a critical study guide to Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.) A recipient of a 2001 NYFA Grant and a 2008 Fund For Poetry grant, Stroffolino's work has appeared in A Body Electric, Isn’t It Romantic, and other anthologies, and has been translated into Dutch, Bengali and Spanish. His music and cultural criticism has appeared in such venues as The Big Takeover, Kitchen Sink, and Oakbook (Novometro). He has also played in various rock bands, including Silver Jews, Continuous Peasant and the Root Rats. He was a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Poetry at St. Mary's College from 2001-2006, and currently lives in Oakland.
May 29th to June 1st
Poetry Writing as Self-Translation
Instructor: Tomás Urayoán Noel
In this workshop, we will write poems (broadly and self-reflexively defined) by looking beyond our own formal, methodological, and linguistic comfort zones. To guide us, we will read some poems by contemporary poets engaged in various projects of self-translation—not only from language to language but also from formal to free verse, from pagebound to performance work, and from automatic to programmatic writing (and back again!)—and we will attempt some of our own self-translations. Rather than work on various drafts of a given poem, we will approach rewriting as a constructivist enterprise (open-ended, provisional, plural). Using a variety of prompts and interactive exercises, we will write in our own trans-languages, non-languages, and found languages.
Tomás Urayoán Noel is originally from San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is the author of Boringkén (Callejón/La Tertulia, 2008) and Kool Logic/La lógica kool (Bilingual Press), which was named a Book of the Year for 2006 by El Nuevo Día, Puerto Rico's leading newspaper. (The books are supplemented by a performance CD and DVD respectively, both featuring music by composer Monxo López.) His poetry has been published in various anthologies of Puerto Rican and Latino/a writing, and his articles, reviews, and translations of Latin(o/a) American poets have recently appeared in Centro Journal, Bomb, and Mandorla. He is co-founder and literary director of the South Bronx arts organization and collective Spanic Attack, with whom he has been performing since 2003. He currently divides his time between the Bronx and Albany, NY, and is Assistant Professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY.
June 27th to June 31st
Trans-Experiential Playwriting Workshop
Instructor:Chiori Miyagawa
This workshop concentrates on freeing our theatrical imagination and writing short plays which deeply engage all the contradictory manifestations of our ideas, emotions and impressions. The participants will write a short play every day of the workshop, inspired by poetry, art, biography, found text, news events, and personal memories. The class time will be used to read the plays out loud and have critical discussions of every participant's work. We will think carefully about how to make these conversations as rigorous as possible.
Chiori Miyagawa has worked in the nonprofit theater field for more than ten years as a playwright and dramaturg. Her plays have been produced Off-Broadway, at renowned performance houses in NYC, and in regional festivals. While she was Artistic Associate of New York Theatre Workshop, she managed the fellowship program for emerging artists of color for seven years. Currently she is the head of the undergraduate playwriting program at Bard College under the chair, JoAnne AkalaitisSix of her plays have been published in different anthologies. She is a resident playwright of New Dramatists. She is currently working on I Have Been To Hiroshima Mon Amour for Voice&Vision and The Cave, a new adaptation of Antigone with director Rachel Dickstein for Ripe Time. Miyagawa's work has received many awards and fellowships including the Beinecke Playwright-in-Residence at Yale School of Drama, the Rockefeller MAP grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts Playwriting Fellowship, a New York State Council for the Arts, a National Performance Network Suitcase Fund (twice), an Asian Cultural Council Fellowship, and others.
July 30st to August 2nd
Painting Workshop: Mixed Media Works on Paper
Instructor: Jason Middlebrook
In this workshop, we will explore a range of materials and methods including traditional painting media (water based only) as well as less conventional approaches and materials. There will be a strong emphasis on drawing. We will work outdoors whenever possible and paint from nature. Students should bring good quality watercolor paper (Arches or the equivalent, 22x30", 5-10 pieces), as a broad range of art materials as they can muster up, as well as anything that might be useful to generate interesting forms and surfaces. Bring one set of EITHER acrylics, gouache or watercolor (as many colors as you can afford) and brushes. Bring rulers, ink, stencils, sponges, sticks, charcoal, pastels, markers, colored or pencils too if you have them and want to include them in the class. Some materials will also be provided. We will have a lot of fun.
Jason Middlebrook received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and is an alumnus of the Whitney Independent Study Program. Middlebrook's work has been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at institutions including the Centre Arte Contemporanea, Sienna Italy; Wellcome Trust, London, England; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California; the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, Colorado; the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College; the New Museum of Contemporary Art; and the former Whitney Museum at Altria branch. He is represented by Sara Meltzer Gallery in New York City.
August 29th to September 1st
Video Workshop: The Weather, Adaptation & Collaboration
Instructor: Bernadine Mellis
In this workshop, the weather—increasingly the object of attention, interpretation, and worry—will be our muse. Participants will work in three possible media (video, digital photography, and/or writing) with three possible collaborators: 1) the weather around us, 2) intriguing and beloved texts or images about the weather, and 3) fellow workshop participants. Each participating artist should bring up to three source objects (image, sound, or short text) that deal with weather. We will work with these sources, and with the daily weather, together and alone, to create 1-3 minute videos, photographs, and writings. At the end of four messy, generative days, we will compile our work, creating a DVD & chapbook.
Basic instruction in the tools of shooting and editing digital video will be offered as necessary, depending on participants' levels of experience and skill. All levels welcome.
