TALK SHOP: SIMONE FORTI AND JEREMIAH DAY AT THE ICA

Jeremiah Day & Simone Forti, ICA London, 7 May, 2009. 

Writing about her  "News Animations" the writer-dancer Simone Forti observes: 

I can more easily access the raw store of fragmentary thoughts, feelings, and speculations out of which I build my understanding of the world. A News Animation performance involves improvising with movement and spoken language, taking off from the fluid, flickering, dream like image of the world brought to us by the news media. Moving and speaking at once, gives voice to the place between thoughts and muscular or visceral sensations, between verbal syntax and the body's syntax of sudden moves, hesitations, slumps and changes of facing. It reveals a process which is usually very private.

My father used to read a couple of news papers each day... When he died in 1985 I began to read the news myself. It wasn't coming easily to me. I did start to experience a sense of familiarity with the stories, with the personages, but most of all, as a dancer, I started to have kinesthetic impressions of pressures, currents, accumulations and pending collapses. I was noticing terminology like 'the dollar in free fall', and Lebanon being called a 'slippery slope.' Soon I was dancing the news, talking and dancing, being all parts of the news; tankers moving up the Persian Gulf, 'human waves' of Iranian youths crashing into the Iraqui forces invading from across the Shat al Arab estuary. 

The movement included the kind of gestures one makes when explaining an describing, but here the gestures were taking on the whole body.

*

Jeremiah Day began his and Simone Forti's performance at the ICA by reading aloud some poetry from Amiri Baraka. There's a rhythm to the words, and to the body reading, a certain array of gestures, although initially Day's are quite neutral - like anyone might be stood reading aloud to group of people. Gradually, however, Day's movements - he paces from one side to the other of the ICA theatre space, turns on a slide projector - have a spatial expanse and focus that we might recognize as dance. Soon, as the piece unfolds, Day sits, squats, stands, walks, talks: a dance-language of words and movements, both linked and autonomous.

I found it an exhilarating experience. For a second piece, Day was joined by Forti, and the two engaged in a surreal, playful, storytelling conversation about economics, in which again verbal language and movement shared an equal role. Or what was the precise word-movement relationship? Day and Forti counter an avant-orthodoxy where words and gestures must not be illustrative, being unafraid to ground their word-movement relationship in literalism: hands waving in the air when talking of water, arms outstretched to be a bird in flight. This enables the complex rhythms and elaborations that do unfold to be read not as virtuosic but as a pleasure-in-relationship or - as Fred Dewey would suggest in his following talk - a demonstration of democracy in process.

Much of the pleasure came from how Day and Forti moved both within the particularities of their own bodies and the space itself. The performance had been shifted from the gallery to the theatre space at the last moment, and whilst text appeared fixed, both Forti and Day were making use of the particular space in which they found themselves, leaning against its walls, climbing its steps and odd nooks. The architecture, too, became part of how ideas and relationships could be manifested, tested, explored, and played with. Both words and images functioned as primary text, commentary, and ornamentation.

For a final piece Forti came on with a copy of the days newspaper and improvised, the newspaper entwined with body, text and her own reading aloud of the words on its pages. Pages were held out, resting on air currents, slowly drifting to the floor, or crumpled and held up against her face. It almost seemed a poetics for the whole project that Day and Forti had presented us with: an art process that finds a way to shape, refine, develop everyday gestures to where they acquire a further layer of import, but without removing them from their source.

Before the final piece, Fred Dewey - who has published Forti's writings as part of his Beyond Baroque publishing project - responded to Day and Forti's project, seeing it as a model of a particular kind of democratic culture. He talked about Forti's particular relationship to poetry, in which written texts would be edited by the body. This created a new kind of text-poetry-transcription, but also, said Dewey, seemed a demonstration of poetry as an act of moving, thinking, and writing in public space, a physical research in time and space. West quoted Carlyle:

unreality is death to all parliaments and all things

and also Milton:

to speak all tongues

to do all miracles

*

Day and Forti were performing to launch Jeremiah Day/ Simone Forti , a publication chronicling a collaborative exhibition and performance series at the Project Arts Centre in Dublin in 2008. Day had become fascinated by the story of the Blasket islanders, who emigrated to Springfield, near Boston. The Blasket islanders had been the sources of one of the finest repositories of oral lore, collected by George Thompson, but in Springfield, Day's research informed him, the storytelling culture had vanished completely.

