open-dialogues

#Nightwatch2012

2012-01-24T07:38:00.000Z

by Mary Paterson

#Nightwatch2012 is a collaborative performance for mass participation, taking place on Twitter.

FRIDAY 27th JAN 2012 00:30 - 02:30 GMT/ THURSDAY 26th JAN 19:30 - 21:30 EST

Streamed live to RHYTHMS OF TIME SHARING curated by KIOSK in collaboration with Vox Populi Philadephia at AUX Performance Space in Philadelphia.

Participating artists: Joanna Brown, Tiffany Charrington, Eddy Dreadnought, Sally Labern, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson and Natasha Vicars.

To join in, please follow the score and tweet to #Nightwatch2012.

The #Nightwatch2012 score

1. Tweet from 00:30-02:30 GMT on Friday 27^th Jan/ 19:30-21:30 EST Thursday 26^th Jan
2. Tweet about the night
3. Tweet to #Nightwatch2012

4. Start by naming your location, your timezone and the rhythm of your night

5. End by naming your location, your timezone and the rhythm of your night

6. Inbetween, follow the words, thoughts and rhythms of the other

Tweeting Conversation Slips

2012-01-21T16:39:00.001Z

By Rachel Lois

In the last days of his life, Franz Kafka could not speakdue to tuberculosis of the larynx. He was reduced to communicating to those whowere closest to him via short written sentences or ‘hints’, otherwise known as ConversationSlips. Along with the enduring visions his novels have given us - a man who hasdone nothing wrong fights for his life against a bizarre court that sits inalmost every attic in the world (The Trial 1914), a machine quite literallywrites condemned people to death (In the Penal Colony 1919), a man tries foreverto get into a mysterious castle (The Castle 1922) - are his Conversation Slips...What was Kafka saying and to whom? What paper or pen did he use? What does ‘ Lemonade it was all so boundless.’ mean? Or rather, favouringthe more opaque, WHAT remains of one – sided conversation? HOW the existential aphorism? HOW BIG the slip? Intrigued by allthis and more, Rachel Lois has transposed a selection of these slips to Twitter;as 140 character endeavour, research and tribute.

TweetingConversation Slips by Rachel Lois Clapham features in #tweetart at WestgateStudios, Wakefield. The work in part relates to the LemonMelon commission ‘ lemonade everything was so infinite.’

See Tweeting Conversation Slips in situ on Twitter via @rachellois1 and #tweetart

HOLD (IT)

2012-01-21T14:11:00.002Z

By Rachel Lois

Fold out extract HOLD (IT) 2012 c. the artists

HOLD (IT), a score from Fourscore Selected Gestures at The Other Room, is forthcoming from Knives Forks and Spoons Press in 2012.

HOLD (IT) captures something of the pace, directionality and physical gestures of RachelLois Clapham’s original performance reading, whilst perforations, instructionsand BLANKS posit new possibilities for shuffling, reading out loud andfingering. The publication is indebted to other live readings such as FINGER, Re-and 0456461 to 0456464.

HOLD (IT) is designed by stephenpperry and features a postludeby David Berridge.

Rachel Lois Clapham produces writing on andas performance as part of UK collaboration Open Dialogues and curates radical writing with the Arts Councilpartnership In a word…. Her own practice points..., punctuates movementand presses on physical gestures as text. Work includes Re- (PSL Gallery, Norwich Arts Centre and John LathamArchive), WORK TRY HARD (Kaleid Editions), (W)reading Performance Writing : AGuide (Live Art Development Agency) and WRITINGthe SPACE (Wild Pansy Press). opendialogues.com @rachellois1

Fourscore Selected Works: 15 minutes

2011-12-05T09:07:00.001Z

Rachel Lois Clapham at The Other Room from The Other Room on Vimeo.

In August, I was invited to read at The Other Room. In a takeon ‘selected poems’, I read Fourscore Selected Works; twenty gesturestaken from different performances (mine, and those from dialogue with David Berridgeand Alex Eisenberg.) The gestures were squared, shuffled then shown and read to TheOther Room audience. The economy of themarks, and the the reading as a whole, is indebted to a process of performanceand extraction, focussing on physical gestures as text.

The score used in the performance- entitled HOLD (IT)- is forthcoming from Knives, Forks and Spoons Press in early 2012 with design by Stephen P Perry.

Diagrammatic works related to Fourscore Selected Works reading at The Other Room can be found here, here and here.

Rachel Lois Clapham - The Other Room Interview Series from The Other Room on Vimeo.

Rachel Lois Clapham produceswriting on and as performance as part of Open Dialogues and curates radical writing withthe Arts Council partnership In a word…. Her own practicepoints..., punctuates movement and presses on physical gestures as text. 2010 workincludes Re- (PSLGallery Leeds, Norwich Arts Centre and John Latham Archive London), WORKTRY HARD (Kaleid Editions) and (W)readingPerformance Writing : A Guide (Live Art Development Agency). opendialogues.com

Is this a rhetorical device?

2011-11-28T21:28:00.005Z

[by Mary Paterson.

1000 words and 102 questions. In response to Being Seen, Being Heard at Chelsea Theatre, 27th November 2011. ]

Is this your body?

Is this a space?

Are we in agreement? Have you heard this before? Did you say something?

Are you reading in silence?

If I repeated the question, would your answer be the same or different?

Can I start with this - who is your community? When you read ‘your community’ did you think I meant the community to which you belong, or the community with whom you are currently engaged?

Is it a project of performance to create communities? To designate, service and evaluate them?

Can I ask again – who is your community? Or, to put it another way – how does it feel to be identified?

How does publicly funded (performance) art ensure it is on the side of the community, and not on the side of education or objectification; of corporations or governments? (Is the side of the community, in your opinion, the better side?)

What is an assembly, and who assembles (it)? How does publicly funded (performance) art ensure it is sustainable? Or, to put it another way – how do you know you are doing the right thing?

Are you allowed to say ‘the right thing’ any more?

Are you allowed to talk about racism if you are white? Are you allowed to talk about marginalisation if you are middle class? Are you allowed to talk about racism and marginalisation if you are middle class, inside a theatre, on a council estate, in Chelsea, on a Sunday? Did you think I had forgotten that knowledge is relative?

Is your community defined by your geography, technology or education? Do you use the same criteria to identify other people?

Do you look like him – the man over there with the Apple Mac and the microphone? Does he look like you? Does he point at you and say, ‘me’? Or does he say ‘we’? Or does he say –not in words, perhaps, but by body language, action or implication - ‘I did not hear you, I am going to answer a different question’?

Is this knowledge, culture, education or the production of another kind of value?

Is this public, private, pedagogic or instrumental? Is this mine, or yours? Is this your idea, and if it is, can I use it? Can I use it without permission? What would you do if I took it without permission, took credit for it, used it for propaganda, invented a word and made an exhibition of myself? Would you join me in sitting round a table and asking questions? Why not?

Is this sustainable? Do you and I share the same sense of humour? If I told you a joke, do you think you would laugh? Have you heard the one about the schoolmaster?

Who owns this event? Who is going to intrepret it? What are you willing to believe in? If I told you that all the colours you are seeing right now have been adjusted for warmth, would you feel a) warm b) chilled or c) like complaining? Who would listen to your complaint? Who do you hope would listen?

Is anyone listening? Have you ever suspected anyone of deliberately eavesdropping on your conversations, and then using the information they hear against you? Is anyone, or has anyone ever, hacked into your mobile phone? Have you ever asked anyone to act as your witness? Have you ever been asked to be a witness, and found the task impossible?

What is the difference between witnessing real life and witnessing an act of performance? What is the difference between being a consumer and being an audience member? What is the difference between being in a room and being in an online network?

Can you formulate an argument without a human in it?

What is your skill? What is your authorial expertise? What is your preferred political position, and do you ever think about changing it, just to see how soft and green it is on the other side? Do you still believe in anything? Do you still believe in something? Do you intend to convey meaning?

Where do you appear?

What is contemporary oral culture? What is the difference between data and statisitcs? How do you represent something that has already happened? Why? Is it interesting or tiresome to know that there is no way to regain the live moment? Is it elitist or democratic to mourn its loss?

Is this clear? Is this clearer?

What do you think it means, that your parents’ body language dances across your hands when you speak? What do you think it means about heritage, culture and class? Who are you networking with? What is close, and what is far? Why aren’t you speaking? Who’s fault is that?

What is the right pace, tone or language? In which situation would you be content to have no power, opinions or speech? Who would you nominate to speak for you? Let me rephrase that – is this democracy?

Is this space?

Is this culture? Is this the production of knowledge? Is this education? Is it friendship, social life, or politics? Is it mine or yours?

Is this space next to, inside, outside, under, over or beside another space? Is the other space your preferred space, or are you happy with this one? Be truthful – would you rather be inside another space, looking out at those of us over here? Would you rather be in a tent, with a placard, making your mark? On a scale of 1 to 10, how dangerous is your body? Or, to put it another way, how much danger are you prepared for?

When was the last time you were surprised? Are you on the side of police, politics, charity or justice? What do you need to read before you will read something new? Do you prefer a place of opposition or a place of security? How long is your memory? Where are you going? If you could start again with language, what would be your first word?

Inside Performance Vol 24 no. 3 2011

2011-11-26T09:36:00.001Z

By Rachel Lois

INSIDE PERFORMANCE is aserialised writing project developed by Rachel Lois Clapham for Dance TheatreJournal. Taking the form of a regularnewspaper or magazine ‘column’ INSIDE PERFORMANCE is a periodic journey intothe practice of writing from or as performance. For this special issue ‘Trashing’, Rachel Lois writesTRASH SUBMISSION which acts variously asdeclamation, instruction or title.

Writing for the Trashingissue of Dance Theatre Journal went through a curious process of condensationor extraction. Of first: googling ‘trashing’ and making a poem based on all the‘hits’ (junk?) that ensues. Secondly, writing a piece ‘on trash’ that reflectedon writing and its place within performance – as trash, as trashing - both acelebration of and critique. Thirdly, getting rather bored with the directness,or rather obedience, of this. And fourthly,turning to the particular editorial guidelines for the issue, along with theinvitation ‘to submit’ a manuscript, and being caught up in submitting trash,and submitting to trash. And lastly,cleaving to just these two remaining words. TRASH SUBMISSION.

