Invitation Only

by Rachel Lois.

At the invitation of Emma Cocker, I will be contributing this to Invitation Only at the British Art Show's Sideshow Book Fair:

(W)reading Performance Writing No.2 (Sideshow Book Fair)
Edition of 1.
Price – 200GBP

For Sideshow Book Fair, I have re-made a special one-off hard copy of (W)reading Performance Writing based on instructions by Marit Münzberg.

Assembling together twenty practitioners from diverse fields of poetry, theatre, visual art and performance on the topic of Performance Writing, (W)reading Performance Writing is a unique guide that comprises of syllabuses, manifestos, scores, personal testimonies and practical exercises. It also includes a detailed subject area index. (W)reading Performance Writing is highly speculative and encourages an active read. A note on its particular invitation can be found in the section Invitation to (W)read.

This special edition for Sideshow contains a variety of bindings and textured papers, a pencil (for scribbling), several carefully retained printing errors and some previously unseen material.

Contributors Charles Bernstein, Caroline Bergvall, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Mark Caffrey, Alex Eisenberg, John Hall, Claire Hind, Richard Kostelanetz, Johanna Linsley, Claire MacDonald, Rebecca May Marston, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson, Joshua Sofaer, Danae Theodoridou, Peter Walsh and Simon Zimmerman. Design by Marit Münzberg.

(W)reading Performance Writing No.1 was commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency in 2010. It is also available as a specially designed downloadable PDF at thisisliveart.co.uk.

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'Invitation Only brings together a series of book works, pamphlets, readers, scores … that operate at the level of the invitational, instructional or propositional, as potential provocations or departure points prompting future action or enquiry. For the Sideshow Book Fair these works are invitations they ask be to be pursued, used and engaged with as part of the live event itself.Invitation Only is a platform for presenting and engaging discussion around a body of work produced and curated by artists and writers including David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker and Marit Münzberg.

David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker and Marit Münzberg have worked together on a number of projects exploring the relationship between writing, exhibition and publication.Invitation Only focuses explicitly on the invitational or propositional imperative within their recent practices in order to develop future dialogue around this shared area of concern.Invitation Only will be followed by an event and panel discussion entitled R.S.V.P where a number of invited speakers address ideas relating to invitational, instructional or propositional forms of writing, text and language through the specificity of their own practices.'

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For more...

Sideshow Book Fair
David Berridge
Emma Cocker
Marit Münzberg

Glorious opportunities

by Mary Paterson

'Glorious' is a new touring performance from Rajni Shah - the third in a loose trilogy examining cultural identity, that includes Mr. Quiver (2005) and Dinner with America (2008).

image - Lucy Cash

Glorious is a haunting and unusual musical that will be completely reinvented for every location, as members of the local community work with the company to create the event.

Rajni says, "I want to explore the sense of not knowing that pervades Europe today – both the fear and the space for hope that has emerged as a result of our increased awareness of climate change, shifts in border policies, and the dramatic impact of the financial collapse. I cannot think of a more appropriate or interesting form for this than the musical – a form that immediately communicates with a vast number of people, including myself, but that is often used to represent some kind of utopia or dystopia. At a time when many people feel disempowered and frustrated, can we make a musical that positively embraces the unknown and the unknowable?"

I am involved in Glorious as a writer, and over the next two years I will be collecting stories from the people who collaborate and participate in Glorious. The result will be a series of interweaved narratives about making, doing and being, to be published in book form in 2012.

Glorious is beginning now, and looking for people to take part. Please click on the links below to find out about three upcoming opportunities.

Image: Lucille Acevedo-Jones

How Does it Feel?

Newcastle, November 10-12th 2010

Open Workshop organised by the Wunderbar Festival, with Lucille Acevedo-Jones, Sheila Ghelani and Rajni Shah. This workshop is not for professional artists - enthusiasm and curiosity are all that's required.

www.rajnishah.com/how-does-it-feel

Workshop and Performance

Inbetween Time Festival in Bristol, early December 2010

Participants will work with Lucille Acevedo-Jones, Karen Christopher and Rajni Shah to devise short performances that they will then perform alongside the company during the festival. Participants do not need to have prior performance experience, but need to be comfortable with the idea of performing on stage in a professional setting.

www.rajnishah.com/opportunity-at-inbetween-time-in-bristol

Seeking Glorious Musicians!