The resulting publication combines Day's black and white photographs of a city - whose  physical and economic decline appears to match the vanishing of its stories -  with images of Day and Forti's collaborative performances. There are also several transcriptions of Forti's News Animations which, whilst thoughtful, rhythmic texts in their own right,  were best read after the performance, newly animated by their proximity to a body, no longer privately consumed texts on a page but, even in an act of solitary reading, inseparable from a performance/demonstration/conversation in a public space.  

*

Later in her essay "About the News Animations" Simone Forti observes:

I teach improvisation with movement and language in workshops around the world. I often begin with an essay I call Movement Memory Snapshots. We sit in a wide circle and each offers a particular memory which comes to mind because of an aspect of movement. I use the term 'offers', so as not to be directly asking for either language or movement. Some plunge in with their whole body or describe with their hands. With some, their movement, as they speak, is subtle: a shift of gaze, a sudden working of their toes without their being aware of it. But there is always some movement related to the activity of that telling. 

We talk about the movements we saw each other do: a mix of abstracted shapes of our original experience, signs like pointing, mimicking, shifting weight at the end of a thought and many other kinds of body moves. Movement and language improvisations can be done solo, or by two or more people working together, sometimes conversationally, sometimes in juxtaposition. Once people get the hand of relaxing into this flow between verbal and kinesthetic, the question becomes: What to explore. What to research. What to express. 

"About the News Animations" originally appeared in Oh, Tongue (Beyond Baroque, 2004). Jeremiah Day/ Simone Forti, published by Project Press, Dublin, 2009, developed from the exhibition Simone Forti/ Jeremiah Day 'News Animations'/ 'No Words For You, Springfield', Project Art Centre, Mar 27- May 3, 2008. ISBN 1-872493-24-6

HYUN JIN CHO & DAVID JOHNSON on PERFORMING LOCALITIES: RECENT GUATEMALAN PERFORMANCE ART ON VIDEO

Performing Localities: Recent Guatemalan Performance Art on Video , INIVA, London, 5th and 6th May 2009. 

Remember after the first evening I wanted to ask Rosina Cazali (Guatemalan critic and curator) about what it means to have these works be shown here in London?  Whom is this work directed at originally?

 

You mean its "sight of reception"? 

 

Yes, I suppose.  In yesterday's Q & A, a couple of people raised similar questions, didn't they? 

 

Yes, I remember.  So, what did you get out of the panel's answer? 

 

When Rosina says that 75 percent of this work has only been seen outside of Guatemala, that says something about who is seeing this work and for whom it's designed.  Then the avenues for dissemination... she went on to say that there are no viable places to show these works in Guatemala. I don't remember specifically why. 

 

Perhaps there are no venues or that people aren't quite ready for this type of work.  But in essence, the people in Guatemala are not seeing this work, or this type of work that's been shown here the last two evenings. 

 

I also sensed that Rosina wanted to tell us not to feel too bad about our being ignorant of their history, not having their political situation 100 percent correct, because this work is art. I remember that she repeated the point about the desire of taking this artwork into a different status, not only within a specific Guatemalan situation, but in more of a global art context.   

 

What do you think 'different status' meant?  A different status in terms of content or reception?

 

I understood it as being about reception.  I remember her saying "an event like this is an example" and what we are doing here is good, positive.  She used the word 'we'.  I'm guessing she was referring to an art establishment based in the 'western world'.  I also remember her positive use of the word 'discourse' several times…

 

If we were to view the work we saw on the level of an elegy or meditation, does the work stand on its own?  In terms of the quality of the work...

 

I personally stopped worrying about its quality, or if it was an artist film, all of these criteria that I normally think about.  Maybe this seemed inappropriate to me.

 

Then are you admitting that you're not receiving the work in a way that Rosina wants you to?

 

Well, yes.  That's my very first honest reaction.  It's also true what Julian Stallabrass [Guest Critic and Art Theorist/Curator] said, "The only history we know about Guatemala is the worst part of its history.  There are issues with categorizing artists by their nationality for international art exhibitions?"  I agree.  That's not ideal either.  Perhaps on this second night Rosina felt strongly about representing aspects of contemporary art in a Guatemalan context without the heavy political references... nothing wrong with that. 