TRASH SUBMISSION then, is a declamation – perhaps froma trash manifesto, or a trash methodology. It invites thoughts on trashingsubmission (of or to?). It is also aninvitation in a much more immediate sense: to trash (this particularpage, the whole journal). The ultimate ‘?’ being what this act of readerlytrashing might be. As a title, TRASH SUBMISSION – whether referencing the theme of the journal, or being self-consciously depreciative of itself - hints at the work which is its namesake and begs thequestion where this ‘submission’ is. Perhaps ‘Trash Submission’ existselsewhere, complete but omitted from this particular issue (for beingunsuitable, for being trash?). Perhaps there was a printing error and only thetitle remains. Perhaps the work is not yet made or never will be. The notion oftrash moves around these two words. Ultimately, it may ~~just~~ be a trashysubmission.

///

Trashing DanceTheatre Journal is a dedicated and rigorous exploration of Trash in art,performance, work, and club culture. It features interviews with performancestar and living-legend Penny Arcade, club performer Mouse, sex worker and activist Thierry Schaffauser, plus articles exploring the work of John Sex, Danish collective dunst, Club Wotever, wasted works, contaminated performances and the'lowest form of performance' - living street sculptures. Forms of trashyarticulation including soap box articles, TV Chat Shows and Tabloid Newspapersinterrupt and compliment more formal essays and interviews in this specialissue! More details here Trashing Dance Theatre Journal is available to purchaseonline at Unbound.Part of Performance Matters.

Previous columns here, here and here.

A text by Mary on the Trashing Performance programme aspart of Performance Matters here.

All images C. Dance Theatre Journal and the artists 2011.

Action Art Now NOTES

2011-11-17T20:19:00.001Z

By Rachel Lois

Action Art Now NOTES are made from last weekend’sevening of performance curated by OUI Performance with Gillian Dyson, PaulHurley, Poppy Jackson, and Christopher Mollon. These NOTES speculate on the natureof action or task - which was variously object-based, practised, done/un-doneand automated in the work.

‘NOTES- the before, afterand during; final, continual and provisional; eventual and event-full.' Very Small Kitchen on Rachel Lois Clapham’s NOTES.

Poppy Jackson 1 Action Art Now

Poppy Jackson Action Art Now

Gillian Dyson Action Art Now

Notes Action Art Now

Paul Hurley Action Art now

Christopher Mollon Action Art Now

NOTES is an ongoing body ofwork by Rachel Lois Clapham focusing on diacritical marks, provisional or livewriting from and as performance. They are made live in the same time and placeof performance and often given to the performer directly after the performance asa gift.

Made as part of NOTA; anOpen Dialogues research project that will produce a sometime set of pedagogicperformance writing tools.

Wendy Houstoun: 50 ACTS – a Partial Response, in time.

2011-11-15T22:49:00.015Z

By Mary Paterson

"The word, to me, is an active thing.”

“Language has a rhythm."

- Wendy Houstoun, Post-Show Discussion, after Fifty Acts at The Place, London, 15/11/11

http://vimeo.com/25963793

Keeping time. Telling time. Making time. Falling out of time.

At some point, at some time, she will disappear.

She tells us so, in big, white, capital letters scrolling up the screen, like the epic intro to an adventure film.

She tells us so, sitting in the corner of the stage, sad and steroetyped like an old person, next to black and white dancing showgirls.

Old times, other people’s times, times made poignant with age.

At some point, at some time, she will disappear.

But all that comes later.

In the beginning, time stops.

Time is dead. It is the end of time.

But all that comes first.

For now there is spinning, there is movement, there are customer surveys.

How did you find your experience of dying? There are jokes.

There is George Osborne, cutting things.

There is a chorus of yesses. There is a chase. There is music. There is poetry.

There is rhythm. There is rhyme, metre, and dance.

There is Act One, followed by Act Two, all the way up to Fifty.

In the middle there is an interval. She re-does things.

She lets the movements of the first Twenty-Nine acts ripple over her body as if they haven’t found their meaning yet.

She pulls the tape out of a cassette to the accompaniment of two women, talking of anticipation.

She reads the cassette tape with her fingers to divine her future.

I see a pension. Oh no, I don’t.

There are jokes.

She smashes some old vinyl records in time to the beat.

Keeping time.

Losing time.

She re-plays the sound of a woman’s voice.

Ok. Cheers, then. Lots of Love.

The woman’s voice fades out of time.

Lots of Love.

The woman’s voice fades out of time and out of ear shot.

Keeping time. Telling time. Making time. Falling out of time.

At some point, at some time, she will disappear.

Everyone is telling her so.

Everything is telling her so.

Drumroll please.

The invisible person behind the cloak can be heard sobbing.

Would you describe the latter part of your life as: satisfactory; unsatisfactory; neither satisfactory or unsatisfactory?

At the beginning, time stops.

Time is dead. It is the end of time.

At the end there is no ending. She is going to disappear.

At some point, at some time.

At the end, she scratches for an ending.

Perhaps she is clutching on to time.

Inbetween, there is falling, there is equipment, there are risk assessments.

There is the language of the bureaucrat, of passive success and implicit blame.

Do you need training?

There is a chase. There is music. There is poetry.

There is rhythm. There is rhyme, metre, and dance.

Perhaps she will go with a bang.

Perhaps she will go with a rhyme.

Perhaps she will go out with the lights.

Perhaps she will go with a bow.

Perhaps she will fade away.

She bows.

When she bows, we clap.

(We clap loud enough to bring her back.)

Trashing Performance (written by Mary Paterson)

2011-10-31T10:20:00.014Z

image (c) Owen Parry

You have to call it something.

A small Cuban woman strides across stage in PVC. Metamorphosing from seventeenth century nun to British Bulldog, she bends her knees, juts out her chin and curls her melodic voice into a grumpy snarl. She turns and gives the audience a flash of her back, bare except for a bra worn the wrong way round, and quips: ‘Worth the entrance fee alone.’ [1]

You have to call it something, this self consciously playful two-fingers-up at the establishment, at academia, at gender, at expectations.

A skeletally thin man teeters in high heels and fish net stockings. He lifts his arms at the elbows, like a puppet, and lip synchs to a strong, American, female voice. The strong voice and the frail body mime a story of gender abuse. [2]

You have to call it something, this persistent, resistant caricature of identities and labels played out, for the most part, on women’s bodies, real and imagined.

A figure in a Burkha scuttles into the spotlight and swivels her eyes from side to side. The music starts up - swing music from the 1940s, the golden age of show business. The Burkha moves slightly, as if the woman is dancing. [3]

You have to call it something, because here it is, the performance programme of the second year of ‘Performance Matters’, a three year research collaboration between Goldsmiths, University of London, University of Roehampton, and the Live Art Development Agency.

So you call it trash performance.

Or perhaps, like Scottee, you command the theatre in a glittering jumpsuit and call it ‘light art’ – a mixture of live art and light entertainment. Art that is both enjoyable, he explains, and that ‘has a politic.’

‘We have a hashtag for tonight,’ says the man in the glittering jumpsuit, ‘It’s #bunchofcunts.’ He checks Twitter to find out what people have been saying about the show. It turns out the hashtag has a double life – it’s also used to describe the Conservative Party. [4]

Because if there’s one thing we’re all agreed on, we’re all agreed that this is not trash.

It’s not trash when Marcia Farquhar’s guests stand in a skip at the back of Toynbee Hall, delivering lectures on a subject they would like to trash, or keep from the trash.

Marcia cries into the fading light: ‘Is that nice man from last night back again?’ Luckily, he is. Enthused from a stay at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest camp, he climbs into Marcia’s skip and tells us about his first performative intervention. [5]

It’s not trash when Nao Bustamante recalls the time she went on the Joan Rivers chat show disguised as ‘An Exhibitionist’, and unleashed the term ‘multi-gendered ambicentric individual’ into the world.

Two thirds of the way through a film of talking heads, Nao Bustamante’s lips stop moving in time with her words. A voice says ‘You literally cannot believe what you see,’ and a body speaks something else – silent, unknowable. [6]

image (c) Ben Walters

It’s not trash when Lois Weaver narrates her own autobiography, part drag queen, part university lecturer, in a selective history of political, sexual and artistic awakenings.

A woman peers over the top of her pink rimmed glasses and underneath her dramatic, blonde wig. She picks up a cupcake from a hostess trolley and flings it to the back of the auditorium. [7]

Of course, nobody ever said it was. The ‘Trash’ of ‘Trashing Performance’ is not a pejorative but a verb. The work in this programme trashes an other.

In the bar, audience members are writing the names of their favourite femmes on doilies. [8]

What is the other? You might call it the mainstream: the dominant messages beamed from television, universities or even three year collaborative research programmes.

Five energetic dancers are wearing T-shirts with an old man’s face emblazoned on the front. They finish. We clap. They come back for another bow. And another. There are more curtain calls than there is dancing. We clap. We cheer. The poster behind them screams, ‘Chekhov is not our dad!’ [9]

But no-one wants to give the other a name – there’s no need, because it’s always there, and it’s always shifting.

Vaginal Davis opens her eyes wide and pouts directly into the camera. She loves criticism, she says. She loves being rejected. ‘It means they’ve really been paying attention.’ [10]

Here among friends (we are friends, aren’t we?) and for now, we might call this trash. Trash is the word for good humoured resistance.

1. Carmelita Tropicana at Musing Muses And FeMUSEum Ribbon Cutting (Fri 28 Oct, Toynbee Studios)

2. Nando Messias, at EAT YOUR HEART OUT Presents Performance Doesn't Matter (Wed 26 Oct, Toynbee Studios)

3. Baghdad’s Got Talent, at Performance Doesn’t Matter

4. Scottee, at Performance Doesn’t Matter

5. Marcia Farquhar, Open University (27 – 29 Oct, Outside Toynbee Studios)

6. Nao Bustamante, in THIS IS NOT A DREAM dir. Gavin Butt and Ben Walters (premiere, 27 Oct, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club)

7. Lois Weaver at Musing Muses and FeMUSEum

8. Amy Lamé at Musing Muses and FeMUSEum

9. Figs in Wigs, at Performance Doesn’t Matter

10. Vaginal Davis, in THIS IS NOT A DREAM

#dawnchorus - performance 16/10/11

2011-10-08T15:34:00.002+01:00

#dawnchorus - tweeting the dawn - will be performed at dawn on Sunday 16th October 2011 (approximately 5:35am to 8am) on Twitter.

