The New School News

Drag Performance During COVID was the topic of a New School Learning Community this summer led by Lang Theatre faculty member and drag historian Joe E. Jeffreys. The group examined how drag kings and queens have responded to the shuttering of traditional performance venues during the pandemic utilizing virtual spaces like Twitch and Instagram Live and reviving drive-in theatre concepts. Drag performers Mo B. Dick, Merrie Cherry, Johnny Gentleman and Crimson Kitty Zoomed with the group sharing the challenges, unexpected positives and possible futures of these environments for their art.

This research and study by Al Hallak, a lecturer at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School and Eugene Lang Summer Learning Group Emily Jasani and Chiny Okonkwo, found that our perception of what we sense is influenced by our psychological state, experience, culture, and age. For example, we might see this person in the picture below as either happy or sad, depending on how we feel at the time when we look at it. To understand more how we perceive the arts and specifically film, we asked people to tell us whether they believe she loves the man in the picture above or not. Our survey showed that 33% of respondents said she loves him, while 67% said she doesn’t. We have also examined how we respond to perceiving certain visual cues or sounds, and we found that the desired response can be produced by using certain emotional triggers. For example, a clip of someone holding a gun can trigger anxiety as well as lead to a physical response. We screened several clips and conducted a survey to understand how we perceive a combination of clips in a sequence. We found that we are constantly involved in reconstructing what we perceive and that means everything we sense is always combined with our projection. This combination creates a unique story and a new reality different than the original. The study’s findings allow us to understand why some people like or dislike something. It also helps us create the desired response from our audience by using targeted emotional triggers.

In No Time Like the Present, led by Angela Carr, Part-Time Assistant Professor, students studied poetic time. We read poetry and interviewed poets on the nature of queer time and non-linear time, in particular. We wanted to explore how identities are constructed in relation to temporality, and what happens to identity when the future is suddenly and indefinitely suspended. We wrote a 54-page collaborative chapbook about our daily lives during COVID. In the process, each writer poetically and frankly addressed a range of related topics including: isolation, loneliness, lost time, online dating, pandemic sex, BLM activism, transitioning, and unemployment. Fragments from students’ collaborative chapbook (published chapbook forthcoming, Fall 2020): “The beginning of ‘this summer,’ of being at home, started in March. To me, it felt like plausible denial, that being at home meant an unwanted stasis.” (Em de Vincentis) * “Anchoresses, and anchorites, in all their solitude, were parts of the community. A sort of ironic life. Like living in quarantine with other people. Like being given your death rites and going to a place you will live for a long time.” (Maeve A’Hearn) * “On the Monday after Pride, I go to a nude beach with my friend. It’s my first time. Leo Bersani, analyzing a Gide novel, describes it better than I can: “Now his body, uncovered, can touch everywhere...” (John Patterson) * “i don’t touch my eyes in public anymore so i wait until i’m in my sister’s car and wedge my knuckles deep into my sockets. and everytime i look to my hands, there is nothing. and everytime i blink, there are tears.” (Juliana Braka)

In Nocturnal Cinema, led by Courtney Stephens, Lecturer, students explored the poetics of the cinematic night, watching films and looking at entire genres that are set predominantly at night. The group did readings on subjects like what the fact of the moon landing does to romantic poetry, and discussed film noir, biblical notions of day and night, and the women of David Lynch. Students created a number of varied short projects. Some were focused on production concerns like shooting in low-light environments or by candlelight, and others investigated night footage in the archive, using early advertorial films and NASA footage. During a hot summer of relatively quiet nights, the group was able to use elements of the night, such as the moon cycles, to give a different kind of focus to the passage of time and to see familiar environments in a new (low) light. (photo by Lang student Erin May)

The Lang Music Room, usually located in room A002 at West 12th St., took on an exciting new life online in June and July as one of Lang College’s Summer Learning Communities. Faculty, students, and alumni from the Contemporary Music program came together via Zoom for four Wednesday evenings of collaborative music listening and lively discussion. Our “reading lists” were curated playlists of a diverse selection of recordings and music videos, and our sessions included participants located across the U.S. and beyond to the Dominican Republic and Japan.

Writing through the pandemic Summer learning community: Faculty member Rebecca Reilly, Ishwara Grant-Harrison, Stacie Carte, Rebecca Snyder, Megan Lam, Emma Windsor Our learning community continued a memoir project we had begun during the spring 2020 semester. We used life writing and photography to create a record of the difficult times we are in, and to remain present, creative and connected during an isolating time. We read OBIT by Victoria Chang, a poetry book published in 2019 that chronicles Chang’s grief after the death of her parents’. The book inspired us to be honest and precise as we described our own lives. One student used writing and photography to capture her experience of the protests that took place in Philadelphia after the death of George Floyd. Inspired by the work of Roland Barthes, another student used photography and personal writing to catalogue a series of objects that connected her to her family history. The projects were risky, vulnerable and deeply moving. (Photo from Stacie Carte’s project: Middle of Nowhere Bubblegum Cheeky Cat)

This seminar, , led by Alexandra Delano, Associate Professor of Global Studies, explored what it means to connect Global Studies to the world beyond the classroom, considering different career paths. Class activities will include resumes, cover letters and interview preparation, including current students and alumni. The goal was to support students in making connections between their experiences in and out of classroom, understand the range of options available for students to build on their skills and knowledge, and the challenges and opportunities of putting ideas and ideals into practice in this particularly challenging context. As part of this series of workshops, we created a Global Studies Career Workshop folder that includes the materials we compiled from various sources (including resumes, sample cover letters and prompts for personal statements, or a list of frequently asked questions during interviews) to support students and answer their questions. It is publicly available and accessible for all students.

