NOTA at SHOWTIME

By Rachel Lois and Mary

Open Dialogues has been commissioned by Present Attempt to produce documents from SHOW TiME, a programme of performances taking place from 15-17 June at Rich Mix.

For SHOW TiME Open Dialogues will take up position at a writing station in the audience.  We will use a manual stamp to NOTA  moments of the event in a series of time stamped documents.  The documents will explore the time, place and quality of notes in relation to performance.

The  SHOW TiME  project is part of Open Dialogues’ framework for research for 2012 - NOTA: NOT, NOTES, NOTER (NOTA), NOT/A, towards a sometimes set of performance writing tools.  It explores documentation as a medium within the context of collaboration, liveness and public space.   After SHOW TiME  a selection of NOTA documents will be published online, along with an accompanying conversation between Mary and Rachel Lois about our work. 

About

SHOW TiME is an artist-led event which creates a vibrant, hospitable and unusual weekend of performance that makes more space for experimental work in professional venues. Curated and produced by artists Present Attempt, the weekend blends work-in-development and rarely seen pieces in a series of dynamic and provoking sessions.

This year's programme includes Rachel Mars and Rosie Kelly, Present Attempt, Bill Aitchison Company, Augusto Corrieri, Haranczak/Navarre Performance Projects, Yoko Ishiguro, Chloé Déchery, Joseph Mercier, Seke Chimutengwende & Friends, Mischa Twitchin with Penny Francis, Head of a Woman & Lisa Jeschke and Lucy Beynon and takes place at Rich Mix, in East London.  

Book tickets here.

Present Attempt is a collective of artists making and producing collaborative, interdisciplinary performance works including studio-based pieces, interventions, writing and research. Present Attempt are James Bush, Alex Eisenberg and John Pinder.

Open Dialogues is a UK collaboration, founded by Rachel Lois Clapham and Mary Paterson, that produces writing on and as performance. As Open Dialogues Rachel Lois and Mary have worked internationally with Pacitti Company (UK), Performa (US), Performance Saga (CH) and Wooloo Productions (DE) amongst others. In 2012, their work focuses on NOTA; towards a sometimes set of performance writing tools.   

Are We Asking For it?

by Mary Paterson

Are We Asking For It?  is a score for remote performance.  It's a pop song of questions, shouted at the top of your voice, to whoever is listening.  It is (not) a protest and it is (not) part of the global Occupy movements.

I first wrote the score as Getting to Know You, for I'm with you: Occupy London, an evening of performances curated by I'm With You for the Bank of Ideas, at the Occupy London protest camp in December 2011.

Like the original, Are We Asking For It? is a performance score for three people.  The three performers are passers by or audience members invited to read the score - a series of questions that should be read (or shouted) in three minutes: the length of the average pop song.  It has been written for Occupy Zeitgest, an exhibition about the global Occupy movements, which is taking place at Gallery 25 in Fresno, California in June 2012, curated by Janice Ledgerwood.

The relationship between live art and protest movements in Europe and the US stretches back to the early 20th century, when Dada and Futurist performances were used as strategies of radical disruption.   Contemporary protest groups like UK Uncut use live art as a form of direct action against government policy.  Art in all its forms is an important part of the worldwide Occupy movements, which rely on the rapid spread of ideas through social networks as well as traditional media channels.

What are the currencies of artistic strategies in the context of protest?  What kind of participation does artistic protest demand, and who is participating?  Are avant garde strategies aligned to forms of radical individualism, or collective action?

Extract from Are We Asking For it? 

Do you like to stand too close to people on purpose?

Do you prefer conversation, fashion or physical comfort?

Can you bear the sound of other people breathing?

Do you think it is warmer in cities?

If you saw me crying on public transport, would you offer to help?

How many people do you need to make you feel anonymous?

What is keeping you?

What is keeping you here?

Are you asking for it?

Are you asking for it now?

About Gallery 25

Formed in 1974, Gallery 25 is one of the oldest cooperative galleries in the country. Located in downtown Fresno, the gallery has been a forum for contemporary art since its inception.

The gallery was founded by Joyce Aiken, professor of art at California State University, Fresno. Professor Aiken was the director of the second Feminist Art program (the first program was created by Judy Chicago at CSUF in 1970). The program focused on women creating artwork from their experience as women. By establishing the gallery, Aiken gave the women in the program the chance to exhibit their work to the public and gain professional experience as artists.

The 25 founding members began exhibiting at 1986 Echo Street, moving to a larger space at 1526 Fullton Street in 1981. The gallery opened its doors to men as well as women in 1989. To expand its quarters in April of 2004, the gallery moved to its present location, 660 Van Ness, adjacent to several other galleries and artist studios.

Gallery 25 is a non-profit organization dedicated to educating the public. Seminars, discussion groups and classes are held in relation to exhibits. The gallery also participatges in international exhibitions and gallery exchanges.

Access All Areas: Live Art and Disability, Eds. Lois Keidan & CJ Mitchell

A new publication about Live Art and Disability, arising from last year's Access All Areas event at Club Row, London E1.

Access All Areas is published by the Live Art Development Agency, who write:

"Access All Areas is a combination of artists’ writings, creative dialogues, critical commentaries and DVDs featuring documentation of artists’ presentations and performances spanning 20 years, which reflect the ways in which Live Art has represented issues of disability in inventive and radical ways. This 200 page publication and double DVD set has been developed from the groundbreaking Access All Areas public programme of performances, screenings and talks produced by the Agency in March 2011"

The publication includes two essays by Mary Paterson: 'Reflections on Access All Areas' (first published on this blog) and 'Undress Redress."  

It is available to buy from the Live Art Development Agency's online platform, Unbound

http://thisisunbound.co.uk/index.php?main_page=product_book_info&cPath=23&products_id=350

#Nightwatch2012

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

Is this a rhetorical device?

[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?

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

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)

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

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