Participating writers are: Amber Massie-Bloomfield, Joanna Brown,Tiffany Charrington, Eddy Dreadnought, Sally Labern, Tamarin Norwood, Mary Paterson and Natasha Vicars.

#dawnchorus is conceived by Natasha Vicars and developed in collaboration with Mary Paterson and the writers, as part of the Live Art Development Agency's DIY6 programme. For more information, please email natashavicars@gmail.com, or see us on Twitter.

NOTES on a return RRP

2011-09-10T14:59:00.002+01:00

By Rachel Lois.

The results of my writingresidency ‘Scoring Notes on a Return’, inwhich I devised a score for writing performance live at the Laing, have beenpublished in Notes on a return, by Art Editions North.

NOTES on a return features aseries of exhibitions and a symposium which revisited five live artworks madeat the Laing in 1985, 1986 and 1987 by influential artists Anne Bean, RoseEnglish, Mona Hatoum, Bruce McLean and Nigel Rolfe. The publication examinesideas of memory, archive and the documentation of ephemeral practices andqueries the reasons and conditions for remembering within the discourses ofinstitution and art history.

Fragmentsof my score are published alongside five new performances commissioned by the Laing and serve variously as description, direction and punctuation.

////

Contributors: Christopher Bamford, Anne Bean, SamBelinfante, Guy Brett, Ramsay Burt, Rachel Lois Clapham, Mike Collier, JohnDummett, Rose English, Sofia Greff, Sophia Yadong Hao, Matthew Hearn, SimonHerbert, Graham Hudson, Bruce McLean, Meg Mosley, Nigel Rolfe, Andrea Tarsia,and Viola Yeşiltaç. Contains a Foreward by Amelia Jones and an Afterward byLois Keidan.

Notes on a return can be purchased from Unbound at The Live Art Development Agency

Notes on a return, ArtEditions North, Sunderland, 2010, 192 pages, 21cm x 13cm.

MANIFESTOS

2011-08-06T14:08:00.010+01:00

The Open Dialogues manifestos talk of how and why we do things, and of the changing nature of these hows and whys (made, as several of them are, from previous mission statements). The manifestos are cumulative, exchanged between Rachel Lois and Mary, each being worked on in our respective homes before being swapped, annotated by the other and sent again through the post.

Bli(m)p

Cover

Score

MAKE TIME (reverse)

MAKE TIME

All material c. Open Dialogues 2010

Trinity Laban: MA Dance Practice

2011-08-06T13:46:00.007+01:00

Open Dialogues was invited to lead a day-long session for Trinity Laban MA Dance Practice students, as part of their ‘Writing the Body: Text as Interface’ course in March 2011.

‘Writing the Body’ is an exploration of writing the body; of what it might mean for writing to be a porous, informed and reflective interface between performance and text. It explores issues surrounding critical engagement with performance, and examine writing as practice within evolving dialogues between text and performance, and the expansion of new mediums and spaces for writing.

Following the structure of our Samtalekkkenet (Dining Kitchen) presentation, Mary spoke about Open Dialogues’ work. She was interrupted by textual interventions supplied by Rachel Lois Clapham, in the form of A4 sheets of paper with words, phrases or symbols on them.

Following our potentially wayward presentation one of the students asked Mary: ‘But what are you teaching us?’ This question is central to Open Dialogues' long term pedagogic project NOTA ...

Background

Mary and Rachel Lois first spoke at Trinity Laban in 2007 as participants on Writing From Live Art – a professional development course aimed at increasing the quality and profile of writing about performance.

Open Dialogues Critical Model

2011-08-06T10:10:00.011+01:00

Open Dialogues is a UK based collaboration, founded in 2008 by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces critical writing on and as performance. We define critical writing as an intellectual encounter between writing and art. And the way we do things is deeply indebted to performance – to collaboration, documentation and the politics and processes of making and showing live work. Our model is also resistant to resolution, it is a living contract with our collaborators and an ongoing work in and of itself.

Here are some Open Dialogues manifestos.

Our critical model has been featured in several publications and symposiums. Below are a selection.

Critical Encounters

The Dining Kitchen, Copenhagen

Trinity Laban

Digital Documentation and Performance

Open Dialogues are developing a pedagogic tool for writing on and as performance both in and out of academic institutions, called NOTA Workshop. More details soon.

ABOUT US

Rachel Lois and Mary work together as Open Dialogues, and apart as writers and artists, to explore, stretch, test and experiment with the relationships between text, performance and criticality. Read more about us here and here.

#dawnchorus

2011-07-18T19:00:00.007+01:00

In August and September 2011, Mary Paterson is working with Natasha Vicars to co-ordinate #dawnchorus, part of DIY 8 - a programme of peer to peer workshops for artists working in Live Art, organised by the Live Art Development Agency.

#dawnchorus is an opportunity to collaborate on devising and piloting a live writing work for Twitter.

Deadline for applications: Monday July 25th 2011

Project summary:

Drawing on your existing experience of writing within your art practice you will take part in a collaborative intervention in the 'public forum' of Twitter. In three days of structured workshops, supported by individual exploration and research, you will work with artists/writers from across the country to consider live, digital writing as a communal act and a response to ideas of place.

Extending the metaphor of the 'tweet' the project asks what happens when diverse voices are brought together in defence/celebration of individual territories as a 'dawn chorus' on Twitter.

Participants will develop and reflect on their use of writing particularly in response to place, in both digital and material contexts and explore the social medium Twitter as a new context for live performance.

After piloting, #dawnchorus is intended for further development and there may be opportunities to be part of a further performance/exhibition at the relaunch of the Irwell Sculpture Trail and/or at Bury Street Light Festival.

Dates: 15 - 16 August and 12 September.
Times: 10:30am - 5:30pm
Location: Meetings held in Bury - exact venue TBC.

Application procedure:

Open to artists at all stages of their careers who use text in their work and enjoy the craft of writing, and writers who have some engagement with contemporary art/live art.

Participants also need to have access to a laptop (alternatively an iPhone or equivalent device) and the internet, and be willing to get up very early to see dawn. No previous experience of Twitter needed.

Participants will arrange their own accommodation and travel to Bury, but a contribution towards expenses is available to all participants.

Expressions of interest should be emailed to Natasha Vicars at natashavicars@gmail.com by 25 July. Include a 1-2 page attachment noting where you live and giving a short statement discussing what attracts you to the project, what you hope to gain and how writing features in your practice and an example of your writing of maximum 750 words.

The project organisers will review applications and select a varied group who have writing experience, and a spread of locations in the UK (including Manchester-Bury).

More info here.

WHEN MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ DIES

2011-06-25T10:59:00.006+01:00

By Rachel Lois Clapham

WHEN MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ DIES
MIT Press, 2010

I have heard Marina Abramović publicly claim she created Performance Art; a typically grand claim by Abramović. The significance of the artist in relation to Performance Art – a significance that will be brought into widespread and acute focus upon her death - is no doubt the intriguing ‘?’ the portentous title of this biography hints at. Using the event of her death as a pivot then, we may ask of When Marina Abramović Dies, what might her death do to Performance Art? What might Performance Art be after Abramović dies? Might Abramović’s death be Performance Art? And, not to cheapen said event in any way, where can we get tickets? As a biography, written by the artists’ former assistant James Westcott, When Marina Abramović Dies, does not set out to answer such forward facing questions. It is, instead, crammed full of facts. Some big, some small. Here is a curious collection of some of those facts.

Stalin excommunicated Tito in 1948.

In the summer of 1977 and Ulay and Abramović island-hopped around the Adriatic, sunbathing and picnicking naked on the beaches.

Abramović’s parents celebrated her birthday on Yugoslavia Republic day.

Yugoslavia Republic day is not Abramović’s birthday.

In the 1970 Belgrade International Theatre Festival Abramović watched as a student broke eggs over a naked woman. At the time, she recalled she thought it was stupid.

Vojo Abramović (Abramović‘s father) was born into a poor family in Cetinje, Montenegro, on September 29, 1914, and grew up in Pec, Kosovo.

Abramović’s maternal Great Grandmother put every pot on the stove and filled them with water to create the illusion of a plentiful kitchen.

Abramović on the event of her death: ‘In the case of my death I would like to have this at my memorial ceremony: Three coffins. The first with my real body. The second coffin with an imitation of my body. The third coffin with an imitation of my body.’

Since, the 1950’s, Tito had enacted relatively laissez-faire reforms in the Yugoslav communist system, shifting from Stalinist command economy towards a unique program of quasi-independence for municipal and industrial bodies in which the workers shared in profits and ran their own factories (though the state still had the final say).

Abramović used to have a job delivering mail. A couple of weeks in, she decided to throw away all the letters on her round that looked like bills and deliver only those with nice handwriting on the envelope. She was promptly fired.

Abramović’s mother forced her to eat horse-meat. She would pretend to obediently finish everything on her plate, but sometimes, rather than swallow the last mouthful of meat, stored it under her tongue all night as she slept, and spat it out in the morning.

Abramović first met Uwe Laysiepen, or Ulay, on 30 November; her birthday, also his. To prove this co-incidence, Abramović and Ulay got out their respective diaries. Both had the page 30 November ripped out.

Abramović’s great-grandmother – Krasmana Pejatović-Rosić – summoned the entire family to her deathbed to watch her die. However, she went on living, for a while, despite her best intentions.

In 1970, Abramović made a proposal to the Doma Omaldine Gallery. The proposal consisted of Abramović standing in front of an audience in her own clothes, which she gradually changed, ending up wearing the kind of clothes her mother dressed her in (dowdy calf-length skirt, heavy stockings, orthopedic shoes). She would then put a pistol to hear head and pull the trigger. Instead, Abramović put on an exhibition of her cloud paintings.

The arguments between Abramović’s parents were relentless and violent.

The Yugoslavian establishment Fine Art style was academic modernism, a holdover from the 1950’s that addressed pictorial problems only and contained no real political or critical dimension.

Danica Abramović (Abramović’s mother, born Rosić) never kissed the young Marina, fearing it would spoil her.

Abramović felt an enormous need to be loved, which her mother never met.