 

Of course, it's not all bad in Guatemala.  Undoubtedly he's right in saying that.  But what I couldn't process was this disconnect between that idea and the work itself, the content within the work itself.  This content doesn't really address what's outside of Guatemala's tragic past and current difficulties, so I 'm confused.  Certainly, we would be interested in a Guatemalan artist's portrayal as an even balance, the good and bad, the joyful and the horrible.  But that's not what was presented.  The work we saw on the first day, it was so direct and visceral:  A woman [the artist Sandro Monterroso] making tortillas from the corn that she eats from the cob, chews, and spits back out; a man [the artist Angel Poyon] shouting into a hole in the ground the names of missing Guatemalans; a woman [the artist Regina Jose Galindo] carving the name in Spanish for the word 'bitch' on her leg with a knife; and the same artist in another piece shackling her neck, arm legs with heavy chains then proceeding with her daily activities for 4 to 5 days. There was more.  Then a discussion afterwards that began to place this work within a historical/contextual locality.  So what else was there to say? 

 

It's too bad that there weren't any artists at the event to receive our questions.  Is it important for him or her to be a Guatemalan artist?  Or do they prefer to be a global artist?  How do they want us to receive their work?  Especially in relation to the actual events/situations that are referenced.

 

Jessica Lagunas, "120 Minutos de silencio" "120 minutes of silence," New York, 2008. Single-channel digital video. 12o minutes. Color, silent. Short clip available online. 

How do you begin to make comments on this work  How do you call it by name?  I don't have right to do it.  Do the artists themselves have the right to call it art?  It's quite complicated.  But then the second evening, the work was much less visceral with a certain layer of remove.  There's still references to drug trade, illegal immigration, and missing war victims, but most of its was not first person performance.  The commentary afterwards was much cooler and was more interested in talking about how the work fit into a global artist network.  And the idea that these artists want to be understood as an individual artist rather than merely a Guatemalan artist.  The two nights couldn't have been more different. 

 

It's true.  The first night was about Guatemala, what they've endured, the works that come from this condition and environment.  You and I didn't or couldn't have a discussion.  The next day we're confronted with having to talk about these works as art.  The committee wants to frame it in relation to a market distribution system. (It's not their words but that's what I thought they were talking about.)  To discuss it in this way seemed to ignore what we experienced in this work and perhaps to forget the specifics of the events that actually happened. 

 

To say that these crimes also occurred in other Central or South American countries, or speaking about this injustice in more general way, as if the specifics didn't matter... We were being asked to shift register, or to read this in a certain way, and I wasn't able to do this.  In the end aren't we just replacing one framework with another- Guatemalan artist for Latin American artist or Global artist?  Perhaps this is for the sake of the artist's individual integrity, but that didn't help eliminate any of my discomfort with the discussion.

 

But because of the different nature of the second evening, we were allowed to be active, and to have a dialogue.  Even though the dialogue was going in a disturbingly cool and distant direction to our perception of the situation and whether we agreed or not, we were able to react and engage.  This seems positive.  We were developing our thoughts in terms of a Guatemalan artist's place in this world even if at a superficial level. 

 

Perhaps this reflects the aims of the second night's discussion panel?

 

So then, what's an appropriate response to this work?  Is there a one?

 

Well to start, the realisation that we're in such a small insular bubble is obviously important. 

 

But can 'Art' really engage with this kind of situation with any substance?  Make it into image, decontextualise the situation, make it more abstract and aesthetic, easier to digest.  It's building awareness, but anything beyond that? 

 

Can this works exist as art without its political content?  Can the artist be successful without the political content? 

 

You mean to be recognized, from outside?  Certainly in Guatemala there must be non-political artwork, still lifes or portraits or something, but maybe those would be of no interest to us.

 

Then the corollary, does this work maintain itself without the political content?  Is it quality/successful art?  Without its political content?  I know quality is a slippery word.  But you and I recognise that it exists. 

 

Then that question carries a hope for art?

 

Certainly the panel sees it this way.  Regardless I can't separate this work, the work we saw, from its political content.  Perhaps the next generation of work...

