From 1982 to 1984, Adrian Piper staged Funk Lessons, collaborative performances/lectures in which she taught big and small groups of people about the history and moves of funk.

Piper is a light-skinned black woman artist and academic who came of age in the ’70s. While she was doing her PhD at Harvard, she was also doing an ongoing performance of a character she called the “Mythic Being,” who appeared as an angry black man sometimes causing fights on the streets—light years from rarefied classrooms. Her work has always been about the places where worlds intersect so badly that people shy away from the intersections rather than crossing them.

About Funk Lessons, she wrote, “My immediate aim in staging the large-scale performance (preferably with sixty people or more) was to enable everyone present to GET DOWN AND PARTY. TOGETHER.“

In this context, that’s a political aesthetic act. See more of Piper’s works, as well as excerpts from her essays after the performances, “Notes on Funk,” here.

And just look at this dancin.

Jen Graves (The Stranger’s former arts critic) mostly writes about things you approach with your eyeballs. But she’s also a history nerd interested in anything that needs more talking about, from male...

7 replies on “Adrian Piper’s “Funk Lessons””

  1. You can see better than this six times a day on old episodes of “Soul Train” on Centric. Plus you get Don Cornelius.

    Conceptual artists can’t dance.

  4. That isn’t funk. That is a lot of people doing the white boy dance. The black people in that clip are doing the white boy dance! We need a video of gay boys teaching us how to dance.

  5. For nuit blanche one year, they broadcasted this video in one of the rooms in Hart house. At midnight, when I passed by, most people were sitting, watching the video. By 4am, it had turned into a party. Participatory art can be such a lovely experience.

  6. @Rich: Reading a book called “Participation” by Claire Bishop as I think about The Long Walk we went on last weekend (led by artists Susan Robb and Stokley Towles). Thinking about leading/not leading participatory artworks, the role of education in the whole process, and the role of healing. Piper’s “Funk Lessons” came up in the book and I wanted to share.

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