Friends at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade, remember Abramović as an exuberant young woman, confident in her beauty, fabulously gifted in communication - ‘famous to get under your skin’ as fellow student Zoran Popovic puts it – and almost obsessively optimistic.

Abramović painted figuratively, prolifically and with gusto, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Belgrade. She used bigger canvases than any of her peers could afford- about 5 ft by 5 ft.

In Rhythm 0, Studio Morra, Naples, 1975, someone wrote ‘IO SONO LIBERO’ (I am free) in lipstick on a mirror and made Abramović hold it. Someone wrote ‘END’ across her forehead. Someone else slowly poured a cup of water on her head. Someone else wiped the tears from her eyes. The gallerist drove Abramović back to her hotel when the performance was finished. When she awoke the next morning, Abramović noticed a clump of her hair had turned gray.

As an infant Abramović was carried across town every day in order that she could be breast-fed by her mother.

Abramović says she was never breast-fed.

An exhibition at the SKC in October 1971 was arguably Abramović’s first performance. She lay down on a table in one of the adjacent galleries for no other particular reason than because she was tired - fellow artist Era Milivojević mummified her prone body with some packing tape he happened to have handy.

With her parents’ illustrious war record and prestigious public roles, political and economic hardship was absent from Abramović’s life.

Marina on working with Hermann Nitsch: ‘I wanted to see how far I could work within another artist’s concept. And I found out that I didn’t have the motivation for this. I was irritated and repulsed by the smell of the blood, it was like a strange Back Mass. I felt something very medievally negative, without any solution or opening. I couldn’t see through the piece, and so I had to stop.’

In the summer of 1977 and Ulay and Abramović island-hopped around the Adriatic, sunbathing and picnicking naked on the beaches.

The Life and Death of Marina Abramović featuring Robert Wilson, Marina Abramović, Antony, Willem Dafoe is showing at The Lowry as part of the Manchester International Festival 2011. See here for details.

EXPERI MENTAL POETRY

2011-06-19T13:31:00.009+01:00

by Rachel Lois

Phil Terry, David Berridge and I are headlining an experimental poetry night at The Other Room in Manchester on 24th August. David and I will be presenting our individual work, and presenting a joint publication specially developed for the night. Here are our previews on The Other Room website.

We hope to see you at The Old Abbey Inn on the night if you can make it.

Differ and Repeat

2011-06-19T13:06:00.004+01:00

By Rachel Lois

My Reading Room score has been re-made and will appear in Differ and Repeat, a solo show at Dance Art Foundation by Joe Moran. Differ and Repeat is a choreographic collection of live performance, film and installation occupying multiple spaces across The Place. Considering new and critical propositions concerned with choreography as a form, discipline and subject that may be distinct from dance and dancing, Differ and Repeat engages in curation as choreographic intervention.

The show opens this week at The Place in London and incorporates a series of publications that will be presented in an installation space, in counterpoint to a sound work. Full information about the show can be found online here: http://www.danceartfoundation.com/differ-and-repeat.html.

WRITING (the) SPACE : EVENT

2011-05-06T14:36:00.012+01:00

19 May 10.45- 8pm

Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

Charles Olson’s Projective Verse invites writing to be considered spatially, as OPEN, or as FIELD (of) composition in three dimensions. His proposition is one of text as space of action, of breath as punctuation, and of the bodily pressures of writing in which ‘form is never more than an extension of content’. Drawing together the practices of UK artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

10.45 – 6pm: OPEN OLSON OPEN Laboratory
A laboratory exploring practice-based examples of Olson’s Projective Verse. Presenting is David Berridge talking on PHRASE POETICS and Olson’s “field”, Rachel Lois Clapham on FINGER and three dimensional ‘diagramming’, Emma Cocker explores the 'spacing' of extraction, condensation and close reading, Victoria Gray unpicks her performance of Loop (2011), Claire Hind examines voice and breath in response to Olson’s insistence upon the author’s body and Mary Paterson uses her online text 'Navigation Through Unbound' as a case study for writing the unknown. Audience space is limited so booking essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?
Dinner, drink and a live performance by Giles Bailey as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. Free but booking essential via rachellois@opendialogues.com or by clicking here.

Details of the overall WRITING (the) SPACE series is here

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Giles Bailey was born in York in 1981. He studied art in Leeds, Glasgow, London and Rotterdam at the Piet Zwart Institute where he is currently enrolled on the Master of Fine Art Programme. Having a long term interest in the power and peculiarities of the voice much of his work constitutes a study of the performing role for a speaking subject with a specific interest in the images that are used to construct and recount history. The inefficiency or problematic character of these images become the basis for performances that aim to expand or complete them. David Berridge is a writer based in London. He curates VerySmallKitchen, and writes on connections of language and art practice for The Fanzine, Fillip, Jacket, and others. His book Lemonade will be published by LemonMelon in August 2011, and he was part of the serial exhibition NierghtravAOnWint’sIf A Teller, curated by Simon Lewandowski, which is now a book from The Wild Pansy Press. With Mirja Koponen he is co-curating I AM NOT A POET, a summer school and festival of language and art practice at the Totalkunst Gallery in Edinburgh (7-21 August). verysmallkitchen@gmail.com. Formerly Editor of Live Art UK’s Writing from Live Art (2006-2008), Rachel Lois Clapham is Co-Director of Open Dialogues; a UK collaboration that produces critical writing on and as performance. She also curates radical writing with the Arts Council partnership In a word.... Her regular column, Inside Performance, is published by Dance Theatre Journal. Her own practice points..., punctuates movement and presses on physical gestures as text. 2010 work includes Re- (PSL, touring to Norwich Arts Centre and Flat Time House), Readers Wanted (Pigeon Wing), (W)reading Performance Writing (Live Art Development Agency) and Essaying Touch (Islington Mill). opendialogues.com. Emma Cocker is a writer and artist based in Sheffield and a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University. Operating under the title, Not Yet There, her practice explores models of practice – and subjectivity – that resist or refuse the pressure of a single or stable position by remaining willfully unresolved. Recent published essays includes ‘Over and Over Again and Again’ in Contemporary Art and Classical Myth (Ashgate Publishing 2010) and in Failure (Documents of Contemporary Art, Whitechapel/MIT, 2010); ‘Performing Stillness: Community in Waiting’ in Stillness in a Mobile World (Routledge, 2011); ‘The Restless Line, Drawing’ in Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, (I.B. Tauris, 2011), and ‘Border Crossings – Practices for Beating the Bounds’ in the forthcoming Liminal Landscapes, (Routledge, 2012). Cocker has written for various exhibition catalogues and publications, including the forthcoming Manual for Marginal Places as well as for Frieze, Dance Theatre Journal, The Art Book, a-n, engage, drain, m/c, Journal of Writing in Creative Practice and artandresearch. She is a member of the Publishing Advisory Group for the Live Art Development Agency. http://not-yet-there.blogspot.com/ Victoria Gray makes live work that is located between performance, sculpture and writing. She has performed work nationally and internationally, including Axis Arts (Manchester), Chisenhale Studios (London) and Sideshow, British Art Show 7 (Nottingham).In 2011 she will present new work at Epipiderme (Portugal) and Grace Exhibition Space (New York). She co-curates O U I Performance, with artist Nathan Walker, together they programme performance art in York. Victoria is Lecturer in Performance at York St John University. www.victoriagray.co.uk – www.ouiperformance.org.uk Claire Hind is a Senior Lecturer at York St John University where she specializes in conceptual performance practice. She has a PhD from the University of Leeds. Claire collaborates regularly with Claire MacDonald on international writing research projects and is on the editorial board of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice and has guest edited two editions on performance writing with Professor Susan Orr. Claire is currently writing a solo performance with Gary Winters and Alexander Kelly entitled Ghost Trackfor an international tour. Her writing functions as the connective tissue between forms of theatre and repetitive acts of stand up. http://clairehind.com/ Mary Paterson is a writer, producer and collaborator based in London. She is currently Creative Producer of Encounter, a programme of public art in urban spaces across North Kent, and Writer in Residence for Glorious, a socially engaged musical extravaganza by Rajni Shah Projects. Mary is co-founder of Open Dialogues, a collaboration that produces critical writing on and as performance.

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WRITING (the) SPACE is developed by Rachel Lois Clapham (Open Dialogues) in partnership with New Work Yorkshire and supported by In a word…

I STOOD UP AND SAID YEAH

2011-05-06T14:18:00.004+01:00

By Rachel Lois

My piece for this new zine – launched today online, as well as in and around Yorkshire - is titled RE-TYPE (500 words) and responds to the zine’s invitation to write 500 words on the theme of DIY. RE-TYPE (500 words) is a 500 word excerpt of Charles Olson’s 1951 text Projective Verse re-typed by myself; as tribute, as research, as labour (WORK, TRY, HARD).

The whole zine can be downloaded and viewed here

RE-TYPE (500 words) is also a pre-cursor to a fuller examination of this particular text in WRITING (the) SPACE 19 May at Wild Pansy Press, Leeds.

A Prototype of Walking (S)miles

2011-05-04T08:43:00.003+01:00

By Rachel Lois Clapham and Present Attempt

An incomplete textual sample that comes out of Walking (S)miles by Present Attempt.

Optional Instructions for Self-Assembly

1. Print the document
2. Cut each of the pages down the centre with the exception of the last page
3. Affix the cut pages to the last page
4. (W)read the document

Walking Smiles

Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer based in Bradford. She is Co-Director of Open Dialogues, a UK collaboration that produces critical writing on and as performance. She also curates radical writing with the Arts Council partnership In a word… Her regular column, Inside Performance, is published by Dance Theatre Journal. 2010 performance work includes Re- (PSL Gallery, Norwich Arts Centre and Flat-time House), READERS WANTED (Pigeon Wing), [Essaying Touch] (Islington Mill) and (W)reading Performance Writing: a Guide (Live Art Development Agency).

Present Attempt is a group of four artists making collaborative performance works since 2007. These have included studio-based pieces, site specific performances, writing and practice based research. They have shown work across the UK at venues includingthe ICA, The Greenroom, BAC, Shunt Vaults and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Recent performances include Networks 1.0 (Riverside Studios, Forest Fringe), Keeping the Park (Away Day 2010) and Walking (S)miles (Hazard Festival, Hide and Seek Weekender). Present Attempt are James Bush, Alex Eisenberg, Venla Hatakka and John Pinder.