 

I would like to think an initial motivation for making this art is as catharsis initially, like women quilting.  One example is the last piece about cutting the camouflage pattern from a pair of army fatigues [an excerpt from 120 Minutes of Silence by Jessica Lagunas]. perhaps they just have to do something.  To make 'art', you could say, to maintain some kind of sanity, a way forward, to live life.

 

 

ARTIST'S PROJECT: REORDERING by SARAH JACOBS

A project by Sarah Jacobs for More Milk Yvette, May 2009. REORDERING is part of SONG OF THE DATA STREAM www.songofthedatastream.net

GOB SQUAD MEET DOMINIQUE GONZALEZ-FOERSTER or FILM AS THEATRE

More Milk Yvette has been quiet lately, mainly because it has been off moonlighting for SPILL:OVERSPILL, a collective critical writing programme that has been taking place as part of the SPILL performance festival. The following piece first appeared on the SPILL:OVERSPILL site, and explored suggestive connections between Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's recently closed Turbine Hall installation TH.2058 and Gob Squad's, Saving the World, Greenwich Dance Agency, 9-10 April 2009.

If Gob Squad had filmed their piece Saving the World a few months earlier, then, amongst the passers-by on the South Bank, they might have encountered Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, off to Tate Modern to install her Turbine Hall installation. It would have been an intriguing encounter, for Saving the World and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's recently closed TH.2058 seem to be in conversation with one another, both through themes of archiving, saving, addressing and imagining the future, and in the boundaries they observe, re-draw and disregard between film, installation, and performance.

TH.2058 was an installation of beds, books, films, and other peoples sculptures, evoking a future when the Tate Modern turbine hall becomes a combined archive and air raid shelter. Saving the World sees Gob Squad spend a day on the South Bank, video recording passers by to create an archive of contemporary existence for some unspecified future date. Both pieces have at their core an accumulation and a saving. Both place themselves at the centre of London's diversity but are haunted by an experience, intuition, anticipation or memory of some ecological or other catastrophe. Both see the artist as a kind of fiction writer, scoring scenarios to be acted out: by sitting on the beds in the Turbine Hall and reading, or by asking passers-by for their thoughts on sex, nothingness, and the soul.

All this, no doubt, reflects different artists filtering the world around them with a somewhat shared sensibility, training and professionalism. As these processes manifest in the pieces themselves, Gob Squad foregrounds the newspapers and encounters of the world; Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster foregrounds a certain art history, an accumulation within her installation of certain art historical precursors (including several previous Turbine Hall installations). It's curious, then, that both end up in a similar place, suggesting art is the real news, and articulating this through a fluid sense of medium becoming theatrical.

For both Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Gob Squad this focusses on a sense of film. Film re-defined, partly as an event, partly as something not confined to the screen: in Saving the World people literally talk to the screen and, more theatrically, come out of and go into the screen. Entering the Greenwich Dance Agency to see the piece last week, film seemed to be becoming installation, but then revealed itself, somewhat cheekily, as theatre. One consequence of this is that the consciousness and materiality of the video itself becomes more a shared property of the whole experience than something just involving the projected image. 

Aside from the different economies and professional networks of artists working in galleries (like Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster) or performance festivals (like Gob Squad), this is also a debate about live presence, moving beyond a sense of mediated and unmediated to a more variegated sense of liveness and place. Gob Squad's search for interviewees on the South Bank, for example, is  partly a search for those open to having part of their identity mediated (via the group's video cameras) in ways beyond their control and that they might never see. Viewing Gob Squad and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster together foregrounds how, for all the ways this is a response to globalisation, media culture, non-place and instantaneous data transfer - it's also a working through of an artistic lineage with a particular sense of the possibility of the moving image. 

A longer essay than this, for example, might use Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's library of films screening in TH.2058 as a partial viewing companion for Saving the World. This wouldn't create a set of easy parallels. But, to pick only a few of the more famous examples, I think the suggestiveness of viewing Gob Squad in the light of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, or Chris Marker's La Jetée, or Alain Resnais Last Year at Marienbad, are immediately apparent.