Eugene Lang Summer Working Group led by Emma Lieber, part-time Lecturer in Literary Studies and psychoanalyst With Jessica Bush, Francesca Hechanova, Quinn Hopkins, John Patterson, and Esme Topp This working group addressed the experience of having a body in a contemporary moment in which the body--all bodies; some much more than others--is under profound assault, and in which bodily experience has become increasingly mediated by technology. Our proposal was that psychoanalysis can help us work through the social and subjective questions that we are now so urgently facing. By reading works by thinkers such as Franz Fanon, Patricia Gherovici, Daniel Gaztambide, and Azeen Khan (and by inviting the latter three to work with us), we thought through how psychoanalysis can address race and racism in various historical and geopolitical contexts, keeping always in mind the dual pandemics of disease and anti-black racism that are both assaulting and being perpetuated by contemporary American bodies.

Study by Jessica Gross, part-time faculty at Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, and Eugene Lang Summer Learning Community members Benjamin Cohen, Zoey Greenwald, and Cameron Gunn Quarantine has forced many of us to take up residence on video chat, but it’s also opened up avenues for communicating by longform prose over longer timespans, whether by email or snail mail. In our summer learning community, Pen Pals, we explored the opportunities epistolary communication affords, pairing fiction readings with writing exercises conducted through letters, emails, and other documents. We performed a comparative reading of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel I Love Dick, examining how these two writers use documents of various kinds to advance narrative. Both novels, we found, played with themes of desire and legacy—of blood and ink. (Desire is embedded in the act of letter-writing, as is legacy.) And, in both cases, crucial plot twists occurred when the documents of each book were, in the world of that novel, made public. As we discussed these novels, we completed a series of shorter-form exercises. Students wrote a letter from one character to another, then responded to a classmate’s letter from the perspective of the recipient. Later in the summer, the four of us collaboratively constructed a story about a cult meeting via an email thread in which we each embodied a separate character. Writing in epistolary form enabled us to submerge ourselves in characters in new ways and follow them—and thus our narratives—down unexpected paths.

In this mini-workshop and webinar, led by Jonathan Liebson, Part-Time Assistant Professor, we discussed experimental fiction that tells a whole story in anywhere from a couple of paragraphs to roughly three pages. Through such writers as Amy Hempel, Mavis Gallant, Dave Eggers, Lydia Davis, and Raymond Carver, we looked at the techniques of voice, point of view, character development, plot, and narrative tension to explore a range of writing styles that helped serve individual stories. Students all pitched in to offer their ideas and critiques, sharing what they liked, sizing up similarities and differences, and pointing out subtleties in form or style, which helped further everyone else’s understanding. At the same time, students also completed in-class and take-home writing exercises, allowing them to generate their own work, to experiment, and to get their feet wet. Some of this work we read aloud, shared by email, and gave feedback on. Hopefully, students discovered at least one potential narrative to continue working on after the webinar ended.

September 4, 2020

Eugene Lang’s Summer Learning Communities Fostered A New Engaged Learning Environment for Students This Summer

With the COVID-19 pandemic making study abroad and community engagement projects impossible this summer, Eugene Lang College faculty and staff devised a creative response to engage students while they sheltered at home. The Lang Summer Learning Communities were developed as a way to provide an engaged learning experience where undergraduates could explore topics of interest and stay connected with their peers.

Communities used literature to explore the idea of communicating through email or regular mail and connected with alumni through music listening rooms and book clubs. Members of the Lost Highway learning community combined a rigorous shot-by-shot analysis of David Lynch’s Lost Highway with a line-by-line analysis of David Foster Wallace’s David Lynch Keeps His Head, to produce their own critiques of the movie.

What the heck is Lost Highway
by Natalie Wolford, Screen Studies ’20

Lost Highway Video Essay
by Taylor Wells, Literary Studies, Writing, ’20

Learn more about the Lang Summer Learning Communities by scrolling through the slideshow above.

The New School News

Drag Performance During COVID

In this film study, we examined how we perceive film and arts in relation to our psychological state.

No Time Like the Present

Nocturnal Cinema

The Lang Music Room

Writing through the pandemic

Global Studies beyond The New School - Coffee Hour workshops

Psychoanalysis and (Dis)Embodiment working group

PEN PALS - An investigation of epistolary fiction

Workshop on Short-Short Fiction

Eugene Lang’s Summer Learning Communities Fostered A New Engaged Learning Environment for Students This Summer

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