Program
Headlong Performance Institute is a supported artist residency and performance training program at Headlong Studios in South Philadelphia.
HPI Fellows embark on a 14-week journey of developing individual practice and process for making performance. The program focuses on methods of research for creating performance worlds and languages that are unique to each maker. Individual processes and collaboration are both nurtured so that we can learn from one another’s insights and discoveries. HPI convenes “communities of inquiry” around your work every week so that it blossoms over time, leading you from the known to the unknown.
HPI offers time, space, mentorship, techniques, and resources for you to develop, deepen, discover, and explore your own artistic practice. The program is for dancers, actors, movers, directors, writers, designers, choreographers, performance artists, physical theater creators, and all artists interested in live performance.
Applications are considered on a rolling basis.
The cost of attending HPI is subsidized for all fellows.
Reach out to us; our program is small and personal. HPI can be a great fit for those at the beginning of their artistic explorations, as well as for experienced artists looking to immersively re-investigate their practice.
Format
The next HPI session will begin the week of February 21, 2022 and conclude in late May.
Each fellow has their own dedicated regular studio time for exploring and making work.
Each week, a guest artist offers a workshop intensive that serves as provocation for your continued artistic inquiries. The 2019 program hosted classes with some of the most profound artists in performance today, including Ishmael Houston Jones, Keely Garfield, David Thomson, Kate Watson-Wallace, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Jumatatu Poe, Arielle Julia Brown and Michelle J. Rodriguez.
Every Monday, HPI hosts a “salon” to show and share work in every stage of development, with invited audiences for conversation and feedback.
Throughout the program, HPI instructors share strategies for making a balanced, sustainable life as an artist. Our ‘Life of an Artist’ curriculum draws inspiration from the work of Headlong Co-Founder Andrew Simonet in his book, Making Your Life as an Artist.
HPI culminates in a 2-week production intensive that empowers you to share your work with the community in the way you want to share it.
We anticipate this next session will be a largely in-person experience, though we are taking some exciting lessons from our remote practices of the last months. (Take a look at a letter from our artistic director here to read about our Spring 2021 program.)
“HPI taught me to value myself by way of teaching me to value my art. During my time with the 2019 cohort, I learned that an artist’s work is deeply investigative, lifelong, and culturally crucial.””
Practice
Artistic Director David Brick offers studio instruction and personal mentorship to each class of fellows. HPI serves as an instigator for artistic inquiry in conversation with the following concepts:
Thinking through Making - through practice, we create art as part of a lived life—not as the result of mysterious acts of rarefied genius. We ‘think’ about making performance by making performance. Click here for a discussion of artistic inquiry predicated on simply showing up for a duration of time and working within a structure of iteration.
Difference as Resource - how do we put our arms around everyone in the room so that our differences—identity, experience, training, ability—are a resource for asking questions and not stopping points in our process?
Audience and Performer are not One and are not Two - It is neither true that the audience and performer are the same things, nor is it true that they are entirely different things.
Reflection as Structure - Testifying and witnessing to oneself and to one another can itself be scaffolding for a project built for and from experience.
“HPI opened doors that I didn’t know were available to me in my art-making. It provided both a generous community and space to let ideas grow and work be born. It was a transformative experience.” ”