About the performance

Walking (S)miles is an event that builds a unique ‘map’ of the city as people wander through it, collecting smiles from passers-by. www.presentattempt.com

WRITING (the) SPACE

2011-03-28T12:49:00.024+01:00

Wild Pansy Press Project Space
4 May - 19 May 2011 (Mon-Thurs 10-6, Fri 10-4)
Old Mining Building, University of Leeds, Woodhouse Lane, Leeds LS2 9JT

‘If I hammer, if I recall in, and keep calling in, the breath, the breathing as distinguished from the hearing, it is for cause, it is to insist upon a part that breath plays in verse which has not (due, I think, to the smothering of the power of the line by too set a concept of foot) has not been sufficiently observed or practiced, but which has to be if verse is to advance to its proper force and place in the day, now, and ahead. I take it that PROJECTIVE VERSE teaches, is, this lesson, that that verse will only do in which a poet manages to register both the acquisitions of his ear and the pressure of his breath.’ Extract, Projective Verse, 1950.

WRITING (the) SPACE presses down on and around this unique poetics of writing in contemporary performance related practice - in particular, the possibilities of performance writing in spatial and physical terms. WRITING (the) SPACE is conceived as a period of action research within the Wild Pansy Press Project Space.

For WRITING (the) SPACE, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a new iteration of their ongoing collaborative project Re –, which essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. This iteration of the project addresses the emergent grammar of Re-, exploring the spatial and physical possibilities of writing. Extracted fragments from earlier conversations rub against mute utterances of a finger diagramming, nails pink; a spoken text of dislocated phrases; partial scores awaiting activation; punctuation, the space of breath. Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) is open to the public from 4 - 19 May, 10-6pm Mon-Thurs and 10-4 Fri).

WRITING (the) SPACE Event, 19 May 09.30am – 8pm

Drawing together the practices of diverse artists and writers, this day-long event attempts to further explore notions of physical and spatial writing, drawing on the installation Re – (WRITING (the) SPACE) and Olson’s notion of Projective Verse.

09.30-6pm: > OPEN > < OLSON > < OPEN <.
A laboratory exploring practice based examples of Olson’s OPEN text. Presenting: David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham, Emma Cocker, Victoria Gray, Claire Hind and Mary Paterson. Audience space is limited so booking is essential, please email rachellois@opendialogues.com.

6-8pm : How is Art Writing?
Dinner, drink, conversation and live performance by Giles Bailey on the last day of the exhibition as part of the In a word…artists’ dinner series. All welcome but booking essential, click on In a word... to book online.

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WRITING (the) SPACE is developed by Rachel Lois Clapham (Open Dialogues) in partnership with New Work Yorkshire and supported by In a word…

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In a word... is a research programme profiling an ecology of radical writing practice in, around and from Yorkshire. http://writingencounters.squarespace.com/in-a-word/

Open Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. www.opendialogues.com

New Work Yorkshire is a proactive, engaged and mutually supportive collection of individuals who aim to develop a vibrant and diverse New Work sector in Yorkshire.

Wild Pansy Press is an art collective, a small publishing outfit affiliated with Leeds University Fine Art and a public venue for experimental works which use the practices of reading, writing and publication as their medium and/or content. wildpansypress.com

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Images

1 The Company of Men" by Charles Olson, typewritten manuscript with handwritten notations, September 13, 1957, from the Charles Olson Research Collection.

2 Re- (Unfixed) Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, 2010. Courtesy the artists.

MEMORY EXCHANGE at 'SHE SAID ...', 10 - 13 March 2011

2011-03-10T15:18:00.006Z

by Mary Paterson

MEMORY EXCHANGE is part of 'She Said ..', a group show of text based works at The Outside World Gallery, London E2. Curator CA Halpin says, 'This show is about what she said, how she said it and the influence that those words had.'

MEMORY EXCHANGE invites visitors to donate a memory and receive a new one in return. It's an experiment in shared ownership and collective wisdom.

The show runs from 10th- 13th March, and the private view is Thurs 10th March 6.30-8.30pm. Please join me for a glass of wine - and to exchange memories.

MEMORY EXCHANGE was first developed for VerySmallKitchen's Writer's Tent in Wandle Park, London in May 2010, and has also been shown at The Department of MicroPoetics at the AC Institute, New York and Writing/ Exhibition/ Publication at Pigeon Wing, London (both curated by VerySmallKitchen).

'She Said ...' is part of WISE WORDS by alternative arts, celebrating women writers, artists and performers. See the full festival programme: http://www.alternativearts.co.uk/wisewords

The Outside World Gallery, 44 Redchurch Street, London E2 7DP

http://www.the-outside-world.co.uk/

Reflections on Access All Areas

2011-03-06T12:04:00.016Z

Written by Mary Paterson

Access All Areas took place on Fri 4th & Sat 5th March 2011. It was, "a two-day public programme reflecting the ways in which the practices of artists who work with Live Art have engaged with, represented, and problematised issues of disability in innovative and radical ways."

http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/RRR/access_all_areas.html

Somebody asked me, "What do you think?"

What do I think? I think that so many of the Symposium presentations begin with a summary of other people’s judgements, it’s difficult to articulate my own response. Difficult, that is, without thinking about the violence of other people's perspectives.

Luke Pell and Caroline Bowden read out reviews that sneer at disabled dancers. Mat Fraser (appearing on video) is knocked senseless by casual comments: ‘I could never have sex with a handicapped man'; ‘it’s so good for my children, having you as a disabled friend.’ Bobby Baker gives everyone in the audience a slice of lemon and asks us to suck – the face you pull at the taste of something bitter is exactly the same, she says, as the faces she sees on other people when she tells them about her experience of disability.

Who are we?

The first time I watch Noemi Lakmeair’s ‘Undress/ Redress’ (a durational piece, commissioned for 'Access All Areas') I watch from behind. She is inside a room built inside the gallery. On either side, two large, glass-less windows let the audience gaze in. Lakmaeir is sitting on a chair wearing smart clothes, and looking straight out. Periodically, a man (Jordan McKenzie) wearing an old fashioned suit walks into the room, locks the door and undresses this woman, silently and seriously. Then he dresses her again, in a second set of identical clothes, and carries her to a chair in the corner.

Lakmaeir’s shivering, fragile body. McKenzie’s placid, controlled movements. The concentrated faces and shifting weight of other audience members, who I can see through the viewing pane on the other side of the room.

Catherine Long speaks at the panel called ‘My Body Did Everything I Asked It’. She starts speaking about a woman she has met, with striking blue eyes and no left arm. This other woman is her, and the stories Long reads out are the fictionalised voices of other characters. This means that, inside her own narrative, she is a character as well.

Who are we?

It’s uncomfortable to watch Noemi Lakmaier, but she makes it that way. It’s not the viewing (more people watch on CCTV video monitors in the entrance to the gallery than at the viewing panes), but the publicness of the viewing. The participation on someone else’s terms. The complicity that comes from being there. The fact that Lakmaier’s body shakes between an individual and a type: artist, woman, disabled, white, young. The fact that the ritual of undressing comes to stand for the stripping back of power that circulates around a body, and an identity.

It’s uncomfortable to watch Martin O’Brien, too. In his durational piece ‘Mucus Factory’ (also commissioned for Access All Areas) O’Brien performs the medical routines meted out on his body, transposing the medical gaze to an aesthetic one. Mucus mixed with glitter. Physiotherapy massage as a percussive routine. He mostly performs alone, but at one point a woman stands up and starts to massage his chest with him.

I think of the word ‘care.’ Not in the medical sense but in the casual sense: ‘Take care.’ Look after yourself. Because our bodies do not contain us. We are connected.

Who are you?

‘I’m sick of motherfucking health and motherfucking safety!’ ‘I’m sick of disabled artists getting their penises out and saying it’s radical!’ ‘I’m sick of being seen as sick!’ The Disabled Avant-Garde pull these ‘sick notes’ out of a hat and provoke the audience with them. Some people are riled. ‘We were in character,’ Aaron Williamson explains, ‘as the Avant-Garde.’

Kim Noble shows a video of himself (apparently) spying on his neighbour and a recording of his neighbour having sex. He shows a wall chart of this obsessive behaviour. He takes some Viagra, ‘in case this presentation goes really well.’ Nobody asks him if he is in character.

What do you see?

Is it easier to confront physical disability than mental illness? Perhaps, but what you can see is only ever part of the story. Sean Burn brings along a case of nuts. Nutcase. He rolls four marbles on a plate. Don’t lose your marbles.

Inbetween the last two sessions, I get into a heated conversation with a colleague about the work of Maria Oshodi and Extant. Oshodi is visually impaired. She creates cross-disciplinary, multi-media, immersive installations that explore the nature of perception, knowledge and experience. Oshodi's work is not about managing other people’s perspectives, but exploring her own.

Rita Marcarlo: advised not to induce an epileptic fit in public, in case it sets a bad example. Pete Edwards: asked if it was really his choice for his creative enabler to undress him. Jenny Sealey: saying she always has an audience in her BSL interpreters.

Who’s side are you on?

Sometimes, I find myself laughing along with Kim Noble. At other times, his persona is threatening, divisive, unpleasant. Who am I being when I laugh with (or at, or for) Kim Noble? Who am I agreeing with? And which of Noble’s personas is a persona anyway?

In a break I say, ‘As a general rule, I think “Them and Us” is a bad way of looking at things.’ ‘Yes,’ says a stranger who has overheard, ‘but you need an “Us and Us.”

It reminds me of something Bobby Baker said right at the beginning: a funder held a meeting for people seen as ‘culturally diverse’ which means, as Baker said, ‘people who are “odd”, all clumped together.’ She was arguing for a better understanding of cultural diversity – as an asset, and not a label.

What do you think?

What do I think? I don't know. But I have some thoughts to end (or to begin) with. 'We' is a shifting category. Not the same is not the same as different. Bodies labelled as ‘authentic’ are also contained.