 

Actually, without checking I'm not sure TH.2058 did  include the Resnais film but it certainly enters into the dialogue, as does Warhol's Screen Tests, literally re-created in the Gob Squad's Kitchen and becoming a research methodology in Saving the World, where groups of passers-by stare silent and still into Gob Squad's cameras. Gonzalez-Foerster doesn't include Warhol in her loop of films but the aesthetics of the Screen Tests can certainly be related to TH.2058's ideal of audience participation: a figure sat on the beds, as absorbed in a book as Warhol's subjects were in the 16mm camera before them. 

Relations of film and theatre is a vast topic that could be traced in essays by, amongst many others, André Bazin, and Susan Sontag. Here, I want to highlight such dialogues manifesting as uncertainty, but in different ways. TH.2058 seemed always there, its films on a loop, but then the installation closed and it vanished. Gob Squad's subjects are saved for DVD-posterity, but confined to the show's limited (and for now completed) performance times. For both artists, film promises capturing and archiving, then delivers a richer, more substantial offering of the intangible and disappearing. 

Not that these pieces are at all grim or po-faced about the apocalyptic scenarios they propose, for either London or the possibilities of film. Gob Squad's attitude to such issues is summed up in the closing party-scenes of Saving the World where they cavort in bear-clown costumes made of multiple soft toys. It reminded me of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's artists' talk at Tate Modern in March which covered the Starr Auditorium lectern in gold tinsel and had a DJ play Latin Jazz records, before ending the evening with the lights suddenly out and a soundscape of tropical rain.  

More Milk Yvette has also been writing on Pacitti Company's A Forest; Julia Bardsley's Aftermaths: A Tear in the Tear of Vision;Victoria, Tim Etchells and the Uncertain Pedagogies out of Performance in That Night Follows Day;  and Rajni Shah's Dinner with America. 

THE BROKEN FESTIVAL MACHINE AND THE NUMBERS by CS LEIGH

Filmmaker to Festival Director: "Please sir, can I have some more?"

1. In the introduction to one of her books Pauline Kael lamented that when she started writing movie reviews people used to come up to her on the street to say how lucky they thought she was to be paid to go to the cinema, but how that had changed over time and for the most part she earned only the public's sympathy for having the fortitude to endure so many crap movies. I'm paraphrasing as the internet search I did found several versions of the original text all of them a bit different and I'm too far away from my Pauline Kael library to check it now. A visit to the closest bookshop revealed that most of her books are out of print. But I feel exactly the same way about film festivals. I am about to attend my twenty-first Cannes Film Festival. I remember the feeling of elation that overcame me on my first visit and it stayed with me for about ten more. But that has now been replaced by a sense of resignation. I go for the meetings not the films which is something I never thought I would say.

2, For those of you familiar with Pauline Kael the title and form of this little jeremiad will no doubt bring to mind Kael's pull no punches Why Are Movies So Bad? or The Numbers, published originally in The New Yorker in 1980. For those of you not familiar with it forget about reading this post here. Go out and get that and don't put it down until you finish it. 

3, Who needs film festivals in 2009 ? The only viable answer I can come up with are hotel chains and airlines. When I first went to Cannes it offered an opportunity to watch many films that I knew I would never have the opportunity to find again especially with English subtitles. In 1994 I watched 53 films in Cannes, though I walked out on a few. These included films from countries who didn't make or export many back then. Nowadays there is nearly no film screened at any festival that I couldn't find on my own and in any number of ways. The few films I want to watch that are rare or hard to locate will never show up at Cannes anyway and sadly they don't find their way on to schedules in Rotterdam, Berlin, or Locarno anymore either. Sometimes if we get very lucky they do get screened at the Viennale which still seems to me a festival with a valid mission. 

4, Film festivals have turned into the Jay Leno show of the cinema circuit. Filmmaker shows up with good looking cast and somewhat less sexy crew, gets hotel room for two nights, a couple of drink vouchers, gives redundant interviews, has ass kissed for three days, and moves over on the sofa to make space for the next guest. The dirty little secret of the film festival machine is that it uses the artists to give the festival enough credibility to lure the commercial movie business into giving it A or B list films in exchange for credibility. For example Cannes opens with rubbish like DA VINCI CODE or Rotterdam gives us the world premiere of some shite directed by SOPRANOS actors who couldn't figure out where to place the camera if their lives depended on it and the respective directors get to feel like Godard for a day. Gone is the time when festivals served the purpose of shedding light on great but neglected cinematic talent. Unless you consider Ron Howard or Michael Imperioli geniuses languishing in isolation while the world looks the other way. There still might be good reasons for regional festivals to exist but the big three or four are just a marketing tool preaching to the converted.