NottDance Festival in Nottingham, February 26th 2011

We are looking for an instrumental music group to take part in our first full-length preview performance of Glorious in Nottingham. We are looking for any size or type of amateur musical group with an interest in the project.

www.rajnishah.com/seeking-glorious-musicians-in-nottingham

Details of how to apply are on the links above.

Deadline for all applications: November 1st 2010

READERS WANTED Pigeon Wing

By Rachel Lois

Below is a selection of documents made by myself and readers in READERS WANTED at Pigeon Wing, 3 October 2010 as part of WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION.

Roy and me (Frame)

Becky and me (Welcome Mat)

Stella and me (Fold and press)

READERS WANTED by Rachel Lois Clapham in collaboration with Antje Hildebrandt.

READERS WANTED to share an intimate (w)reading performance for two. This is a little game, a small exercise in trust and a live cursive encounter. You can decide how long it might take. Two minutes is good though. Bring a + 1 with you if you like.

Please come. I'll be waiting.

Phil and me (Point and follow)

Helen and me (Equation)

James and me (Pre writing) 2

James and me (Pre writing) 3

Indebted to Antje Hildebrandt and all the readers at Pigeon Wing.

INSIDE PERFORMANCE Dance Theatre Journal Volume 23 no. 4

By Rachel Lois

INSIDE PERFORMANCE, Rachel Lois's regular column for Dance Theatre Journal, is this month entitled A Script about Fantastic Diagrams and consists of an collaboration between David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham and Alex Eisenberg on diagrams in writing and making performance. It begins:
‘Throughout summer 2009 Rachel Lois Clapham, Alex Eisenberg and David Berridge are reading Richard Kostelanetz’s (RK) 1975 anthology Essaying Essays. Its abundance of forms - drawing on performance scripts, conceptual art, concrete poetry, experimental fiction and critical prose - feed into various individual and collective projects.

For a planned DTJ collaboration the three return repeatedly to Richard’s description of the diagram in his introduction to Essaying Essays, relating it to their own differing engagements with writing about and making performance. Throughout several months of meetings, phone and email conversations Richard’s celebration of the diagram is repeatedly summoned to embody a certain sense of writerly possibility that is simultaneous, open and fantastic...’

The column continues as a travelling conversation in script form, sited across various times and locations between Richard (via excerpts of Essaying Essays), David (from his bed, a café in Brick Lane, and in spirit), Rachel Lois and Alex (on the telephone in Bradford and London respectively). Through various 'takes' of the script a personal sense of the term diagram, and the act of diagramming, emerges as conceptually enmeshed within the process and product of performance: as potent tool for (w)reading, as sympathetic critical opener and as definitely speculative performance document.
This personal, almost hopeful, sense of the diagram as a writerly form and endeavour - which, as a recently awoken and angry David is keen to point out, retains a sense of space that is distinct from that of drawing - is countered and extended by two diagram pieces inserted outside A Script About Fantastic Diagrams proper, which appear unannounced amongst the remaining journal content.

For the first insert, Alex diagrams the journey of his telephone conversation with Rachel Lois on one side of a double spread. On the other side, his cut-out template lightly mimes page 27; Theron Schmidt’s text on anti-messianic theatre. In the second insert, David writes A Syllabus for Diagrams in which he tracks a lineage of historic diagram examples – from Claude E. Shannon, through George Brecht, around Ricardo Basbaum and out towards Alexander Rodchenko. The the cut-out template for this piece serves as a backdrop for p35; text by Joao Florencio on the difference and dissensus of drag politics along with a very particular photograph (Christophe Chemin) of a man-cum-musical instrument.

Both these diagrammatic moments point outside themselves, pivoting away from the proposition set out by the main script and activate material that lies adjacent to them in the journal (as well as reflecting back onto the diagrams themselves when folded closed) to create new meanings. It is perhaps this sense of activation that pinpoints how exactly diagrams might frustrate - as both process and product. The script ends with David commenting on the confounding nature of the diagram. ‘It lacks the commonality that language brokenly attains. Its possibilities remain resistant, its sociality is, well, odd. It tantalizes with its ambition, yet must be rationed. I say farewell to the diagram here.’