Inside Performance Volume 24. no.1 2011

2011-03-02T10:36:00.007Z

By Rachel Lois Clapham

Volume 24. no.1 of Dance Theatre Journal comes out of the short festival of screen dance ‘What if...’ at Siobhan Davies Dance, London, April 2010. The texts in this special issue, guest edited by Lucy Cash and Theron Schmidt, all circle around central themes of the festival; documentation, choreography or how to ‘write’ performance. The texts in the magazine are by ten writers who were present at the festival, and who were charged with writing the What if... performances. And me.

For Inside Performance Vol. 24 No.1 I acted as first reader of the then unpublished magazine. I selected phrases from the respective contributor’s pages and compiled them onto one page. The result is a new text in the form of an assemblage that reflects on performance writing, writing performance and the performance of writing.

The text acts as a weird coda, or postscript, one that points first and foremost to the content in this particular issue. Indeed, the reader can trace back each phrase to its place of origin through an adjacent index if they wish. In doing this, the reader would re-(W)read the magazine 'out of sequence' from its published numerical page progression. However, I imagine this index to be purely latent, an indication of place, as it is difficult to imagine any reader - however avid- tracing laboriously through page and line numbers to locate a certain phrase in situ. [i] It could also be read more widely as an exercise that WORKS the writing of performance / performance of writing, and as such could be repeated in any publication or place.

Being first reader of the material and extracting from it in this way was a deeply circular exercise - making a text about performance writing from a series of texts about writing performance from a performance festival. In this, it was also satisfying; the writerly equivalent of spring cleaning – paying close, perhaps exorbitant, attention to punctuation and small sentences in dusty corners. As a process, it was one of refining, distilling or WORKING text through a series of sorting, copying and pasting gestures [ii].

In retaining the format of the original phrases in their transposition to the back page, their formatting becomes erstwhile. And when assembled together the individual phrases seem loosed from their original place and meaning; a sense of site-specificity is implied. An attempt to run against the grain of FLAT PACK writing. Conversely, the text can be read from beginning to end as a whole. And although primarily disjointed, at times the extracted phrases collide with one another to make a narrative all their own.

Structural only to a degree, there is no discernible pattern, particular linguistic bent or blanket treatment of the phrases, no rules that I have devised for the assembly. In many cases, I transposed the text somewhat arbitrarily. In others, a different sense of purpose- although no less purposeful- of unfolding or sense-making prevailed. In this re-sequencing are physical, dense and diacritical gestures that imply a warp and weft; a movement of text, of the reader and of the writing itself.

Click here to buy Dance Theatre Journal

Previous columns here and here

[i] However, this kind of keen readership is what I imagined when creating the piece. It is why I worked meticulously on correctly pinpointing each line and page number throughout the various edits of the magazine. This latent referentiality, then, should be considered critical. This occasional nature of how people might (not) read this text is also linked to the desire to look, rather than read, that it generates.

[ii] How is this different from creating, or writing? In fact, each chosen phrase was re-typed by myself into the assemblage, and so re-written. HOW does this matter?

ACCESS ALL AREAS: Live Art and Disability, 4 & 5 March 2011

2011-02-13T22:48:00.010Z

by Mary Paterson

This weekend the Live Art Development Agency is producing a programme of art, debate and action linked to disability, identity and artistic practice. I will be going along as an interested audience member, as a writer, and as a producer.

The programme features a performance by Noemi Lakmaier and a contribution from Maria Oshodi. I am working with Noemi Lakmaier over the next few months while she carries out two new pieces of work: 'Undress/ Redress' for Access All Areas, and a commission for ArtsAdmin. We have been discussing her work (amongst other things) in a series of lengthy intrerviews/ conversations, which will result in an in-depth text later this year (see this post). I also have a vested interest in Extant, where Maria Oshodi is the Artistic Director. I've been working as a manager and producer with Extant for the last two and a half years, helping to produce shows like The Question (an experiment in immersive, tactile and audio theatre using haptic technology).

But mostly I will be going along as a member of the audience, hoping to think through some ideas that have been spinning through my mind about, inclusion and exclusion, societies and individuals ...

>> How does live art work as a strategy in relation to identity? And for whom?

>> What (dis)advantages does the context of 'disability arts' confer on artists' work?

>> What common threads can be drawn between/ through/ across mental illness and physical disability?

>> What role do access workers or 'creative enablers' (to use Pete Edwards' term) play in the making process?

See also my review of Sean Burn as part of 'Louder than Bombs' at the Stanley Picker Gallery last year.

Details below:

Image: Noemi Lakmaier 'Undress/ Redress' (c) Noemi Lakmaier

Live Art is truly the avant-garde forum for Disability Art and at the forefront of Disability Art practice, thinking and theory.
Dr Paul Darke (DASh)

The Live Art Development Agency presents a two-day public programme reflecting the ways in which the practices of artists who work with Live Art have engaged with, represented, and problematicised issues of disability in innovative and radical ways.

Friday 4 March from 19.00 & Saturday 5 March from 12.00/ Club Row Gallery, Rochelle School, London, E2 7ES

Image: Martin O'Brien 'Mucus Factory' (c) Martin O'Brien

- Mucus Factory, a durational performance-installation by Martin O’Brien. A Live Art Development Agency commission.

(4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00)

- Undress/Redress, a durational performance-installation by Noemi Lakmaier. A Live Art Development Agency commission.
(4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00)

- Robots Destroy the Tower of Babble!, a new performance by The Disabled Avant-Garde. With screenings of earlier DAG works (4 March from 19.00)

- A landmark symposium with Tonny A, Jon Adams, Bobby Baker, Caroline Bowditch, Sean Burn, The Disabled Avant-Garde (Aaron Williamson & Katherine Araniello), Pete Edwards, Mat Fraser (on film), Tony Heaton, Raimund Hoghe (on film), Brian Lobel, Catherine Long, Rita Marcalo, Tomislav Medak, Kim Noble, Maria Oshodi, Luke Pell, Jenny Sealy, and Rajni Shah. (5 March, 13.00 to 19.00).

- Screenings of influential performance documentation and works for camera by Katherine Araniello, Back To Back Theatre, Bobby Baker, Mary Duffy, Pete Edwards, Extant, Mat Fraser, Raimund Hoghe, David Hoyle, Alan McLean & Tony Mustoe, Aine Phillips, Juliet Robson, and Aaron Williamson. (4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00).

- A bibliotheque of key books and DVDs (4 March from 19.00 and 5 March from 12.00).

- Plus - Jon Adams’ Dysarticulate 2 (Saturday 5 March, from 12.00, Club Row Gallery surrounds) and Rita Marcalo’s She’s Lost Control (Thursday 3 March at 19.00 and 21.00pm at Rich Mix).
Full Access All Areas programme, venue, booking and access details can be found here.

Tickets available online through the Events Shelf on Unbound & on the phone +44 (0)207 033 0275

Access All Areas is part of Restock, Rethink, Reflect, a series of Live Art Development Agency initiatives for, and about, artists who are exploring issues of identity politics and cultural diversity in innovative and radical ways.

Access All Areas is financially assisted by Arts Council England, with additional support from Tower Hamlets Council and British Council, Croatia.

Liveartwork Editions: Performance Saga

2011-02-09T09:20:00.015Z

Performance Saga and Liveartwork have released DVD documentation of the Performance Saga Festivals (Switzerland, 2008 and 2009).

The DVDs also include some of the writing from the Open Dialogues: Performance Saga projects (see here and here).

Image: Esther Ferrer performing at Performance Saga Festival in Lausanne, 2009. Image (c) Performance Saga

About Performance Saga:

Performance Saga transmits and updates the history of performance art and promotes a dialogue between generations. The project includes the conception and commissioning of performance pieces, the publication of video interviews with women pioneers of performance art and the organisation of events.

Performance Saga is a project by the artist Andrea Saemann and the art historian Katrin Grögel, both based in Basel, Switzerland. Three Performance Saga Festivals were held in 2008/2009. The DVDs feature work from both performance pioneers and emerging artists who were featured in the festivals.

About the DVDs

This 4 disk DVD set contains video documentation from 28 separate performances that were presented during the Performance Saga series of festivals that took place in Bern (Dec. 2008), Lausanne (Feb. 2009) and Basel (April 2009), Switzerland.

The DVDs contain over six hours of video documentation including new performance works from some of the leading figures in international performance art. The artists featured are: Alison Knowles (US) & Die Maulwerker (DE), Carolee Schneemann (US), Kate McIntosh (BE/NZ), Irene Loughlin (CA) & Jorge de Leon (GT), Gaspard Buma (CH), Peter Vittali (CH), Wagner-Feigl-Forschung (AT/DE), Martha Rosler (US), Muda Mathis (CH), Annie M. Sprinkle & Elizabeth M. Stephens (US), Sands Murray-Wassink & Robin Wassink-Murray (NL), Tania Bruguera (US/CU), Robin Deacon (UK), Katia Bassanini (CH/US), Stuart Brisley (UK), Monika Günther & Ruedi Schill (CH/DE), Markus Gössi (CH), Simone Rüssli (ES/CH), MIRZLEKID (CH), Andrea Saemann (CH), Esther Ferrer (FR), Hina Strüver (CH), Lena Eriksson (CH) & Varsha Nair (IN/TH). Most of the individual videos are between 10 and 15 minutes in duration.

Each disk also includes additional background information, contact details for each artist and texts from the writing workshops conducted by Open Dialogues in conjunction with the festivals. Curated by Katrin Grögel and Andrea Saemann, Basel DVD production by Christopher Hewitt / liveartwork Total duration of DVD set: approx. 360 minutes Audio: English/French/German with English/German subtitles For full details and to order the DVDs see: www.liveartwork.com/editions/full_saga.htm

Review: Inbetween Time Festival of Live Art and Intrigue

2011-02-09T09:06:00.009Z

Photo: Oliver Rudkin - Ivana Muller, '60 Minutes of Opportunism', performance, 2010.

Inbetween Time Festival, Various Locations, Bristol, 2 - 5 December 2010

'What Next for the Body?' Arnolfini, 1 December 2010 - 6 February 2011

Ivana Muller: '60 Minutes of Opportunism', Wickham Theatre, 3 December 2010

Silvia Rimat: 'Imagine Me To Be There', Wickham Theatre, 4 December 2010

Jordan McKenzie: 'Holding My Breath', Arnolfini, 5 December 2010

This article was originally published in AN Magazine www.an.co.uk. Written by Mary Paterson

In 37 Cuerpos by Teresa Margolles (part of the exhibition 'What Next for the Body?'), a single, bare thread divides the largest room in the gallery. Up close, you realise that it's not one thread, but many short ones knotted together. Each strand is fragile, frayed and dirty, like scraps of leather.