5. I don't discount great filmmakers who are film festival stars like Atom Egoyan and Michael Haneke. They are among the greatest artists working in cinema today. I await their new films as previous generations waited for Ingmar Bergman to send down the next chapter of the Grail. What I do question however is the idea that these directors are guaranteed competition slots in Cannes year in and out as a matter of course. Has the film festival model just turned into a Greatest Hits collection?  Does anyone need to be reminded that Ken Loach makes brilliant and brave films ? And does anyone need to go to Cannes to watch them anyway? There was a time when distributors did need Cannes to be guided to know what to buy. These days the distributors tell the festivals what to do and make the deals. 

6. About ten years ago Rotterdam introduced an amazing strand called Exploding Cinema. They understood very early on a need to respond to new technology and, more than that, the ways cinema audiences's expectations and habits were morphing because of it. Many festivals have since introduced similar sidebars. For example at Sundance this year there was the bold and challenging New Frontier including films by Pat O'Neil and Sharon Lockhart and also installations and other film ephemera. Although this was very interesting it still offered very little that we could not find in musuems and art centers all over the globe. There was nothing cinematic about New Frontiers. I get the feeling these sidebars are now being created largely as a way to keep spectators interested as if the distraction of the laptop, phone, and whatever other popular device is selling like hotcakes these days are threatening the festival idea at its core and I suppose that's the point. They are.  For heaven's sake, Rotterdam even had a Haunted House this year. What's next? Maybe a Lego version of Chloe Sevigny's likeness at the entrance to the Berlin Film Festival's Panorama screenings ?

7. The real problem is that the model is broken and outdated and nobody has the balls to admit it. It's just another naked Emperor. For filmmakers the relationship to film festivals is the same as Oliver Twist innocently asking the orphanage "Please sir can I have some more?" after feeling less than satisfied by his first meal under their roof. Why do we feel the need to be granted the right to show our work ? Are we bought so cheaply as a plane ticket, hotel rooms, and saving a screening fee? Why do we feel blessed when second rate beurocrats and third rate academics select our work? You don't need to go to Cannes or Venice anymore to keep up with the best new work. You go only if you want to know what Monica Bellucci is wearing on the red carpet and you can read about that on a blog too pretty much in real time. Festivals have become boring largely because the people who frequent them are too willing to play by the rules. 

8. The great thing about this horrible moment we live in is that everyone is a curator, everyone is a festival director, anyone can programme pretty much anything on youtube or on their computer and can stream whatever they like out there to whoever is willing to watch it.  I don't personally feel very excited about having my work shown that way. But there are other options. Warhol told us all that anyone can do it and maybe it took fifty years for his words to be born out. Of course that doesn't mean that anyone can do it well. But surely with the bar set as low as it is right now could it really be worse?  I say this and I say it simply to my community. Show your work. Screen your films. Stop begging. Find new ways to distribute your work and create the next version of cinema.

CRITICISM TOWARDS PERFORMANCE NOTATION: A PRESENTATION AND WORKSHOP FOR SPILL:OVERSPILL

Karl Stockhausen considers the idea that criticism is a form of performance notation...

For a presentation as part of the SPILL:OVERSPILL writer's workshop (28-29 Mar, 2009), I wanted to explore how certain forms of criticism can become a new form of performance notation. The theme emerged from looking through a range of recent texts, which have appeared on this blog and elsewhere. This included:

Texts developed in response to a range of live events, talks, and discussions.

Texts developed out of reading and research around a particular topic.

In both cases the process is often a layered one. Initial notes and transcriptions are developed later into a text resembling a performance script.  

Often this meant using such notation conventions as numbered scenes, stage directions, and the dividing of text between different voices. But such conventions were rarely utilised in the logical manner of a conventional playscript. Instead, aspects of these devices were part of a broader effort to show language existing in space, being choreographed, not summarising or interpreting an event but seeking to open out of an event into something else.  