The published reading list offers more opportunities for joy, hope and frustration in the form of diagrams.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Yve-Alain Bois ed. Gabriel Orozco (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2009).

Ricardo Basbaum, “Diagrams” in Casco Issues 10: The Great Method, 83-92.

Julia Born, “Secret Instructions” in Zak Kyes & Mark Owens, Forms of Inquiry: The Architecture of Critical Graphic Design (Architectural Association, London, 2007), 88-93.

Joan Jonas & Sung Hwan Kim, “Three short conversations on seven different objects” in Sung Hwan Kim (Rotterdam, Witte de With, 2009), 31-48.

Richard Kostelanetz, Essaying Essays (New York, Out of London Press, 1975).

Richard Kostelanetz, ed. Scenarios: Scripts to Perform (Assembling Press, New York,1980).

Marie Neurath & Robin Kinross, The transformer: principles of making Isotype charts (London, Hyphen Press, 2009).

Astrit Schmidt-Burkhrdt, Macunias’ Learning Machines: From Art History to a Chronology of Fluxus (Vice Versa Verlag, Berlin, 2003).

Paul Auster, New York Trilogy, (Penguin Books, 1990)

Georges Perec Life: A User Manual (Vintage Books, 1978, Eng. 1987)

Adrian Heathfield Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (MIT Press,2009)

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Click here for details of how to buy Dance Theatre Journal

INSIDE PERFORMANCE is a serialised writing project developed by Rachel Lois Clapham for Dance Theatre Journal. Taking the form of a regular newspaper or magazine ‘column’ INSIDE PERFORMANCE is a periodic journey into the practice of writing from or as performance.

For other columns click here, and here

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Rachel Lois is Co-Director of Open Dialogues, a UK based collaboration that produces critical writing on and as performance. www.opendialogues.com

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance, live art and writing. He lives and works in London and is a member of the performance group - Present Attempt.www.presentattempt.co.uk

David Berridge is a writer who lives in London and curates VerySmallKitchenhttp://verysmallkitchen.com

Richard Kostelanetz’s work appears in various editions of Readers Guide to Twentieth-Century Writers, Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature, Contemporary Poets, Contemporary Novelists ... www.richardkostelanetz.com

Writing Artists on the Radio

By Rachel Lois Clapham

David and I interviewed by Hyun Jin Cho live from the Pigeon Wing on WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION.

Listen live HERE http://radio.spacestudios.org.uk/

or come here:

129—131 MARE STREET

LONDON E8 3RH

6^th of October 1 – 6pm

WRITING/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION/PRESENTATION/DISCUSSION/PERFORMANCE/READING/LISTENING/SINGING/PLAYING

Sarah Jury and Ruth Beale invite artists from The Pigeon Wing plus more. Matt Lewis, Emma Leach, Tamarin Norwood, Bella Szyszkowska, Julia Calver, Nicole Bachmann, Jill Magi, Helen Kaplinsky, Hammam Aldouri, David Berridge, Hyun Jin Cho, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Leach.

1 - 3pm Part 1.

13:00 Intro

13:05 Tamarin Norwood presents TEXT AS MACHINE

13:15 WRITING/ EXHIBITION/ CONVERSATION, an exchange about the recent exhibition at The Pigeon Wing. David Berridge, Hyun Jin Cho and Rachel Clapham.

13:35 Matt Lewis, seeing aloud. ‘a live creation of radio sound-effects, a bit like The Archers but without the dialogue’.

13:50 SMALL TALK SMALL BOOKS an audio essay by Jill Magi.

14:15 Hammam Aldouri and Helen Kaplinsky. The Artists Assistant: Acts of Obedience, includes a discussion of authorship.

4 - 6pm Part 2.

16:00 Ruth Beale’s Pioneer Singers perform 'Sing Me a Song with Social Significance' and then discuss their motives. Followed by three other covers versions.

16:35 Julia Calver, A reading from new writing. These coins, my eyes

16:50 Nicole Bachmann, La conversation

16:55 Matt Lewis, seeing aloud. ‘a live creation of radio sound-effects, a bit like The Archers but without the dialogue’.

17:15 Storytime with Bella Szyszkowska. Death Valley

17:30 Emma Leach, A short presentation about fear, the sea and the slippery nature of text in works by the artist.

17:45 Spartacus Chetwynd