These are actually thirty-seven pieces of surgical thread, used to sew up the bodies of thirty-seven victims of violent death. As a gruesome relic the work fails to represent the lives of the victims, just as it failed to bring them back to life. But its weakness is what makes its physical presence so compelling. The thread divides the room in two as if on the brink of life and death, and represents the mysterious truth of our bodies - that they house life, but do not contain it.

'What Next for the Body?' is an exhibition about the body dissolving, breaking or breaking down. It sat at the centre of the Inbetween Time Festival, a four-day programme of 'live art and intrigue' taking place in art venues and public spaces across Bristol. It was also the name of one of the festival's curatorial strands; the other, 'D:Stable,' promised works that "thoroughly reject the conventions of theatre". These two rich and familiar problems created a dense programme that also suggested another recurring theme - the place of live, embodied presence in the modern world.

In 60 Minutes of Opportunism the choreographer Ivana Muller explores the relationship between her body, her identity and her persona. She is live onstage throughout, but her voice is heard in a sound recording played into the auditorium. This divides Muller in two: the person from the image, her past self (who made the recording) from the woman who is standing here now. Muller 'the image' slides between a collection of visual stereotypes - traveller, dancer, suicide bomber - the potency of each cliche as disturbing as the fluency of the movement. Meanwhile, her voice is beset with glitches and background noise that remind the audience that it's stuck in the past.

This dislocation is eerily familiar. It draws me into a type of looking that is baited by visual presence, and contextualised by words untethered in space or time. In other words, it's exactly like browsing the Internet, or flicking through channels on the TV.

Sylvia Rimat's Imagine Me To Be There brings the theatre show even closer to the computer. Rimat is alone on stage - cross-legged on the floor, eyes glued to her laptop. She begins to type and words appear on the screen behind her.

'Silence.'

The skill of Rimat's performance lies in the way she marries the magic of the theatre with the fantasies of the virtual. When she writes about the lights fading in the auditorium, they really do. Of course, we know she doesn't control them - but the device is clever enough to suspend the audience's disbelief. Which means that when Rimat writes about wearing a bear suit, we're inclined to indulge that fantasy as well. And when she writes directions for the audience, we happily play along.

At a Curator's panel on 4th December, an audience member suggested that video streaming and online technologies should replace live events. Given the obvious debt these two performances have with digital modes of representation, it's hard to disagree. Both are in fact about performing - Muller begins by telling us she was asked to make a performance in which she appears on stage, and Rimat's show is effectively a deconstruction of theatre. But their relationships to more proverbial and accessible forms of representation beg the question: why does theatre (with or without its conventions) matter?

I found an answer by returning to the disappearance of things. In Holding My Breath, the third in a trilogy of performances by Jordan McKenzie, the artist stands in a small room with cupped hands, holding the attention of eight or ten strangers who watch water drip through his fingers. We match each other's breathing, listen to the rustle of each other's clothes and feel the concentration thread through McKenzie's body.

This is the meaning of shared presence - its fragility. Value (to paraphrase the writer Eva Hoffman) is scarcity measured in time. Just as the threads in 37 Cuerpos resonate with what they cannot represent, so the time we strangers have together describes the distance between us, and the times we won't share.

This precarious and temporal balance between the known and the unknown is also the space Muller uses to dissect contemporary modes of looking, instead of just recycling them. When she says she is going to do something 'dangerous' - and starts smoking - it really is dangerous because it affects the precious and finite bodies of everyone that is looking. Similarly, when Rimat gives the audience a knife, she is not streaming a relationship with strangers, nor representing it. She's testing it out.

Perhaps it's telling, however, that McKenzie is dressed in 1930s costume - suit, waistcoat, waxed moustache. This cherished affirmation is emphatically old fashioned - as if being 'live' is no longer part of daily life, but a relic of the past.

Open Dialogues at Samtalekøkkenet, Copenhagen

2011-01-29T10:59:00.016Z

Open Dialogues was invited to give a presentation about our work and lead a two day writing workshop for Samtalekøkkenet (The Dining Kitchen) in Copenhagen, February 2011.

The Dining Kitchen is a monthly evening of performance art and conversation, which includes performances from international artists, debate between audiences and artists, and dinner for everyone.

Fragment from presentation prompt 'Purposeless Writing!' c. Rachel Lois Clapham

Fragment from presentation prompt 'To Score!' c. Rachel Lois Clapham

Mary spoke about the evolution of Open Dialogues’ work, which began as a response to a (perceived) lack of critical writing about performance art, and has become progressively more concerned with experiments in text and performance.

Fragment from presentation prompt 'How is not performance writing?'' c. Rachel Lois Clapham

Rachel Lois took part in the presentation through a series of textual and/or grammatical interventions - a range of A4 sheets with words, phrases or symbols on them. Mary interrupted her own speech to walk to the other side of the stage and perform Rachel Lois’s contributions.

Samtalekøkkenet workshop

The Workshop

The Dining Kitchen asked Open Dialogues to put together a workshop for critics, academics and artists in Copenhagen. Over two days, Mary led a group of 10 people exploring different styles of writing in relation to performance, including: reviewing, reportage, eavesdropping, drawing, performing, listening, speaking, script writing, scores, live writing. The group has since been taking part in live writing sessions in response to Dining Kitchen events.

Re– (repeat, rework, rewrite, remember)

2011-01-06T14:46:00.008Z

by Rachel Lois

A conference paper Re– (repeat, rework, rewrite, remember), developed by Emma Cocker in collaboration with myself, has been selected as part of the forthcoming Psi (Performance Studies International) conference #17 in Utrecht entitled Camillo 2.0: Technology, Memory, Experience. The proposed paper will critically extend some of the debates and issues that have been emerging within our collaborative project, Re –

Re – (repeat, rework, rewrite, remember)

Drawing on our ongoing collaborative project Re –, the performance document will be reflexively interrogated as a specific ‘technology of remembrance’, an interstitial site wherein technology, memory and experience collide. Re – is an iterative performance reading that responds to and is reworked against the specificity of each invitation to perform; it presses on two writers – and two writing practices – coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text).

Re – is a conceptual framework for collaboratively exploring the tension between improvised/rehearsed; performance/document; live/recording; writing/written, the visible/invisible states of not knowing within the performed act of writing, through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages. Each performance stages the archive (save as) of its own coming into being, which in turn contains the trace of previous iterations. The work puts into question the relation between rehearsal, performance and documentation by blurring the line between these phases of practice, declaring them unstable categories. Each Re –reading enacts the making of its own documentation; the performance is also already the documentation of earlier dialogic thinking and making processes: there is always something that comes before.

The documentation archives what is taking place whilst anticipating future action; existing as record of the ‘becoming past’ whilst intimating towards an unknown future moment, as a starting point or instructive score waiting to be inhabited again (differently). Re – explores the impossibility of singular, panoptic forms of documentation (and knowledge) that attempt to capture and archive the totality of an event, focusing instead on performance document as fallible fragment, where (analogous to memory) the shattering or splintering of documentation into manifold parts resists reassembly or recollection, remaining partial, incomplete. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, increasing the ways of documenting or archiving performance results in it being less known or knowable, less easy to grasp – evermore contingent. Fragments of documentation fragment and disperse any coherent memory of the originary event; overwhelming … losing … forgetting … editing something out in the process. However, each fragment potentially operates as a germinal ground, a graft from which new or unexpected lines of flight might materialize. We will examine how failure or indeed refusal to fully save as can thus be generative, creating productive gaps for (re)making or reworking a performance anew.

How can writers and artists work together?

2010-12-22T17:39:00.003Z

by Mary Paterson

Over the next few months, I'll be undertaking a number of projects that explore the productive relationships between critical writing, documentation and creativity in relation to other artists' practice.

Noëmi Lakmaier 'Exercise in Losing Control.' photography by Joy Stanley and Margaret Sturton

The first project is a collaboration with the artist Noëmi Lakmaier.

Noëmi Lakmaier's work explores notions of the ‘Other’ ranging from the physical to the philosophical, the personal to the political. The individual's relationship to its surroundings, identity, and perception of self and other in contemporary society are core interests in her predominantly site-responsive, live and installation-based practice.

http://www.noemilakmaier.co.uk/

From January 2011 I will be having an ongoing dialogue with Noëmi to understand the context of her work and the making process. In particular, we'll be talking about two new projects that Noëmi is working on: in March 2011 she'll be presenting new work for the Live Art Development Agency's 'Access All Areas' exhibition; in June 2011 she'll be showing a new piece as a result of her ArtsAdmin Bursary 2010.

I will write a series of short texts in response to these two pieces of work, and the wider context of Noëmi 's practice.

More about the Artsadmin Bursaries here.

More about Access all Areas here.

(more information about other projects to follow).

Re- (Unfixed)

2010-12-06T10:44:00.005Z

By Rachel Lois.

Below are some images of Re – (Unfixed), a new version from the iterative series Re– developed by Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker. The work was shown at John Latham’s Flat Time House, as part of the exhibition UNFIXED curated by Reading for Reading’s Sake. The installation was presented in conjunction with a version of the Re- (Reader) (designed by Marit Munzberg). Re – (Unfixed) was periodically interrupted (or perhaps activated) by a live reading.

Images: Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Re- (UNFIXED), installation 2010

More about Re- (Unfixed) here.

Re- (Unfixed)

2010-11-23T17:41:00.007Z

Image: Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker, Re- (UNFIXED), 2010

UNFIXED is a series of events developed by Reading for Reading Sake (RfRS) that will take place at Flat Time House, John Latham Foundation and Archive from Thursday 2nd December – Saturday 4th December. Contributors include Politics and Aesthetics Reading Group, Patrick Coyle, David Berridge, Rachel Lois Clapham (with Emma Cocker), John Hill. See further information and the full programme here.

RfRS Curatorial Outline

To read is to absorb, comprehend, determine and evaluate. These processes come to pass not only in the interpretation of a text, but in the perception of any given material. All material is data to be read, accordingly all material is privy to the particular positioning of a participant within a given time and space.   John Latham understood books as symbols of fixed knowledge. The printed word, inscribed for its purpose in a particular moment lays unchanged, whilst the universe moves on regardless. How can artists reactivate the fixedness of publications and make the words move with the universe?

