HEYA
How are you this week? Hope you’ve had a good one
This week I thought I’d do something a bit different and focus on texts that have been created over the past few months. These texts are made for people to perform wherever they are. If you do perform them let the artists know!
PLAYS FOR THE PEOPLE by Andy Smith
Rather than performed by actors in a theatre, these plays are written to be read aloud and discussed by a group of audience-participants. They can be organised and undertaken by any group of people in a suitable place or space.
This project, and form, is inspired by the lehrstück, a word usually translated into English as ‘learning play’. The most well-known historical examples of these plays were created by Bertolt Brecht in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Inspired by this model, the short plays in this project want to attempt to address some big questions and themes, and present a sense of involvement, engagement participation and agency in those that encounter and take part in them.
So far the project has produced two examples, The Actions, created in collaboration with director Sam Pritchard, and a new work called The Rule of Six. More information about each play can be found below, along with a brief outline.
Each play contains the necessary instructions. Often all they need is some people to meet and read aloud to each other, some copies of the text to do this from (printed out or on a screen), and a space quiet enough for the reading/performance to happen. This might be a lecture theatre, a classroom, a hall in a community centre, a table in a pub, a rehearsal room, or even a video conferencing platform such as ZOOM. Each performance should be seen as a play with two halves. The first part is the reading, the second a discussion/debate about the themes and ideas that the play presents.
Over time, and along with more collaborators, the aim of the project is to write more and further explore the possibilities of the form.
In 1919, Marcel Duchamp sent instructions for an artwork from Buenos Aires to his sister by way of a present. Suzanne Duchamp was asked to source a geometry textbook and suspend it by strings from her balcony overlooking Rue la Condamine in Paris. “The wind had to go through the book, choose its own problems, turn and tear the pages.”
In Spring 2020, the urge to create instructional performances reached new heights: locked in, with limited social contacts or in physical distance – without a venue like a theatre, gallery, concert hall or club to go to, to meet and exchange, the private environment turns into the place for interaction. In times when meetings are limited and art institutions keep their doors shut, scores become a transdisciplinary artistic practice for connecting people in their isolations and with their surroundings; to keep creating performances by making the audience become the protagonist of pieces that are written for them.
“1000 Scores. Pieces for Here, Now & Later” is an online performance space that presents new scores from various artists on the website www.1000scores.com. Each score is an instructional art piece for one person, commissioned by the project, in collaboration between partner institutions and the artistic team. New scores are published regularly on the website and spread into the world through social media channels and newsletters.
The ALMOST — Performance as practice of Daydreaming by Danja Burchard
This performative lecture is a confrontation with the emotional implications of a vanishing future within the logic of the economy of constant productivity. It is an abstract, spatial and personal reading of the ALMOST — a space created around the potential Point of Success and FAILURE.
ALMOST is the space one crosses when transiting to Success. Stopping along the way — at any point for a specific amount of time — is considered FAILURE. FAILURE, the ALMOST and the Point of Success are tangible imaginaries of Daydreams, which have been validated by socio-cultural narratives. They are a recollection of thoughts, of imaginations that lead to action. Imagination augments the value of reality. Imagination leads to action.
The ALMOST and FAILURE can be understood as territorial spaces of transit, whose impact and reality are based on the immaterial constructions of Daydreams and thoughts.
It is in the speculative fictions of Success, that FAILURE arises. The ALMOST as inhabitable space reclaims the underlying radical and political aspects of Daydreams as performative practice.
I hope you emjoy these texts and I’ll see you next week