This project began with a transcript I made of a Richard Foreman talk at the ICA in May 2008. This was appropriate because Foreman's own scripts and poetics are a key source for this kind of work, not just in themselves but in their indebtedness to open field poetics. For my SPILL: OVERSPILL presentation I showed the following images of Richard Foreman's 1972 essay:  

For a second example I outlined my research into Robert Smithson's Cavern Cinema. This began with Smithson's own diagram-score-drawing-proposal for the project. I talked of how this had connected to Stockhausen's notations, through an interest in his own underground concert at the Jeita Caves in Lebanon in 1971, and also to the underground cinema events in the catacombs of Paris. 

Robert Smithson, Towards the Development of a "Cinema Cavern" (1971) Pencil, photography, tape.

Working with these different histories - and the different texts through which these events become present - I showed my play script You Don't Know What's Down There:  A Fantasia for the Cavern Cinema, recently published as part of the soanyway project. This, again, was an example of curating or choreographing material, and of writing involving a working in space with existing texts rather than the generation of large amounts of new material. Although, of course, the loss of such boundaries is often part of such texts.   

Karl Stockhausen, score for Stimmung (1966). 

Having looked at these different examples I drew up a short list of what characterised such pieces of writing:

statements 

polyvocality

shifts in register

word as object

quotation (real/ misremembered/ invented)

associative thought

framing

use of white space

lists

loss of attribution

choreographic listening

Several of these statements prompted questions from other members of the group. I described choreographic listening as a process of watching or reading an event with an awareness of translating it into typographic space and also into a series of language-gestures. The loss of attribution point prompted questions about plagiarism. This made me realise how one of the tensions in this form of writing is a reconsideration of the notion of voice. 

So what is the result and rewards of such writing? I am interested in how  it produces exciting and engaging texts alert to a certain reciprocity between the space of an event and the space of the page and its constituent tools of letters, words, sentences, paragraphs and punctuation marks. On a level that is less explored as yet I am interested in texts as literal scores, generators of new events, and as literal embodiments - and exaggerations - of the processes whereby ideas and events become transmitted.  

The notational possibilities of Black Mountain College...

A longer workshop could have moved into an exploration of this next stage. As, too, it could have considered a broader history of notation, moving from fluxus scores, experimental music, and Richard Kostelanetz's book Scenarios: The Right to Perform (1980), through to the more contemporary work of the journal Play: A Journal of Plays, the scripts of Mac Wellman and Erik Ehn, and the collaborations of Will Holder and Alex Waterman (captured in two excellent exhibition catalogues of music notation, Agapē and Between Thought and Sound). 

It could, too, have explored interconnections with certain strands of experimental poetry, from the open-field poetics of Charles Olson that informed Foreman, to the LANGUAGE poetics of Bruce Andrews who, to a degree, summarises the concerns of this presentation when he observes in The Poetics of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E:

The page, like the windowed computer screen, can encourage a LOOKING THROUGH or a LOOKING AT approach -

Looking through: as a transparent, dematerialized virtuality, cinema-style), 

or a LOOKING AT (as an opaque, action-oriented, control-panelled material reality). 

As, too, to link back to where the presentation began, the notebooks of Richard Foreman - available online for others to make performances from - are a reminder of the reciprocity between writing and performance in relation to event, space and interpretation.  

This essay - and the presentation it summarises - ends with several possibilities:

(1)An interchangeability between critical text and performance notation, where each becomes the other.

(2)A sharing of categories on a practical (use of stage directions and scenes) and conceptual level, but a maintaining of difference in how such scripts are read. 

(3)A combination of criticism and notation pursued to the level of uncertainty, where the precise character and demands of the text remains mysterious, dependent on  context, delivery, intention, and/or whim. 

A PROPOSAL FOR A WORKSHOP

So for the workshop I thought it would be interesting to respond to a piece of work, thinking through this connection of criticism and performance notation emerging from the experience of a particular event.  So this is the film _______ by the artist ______ which I chose for the way it engages a certain sense of _________ ,________ and ________.  

I encourage you to watch _______ and develop and improvise a _________ in response, writing down any thoughts, ideas, drawings, diagrams and _________'s whilst thinking of the idea of criticism as a score AT ALL TIMES. 

When _______ is finished we will have ten minutes to work those pieces of writing into an example of critical writing as performance notation.  The film is intended to be shown on a loop so I will let it run through twice. Let's go...