NOT A Contemporary Theatre Review

By Rachel Lois

Mary and I have just finished a text on NOTA for Contemporary Theatre Review's (CTR) Intervention series, commissioned to sit alongside CTR's special issue on 'Editing' (25.1). The text features a selection of notes from our performance of NOTA at  Cross-Cultural Live Art Platform, curated by Something Human, at the Proud Archivist in London, November 2014. 

Johanna Linsley of the CTR Editorial team on NOTA in the context of the Intervention series: 

'Alongside these features on editing, we also offer reflections from two different projects that deliberately subvert or refuse the edit. Both projects deal with performance documentation – NOTA is a performative intervention that occurs alongside performance events and explores notation, while Emergency Index is an annual compendium of performance documentation submitted by artists. As well, both projects toy with a utopian idea of unmediated response, while complicating this idea with attention to mechanisms like administration and design. Questions of labour, funding and independent or autonomous production also connect NOTA and Emergency Index, and add complexity to the wider discussion of what it means to not edit. Finally, while each is situated firmly IRL (in real life), they nevertheless explore a kind of radical indeterminacy that might be considered ‘virtual’.'

The text and images are online here 


NOTA: NOT, NOTES, NOTER (NOTA), NOT/A, is a research framework produced by Open Dialogues (Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson) that presses on the time, place and quality of notes in relation to performance.  Read more about this long term project here and here. 

Lemonade xeverything was so infinite. by LemonMelon

Image C. LemonMelon 2015

The LemonMelon series 'Lemonade  everything was so infinite.' is launching on 15th February, 3.30–6.30pm at Hundred Years Gallery, 13 Pearson Street, London E2 8JD with musicians responding to selected pages of the publication.

Cixous's translation of Kafka's sentence 'Lemonade  xeverything was so infinite.' forms the basis of a series of seven titles written by seven different writers / artists – David Berridge, Julia Calver, Emma Cocker, Rachel Lois Clapham, Marit Münzberg, Tamarin Norwood and Mary Paterson.

Each title explores one of the seven segments of this sentence – 'Lemonade', 'x', 'everything', 'was', 'so', 'infinite', '.'.

Using a variety of apparatuses and improvisational techniques Douglas Benford, Steve Beresford,Blanca Regina and Manuela Barczewski will play a selection of pages of the combined publication.

More information about the publication, and to purchase a copy, here