Artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz is the first artist-researcher to be invited as part of the Performance in Residence series. The project, titled Taking Language Lessons, will plot a personally and affectively invested trajectory across diverse communities of poets in North America. It seeks the ethical and political complexities along with the alliance potentials that may be encountered through acts of poetic voicing. The research departs from the key question: "How do we all take possession of, give voice to, own, the work of artists whose commitments are generated from very specific, self-avowed subject positions?"

The research centers on the enmeshment of subject and situation that may be apprehended through poetic texts. Bordowitz will focus his attention as a researcher and as an artist/writer upon poetic forms that address issues of affect as they relate to ideas of the body, identity, sexuality, race, and gender.  Bordowitz notes, "I am most interested in the formal tactics poets use to embody concerns of social position and marginalization. In other words, I am not only interested in what poems 'say' but also how they are constructed."

Taking Language Lessons continues a series of recent linked performative and poetry-focused projects including In the Life, a reading of works by gay black men from the 1980s and ‘90s presented at the Whitney Museum of American Art as part of the exhibition Blues for Smoke, as well as the edition of Testing Some Beliefs presented in Amsterdam as part of If I Can’t Dance’s Appropriation and Dedication Seminar, both in 2013.

Poets and poet communities that will form key references for the research include gay black poets from the 1980s and 90s such as those anthologized in Brother to Brother (2007) and In the Life: A Gay Black Anthology (1986), and in particular the work of Essex Hempill. Also in focus will be gay poets of the 1940s and '50s San Francisco Renaissance such as Robert Duncan and Jack Spicer. Among these groups the emergence of ‘poet’s theatre’ will also be explored. The work will also engage with a new generation of poets exploring gender issues and transgender politics. 

Biography
For the past four years, Bordowitz turned his attention to performance. Testing Some Beliefs is an improvisational lecture that he delivered at Iceberg Projects (Chicago), Murray Guy (New York), Temple Gallery (Philadelphia), the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas) and with If I Can't Dance (Amsterdam). He wrote and directed Sex Mitigating Death: On Discourse and Drives: A Meditative Poem, presented March 18th 2011, at the Tate Modern, London. He also directed and wrote an opera titled The History of Sexuality Volume One By Michel Foucault: An Opera, which premiered October 1 and 2, 2010 at Tanzquartier Wien, Austria. His most recent book, General Idea: Imagevirus, was published by Afterall Books in 2010. A collection of his writings—titled The AIDS Crisis Is Ridiculous and Other Writings 1986-2003—was published by MIT Press in the fall of 2004. For this book, Bordowitz received the 2006 Frank Jewitt Mather Award from the College Art Association. His films, including Fast Trip Long Drop (1993), A Cloud In Trousers (1995), The Suicide(1996), and Habit (2001) have been widely shown in festivals, museums, movie theaters, and broadcast internationally.