As a part of the workshop, we will investigate other adaptations and collaborations, screening works and clips from works by such makers as the Silvia Rivera Law Project, Filmverlag der Autoren, the Brothers Quay, Pocket Myths, Yazujiro Ozu, Elisabeth Subrin, Todd Haynes, Marvel Comics, and others. We will see what can be created by multiple directors/makers working inside non-hierarchical structures. (What happens to the viewing experience when the idea of originality is troubled or abandoned? Who owns a film made by a group? Where do we find point-of-view or voice when the author is plural? What happens when the primary engagement in a given work is between artists, and/or texts rather than between a genius and his or her material?) We will also examine the processes of condensation and translation from written word to film. (What gets lost, drawn out, punctuated, obscured? How are sentences, exposition, and character interiority condensed or translated into a single frame, or elaborated through mise-en-scène? How does our relationship to a story change when the time in which it is told becomes fixed, through the transition to time-based media?)
Bernadine Mellis' short films include Born, The Golden Pheasant, and Farm-In-The-City, a collaboration with EE Miller. Bernadine's father's role as lead attorney in Earth First! activist Judi Bari's civil case against the FBI prompted her to make The Forest For The Trees, her first documentary. Bernadine also directed The Odyssey, a collaborative adaptation of Homer's 24-chapter epic, made up of 24 shorts by 24 different mostly queer/trans/lady filmmakers. She is currently in production on a documentary about children of the New Left tentatively called Struggle Baby. Bernadine teaches film and video in the Five Colleges. Her films can be found on www.redbirdfilms.com.
October 1st to October 4th
Call & Response: Conversations with land and life shapes
Instructor: Eleni Sikelianos
What is this curve of the hill saying to me? What about this rock? In this workshop, we will play among forms around us, using a wide range of shapes (radiolarian to human) as starting place. In the 1940s, William Carlos Williams embarked upon a poem of place in which a city might be seen to mirror the forms of a man's mind, and the classic Paterson was born. In this course, we will consider techniques of documentary poetics, the poetics of place, and eco-conversation. How can an artist, particularly a writer, interact with particular loci and its data, real or imagined? What forms of dialog with the environment are possible? What non-languaged information can be included in the poem? We will look at and make our own work that interacts with the flora and fauna, layers of history, shifting populations, quotidian rhythms and mythologies of time-space. We might engage in some Land Art, we might make line drawings, we might create characters all in the name of conversation.
Eleni Sikelianos is the author of six books of poetry and one nonfiction hybrid / memoir; titles include The Book of Jon and The California Poem. Her most recent book is Body Clock, and her translation of Jacques Roubaud's Exchanges on Light is forthcoming from La Presse. Widely anthologized, she is a graduate of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, and currently teaches in and directs the Creative Writing program at the University of Denver.
October 29th to November 2nd
Critical Writing as Creative Practice
Instructor: Frances Richard
It's tempting to think of the artist and the critic as adversaries, or at least as opposites—one creating and the other evaluating the work. But "to criticize" comes from the Greek word meaning "to decide," and to write critically means, fundamentally, to decide what you think—to explore your options, consider your questions, and survey the lay of your land. Knowing how to accurately and incisively describe and contextualize one's own work is, of course, a survival skill required for any working artist. More fundamentally, however, the ability to analyze, illuminate and comment on artifacts and concepts that please, provoke, and infuriate you—or to address issues in the culture at large to which an artist can bring unique perspective—is to take ideas themselves as creative materials.
Starting from our own current projects, verbal or visual, and dipping into artists' writings and critical prose from the notes of Marcel Duchamp and the essays of Lyn Hejinian to Cabinet Magazine, this workshop will introduce writing as a technique for alert and generative analysis in and beyond the studio. Develop a vocabulary for descriptive and speculative discussion of specific media or works-in-progress; learn to use free-writing and other exercises to clarify goals and articulate ongoing (or secret) interests; break writer's block; and experiment with finding your own ways to move between words and forms, and between words in their many forms.
Frances Richard has been a member of the editorial group at the art and culture magazine Cabinet, and a founding editor of the literary journal Fence. Her critical prose and reviews have appeared in magazines such as Artforum, Bomb, The London Review of Books, and The Nation; she has contributed essays for catalogues produced by institutions including the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2005, she organized with Jeffrey Kastner and Sina Najafi an exhibition and accompanying monograph titled Odd Lots: Revisiting Gordon Matta-Clark's "Fake Estates." Her book of poems, See Through, was published by Four Way Books in 2003; two chapbooks—Anarch. from Woodland Editions, and Shaved Code from Portable Press—were published in 2008. She teaches at Barnard College and the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Brooklyn.
Workshop Details
Workshop Schedule: Each day begins with a fresh breakfast followed by a three- hour workshop at 10:00 AM. Total workshop time for the retreat will be twelve hours. The afternoon can be spent working in the studio, visiting local sites, swimming in a nearby lake or walking the mountain trails. Dinner is served overlooking our gorgeous meadows. Evening hours are devoted to worktime.
Fees: $650 includes tuition, private room, private studio and all meals. $400 includes tuition and meals only.
Participants may purchase a thirty-minute Private Consultation with their instructor for $150. Manuscripts (15 pages maximum) must be sent in advance; portfolios can be but this is not required.
Limited Scholarships, based on need, are available.
Millay Colony Alumni receive a 15% discount.
To Apply: Send a letter of introduction indicating your choice of workshop and including a brief biography with a $100 deposit. Also include a work sample (10 pages of writing, 10 images on CD or a brief video clip). Applicants will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis. Please indicate if you require lodging and studio space and if you would like to have a Private Consultation with the instructor.
Apply to: The Millay Colony for the Arts, 454 East Hill Road, Austerlitz, NY. Attention: Summer Retreats. Make Checks payable to The Millay Colony for the Arts.
For more information please get in touch with Caroline Crumpacker at 518-392-4144 or .