Contributors to the programme work with an attention to the publicness and privateness of any given reading moment and the activation therein. Certain discourses reappear across works in the show, most prominently: collectivity and singularity, text as score, pedagogy, haptic gestures, instruction and fallibility, displaced words, the mediation of one text with another, dissemination, dialogue, bodies of knowledge, publishing as performance, and the fixedness of the printed word.

Re – (UNFIXED)

Re – is an ongoing, iterative performance reading that presses on two writers – and two writing practices – coming together to explore process, product and performance (of text). For UNFIXED, Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker present a re-iteration of Re – that essays the relationship between performance/document, live/recording, writing/written through the collision of spoken, textual and gestural languages.

This re-staging (of a previous performance, Re – Afterlive) attempts to re-activate or unfix how the performance document functions, where the disparate parts or fragments of documentation inevitably begin to fall out of sync, creating the potential for new connections and relations between the different elements of the work. Presented side-by-side, two monitors relay fragments of a performance, two facets of the same event rubbing up against one another: the promise of dialogue. A live spoken text fluctuates in and out of the installation – sometimes as a scheduled reading for an audience, at times unannounced, on other occasions silently – at first attempting to synchronize with the elements presented on the monitors, but gradually failing to keep pace over time.

Invitation Only

2010-10-18T18:43:00.017+01:00

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

2010-10-17T20:25:00.005+01:00

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

2010-10-16T14:59:00.019+01:00

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

2010-10-15T08:30:00.014+01:00

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

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

2010-10-06T17:10:00.003+01:00

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

Performance Matters - Performing Idea

2010-09-30T12:55:00.005+01:00

by Mary Paterson

A week long programme of events, lectures and performances on 'Performing Idea'.

Performance Matters is a 3 year creative research project carried out by Goldsmiths University of London, Roehampton University and the Live Art Development Agency. It explores, 'the contemporary values associated with performance at a time when it has increased resonance as a cultural phenomenon, and as a concept and metaphor in critical discourse.'

The first year is is themed 'Performing Idea', and the Performing Idea seminar launches on Saturday 2nd October.

Not to be missed!

The organisers have just announced there will be a specially commissioned video of Hélène Cixous in conversation with Adrian Heathfield (by Hugo Glendinning) in the Performing Idea Symposium on Friday 8 October.

The programme is spectacular. My personal highlights include the conversation on 'Moving-Writing' between Adrian Heathfield and Jonathan Burrows on Monday 4th October, the Performing Idea Archive Presentation on Thursday 7th October, and the showing of Rabih Mroué's new film 'The Inhabitants of Images' on Saturday 9th October. But you will find more to engage and excite you when you browse the full programme on the Performance Matters site here.

Book tickets here.

All events are held at the Whitechapel Gallery and Toynbee Studios, London.

Lies

2010-09-26T19:06:00.009+01:00

by Mary Paterson

Pilvi Porkola invited me to contribute to Esitys Magazine, a Finnish-Language forum for discussions on the art and study of performance. This edition includes essays by Caroline Bergvall, John Hall, Heather Kappalow, Maija Hirvanen, Pilvi Porkola, Leena Kela, Johanna MacDonald, Tuomas Laitinen, Janne Saarkakkala, Masi W. Eskolin & Suvi Parilla.

http://esitys.todellisuus.fi/editorial-3-2010

Buy the magazine here:

http://todellisuus.mycashflow.fi/product/2/esityslehti---vuositilaus

My essay (in English) is a short piece on writing, performance and lies. I used the opportunity to delineate the relationships between writing and performance which are the backdrop to my work with Open Dialogues and elsewhere.

http://esitys.todellisuus.fi/and-lies

I wrote about lies because I am increasingly drawn to the morality of writing. This has come from thinking about the experience of writing as it relates to time and translation (as well as performance). Of course, writing is never an equivalent for time or another language; in fact, writing always overlays other times and other languages. But whilst it's important to acknowledge this necessary imperialism, being self conscious can damage what is functional or even beautiful about the written form.

I find that writing in the context of art ('art writing', or 'performance writing') sometimes has a tendency to concentrate on the materiality or process of a textual work over the fluidity of the writing itself. This is intellectually productive, but not always affectively so. At worst, it feels likes moral abdication, or a kind of soft-focussed ghost of post modernism, which casts a shadow over daily life.

I find myself turning to familiar forms like plays and poetry (the ultimate score for performance, and the ultimate performative writing, respectively) in order to step outside the weight of knowing your own limits. Or, more specifically, to step outside the structural boundaries of this conceptual art tradition.

Looking at the architecture of writing from another perspective, I can see the moral relationship more clearly. (I can even see that the material relationship can sometimes slip into being a proxy for truth.) That entire edifice is an act of deception, which means the question now becomes - how can you make the deception consensual? Which is to say, morally acceptable?

Clearly, it's not enough to know that writing and reading are performative acts that create meaning - you also have to create meaning. It's not enough to invite the act of reading - you also have to address and position your reader. And in order to do this through consensus (if you are, as I am, that way inclined), then you have to acknowledge the moral in the material relationships. Which means I step back into the structure with a renewed enthusiasm, ready to tell some lies.

How is Art Writing?

2010-09-23T17:48:00.006+01:00

By Rachel Lois.

A series of artist-led conversations over dinner

How is Art Writing?

An impossible question

A dinner date

A get-together round a table

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How is Art Writing?

Is a series of artist-led dinners that enable a travelling conversation through and alongside the In a word… research partnership, supporting the programme’s aim of profiling an ecology radical writing practice in and from Yorkshire.

Each dinner has its own content and flavour – that of its host and its local situation.

Places at the table are open: dinners enrich existing connections, as well as forging new ones.

Dinners represent different voices with diverse perspectives on writing.

Dinners have an implicit creative impetus but their main aim is to facilitate meeting, talking and eating.

The dinner host receives 150GBP contribution towards the dinner.

Documents play a part in each dinner and contribute to a published outcome. These documents diagram the event, index or record aspects of the conversation and are produced by the host, the guests, the food or the table.

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Details of the first dinner are here. Arrangements for other dinners are being finalised with: East Street Arts (Leeds); Caroline Bergvall (London); Kim Rosenfield and Rob Fitterman (New York); and Claire Hind (York).

If you would like to reserve a place at the table please go to http://inaword-dinners.eventbrite.com/

If you would like to host a dinner as part of this series, please contact info@writingencounters.org.

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How is Art Writing is curated by Rachel Lois Clapham in collaboration with Simon Zimmerman for In a word… as part of Writing Encounters.

Open Dialogues and Edge of Europe - ANTI

2010-09-16T18:40:00.006+01:00

photo (c) Maija Hirvanen

Open Dialogues has been invited by Edge of Europe to write from the ANTI Festival seminar on writing, language and site.

About ANTI Festival

ANTI - Contemporary Art Festival is the only international contemporary arts festival in the world presenting site-specific works made for public space. ANTI – festival presents live, sonic, visual and text-based art from today’s most exciting and innovative artists in the Finnish town of Kuopio. Free of charge ANTI - festival is a meeting place for artists and audiences fascinated by how art shapes and responds to the places and spaces of everyday life.

The concept of ANTI is unique in the Finnish and international art scene.

About the seminar

This year's seminar asks: How does writing operate in public space? What are the performative possibilities of thinking about writing and reading in an expanded sense? What compositional techniques and methodologies allow artists to engage with the written and spoken word when working contextually? An international group of academics, artists and writers will discuss these issues through prepared papers, artists’ talks and performance lectures. The seminar is co-curated by Larry Lynch (Department of Performance and Performance Writing Research Group at University College Falmouth); artist and editor Pilvi Porkola (Esitys journal), artist and coordinator Maija Hirvanen (Edge of Europe) and ANTI Festival. The ANTI seminar is chaired by Maija Hirvanen.

Presenters are:

Wed 28th Sept -Larry Lynch, Kira O’Reilly, Emma Cocker

Thu 30th Sept - Jane Jin Kaisen, Pilvi Porkola, John Hall, Rosie Dennis

Fri 1st Oct - Caroline Bergvall, Timo Heinonen, Maija Hirvanen

http://www.antifestival.com/2010/eng/programme/seminar/

About Edge of Europe

Edge of Europe is social, pedagogic and experimental project in the areas of performance and writing. The project explores the artistic and critical possibilities of writing and other forms of textual work in their relation to contemporary performance.

http://www.edgeofeurope.net

Mary will be reporting from the festival in the form of a play's script. She will also be functioning as the Department of Micro Poetics (Finland) for EXCHANGE VALUE and WRITNG/EXHIBITION/PUBLICATION, both curated by VerySmallKitchen.

http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com/2010/09/department-of-micro-poetics-at-ac.html

http://open-dialogues.blogspot.com/2010/08/writingexhibitionpublication.html

Re- (Reader)

2010-09-12T10:15:00.007+01:00

Below are images of the Re- (Reader) which is currently part of the exhibition Afterlive at Norwich Art Centre.

Re- is a collaboration between Rachel Lois Clapham and Emma Cocker. The Re- (Reader)was developed in collaboration with Marit Muenzberg.

Re- (Afterlive)

2010-09-12T10:02:00.008+01:00

Below are images from the performance reading Re- which was presented as part of Afterlive Norwich Arts Centre Saturday 4th September. The reading was presented in conjunction with Re- (Reader).

Re- is an iterative work which responds and is reworked in relation to the specificity of an invitation to perform (text). A previous iteration of the work, Re- (RITE), can be found here.

Excerpts from performance Re- (AfterLive) 2010.

Study Room Gathering

2010-09-06T18:50:00.010+01:00

A small audience of contributors will be gathering in the Live Art Development Agency's Study room tomorrow night to celebrate the launch of the Study Room Guide (W)reading Performance Writing, and to carry on the conversation that the publication has started.

Andrew Mitchelson of the agency will open with an introduction and welcome, after which Rachel Lois Clapham will lead an informal discussion on Performance Writing and critical assemblage. At some point, we will collectively handle the special edition of the guide. A document will be produced from the night, and available here...

(W)reading Performance Writing contributors include 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 Munzberg.