'In Terms of Performance' - a free online resource worth checking out

I've recently discovered a fascinating website called 'In Terms of Performance'. 

intermsofperformance.site

"It is a free web-based keywords anthology designed to provoke discovery and generate shared literacies for how the goals, skills, and artistic traditions of experimental interdisciplinary work are understood. 

Produced by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia in collaboration with the Arts Research Center at UC Berkeley, the site features essays and interviews from more than 50 prominent artists, curators, presenters, and scholars who reflect on common yet contested terms in contemporary cultural practice such as Curating, Choreography, Duration, Live, Participation, Score, and Spectator. 



The authors contemplate the relations among visual art, theatrical, choreographic, and performance art practices; the poetry of miscommunication; and the stakes of literacy in our current context of progressively hybrid cultural production."

Topics covered include



"As a free online resource, In Terms of Performance is non-linear and richly cross-listed, enabling an unstructured browsing experience in which terms, contributors, and artworks connect intricately in a true web of reference—while inviting new entries to be added in the future. It also allows users to create their own PDF publications, customised to their interests."



The coeditors, Shannon Jackson and Paula Marincola conducted a set of extended interviews with major figures in art and performance, who reflect on their own experience with the poetry of miscommunication, the challenges and rewards of collaborating, and the history and future of intermediality.

An extended conversation between Jackson and Marincola explains the project’s evolution and muses on the stakes of literacy across disciplinary boundaries today.

intermsofperformance.site

The Drone Ensemble at BALTIC - The Playground Project: Children'sPreview

Yesterday the Drone Ensemble participated in The Playground Project: Children's Preview at BALTIC.

The exhibition is really vibrant and exciting, featuring a range of works that embrace, encourage and depend upon interaction. The Lozziwurm, a giant orange snake-like tube with cut out windows, dominates the space. Children (and adults) crawl through it, slide down it and climb on it, much to the enjoyment of the gallery staff. This is an exhibition for those who love to play.

There are drawing machines, swings, a giant sandpit, a craft area, a continually growing and changing sculpture, voice performances and The Drone Ensemble were performing and demonstrating a selection of our instruments.



We had an overwhelmingly positive reception. Kids and adults were full of enthusiasm for what we were doing and it was great to see young and old take pleasure from playing with what we had brought. Children were mesmerised by the quirky sounds that they could control, and parents saw a different side to their children as they were so fully engaged in the instruments that they were no longer apprehensive about leaving their parents side. Children had a new found confidence.



There are loads of events happening throughout the duration of the exhibition so it's well worth checking out the BALTIC website to find out more:

http://balticmill.com/whats-on/the-playground-project

The press have also been very positive about the exhibition. Read some reviews here:

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/whats-on/art-kids-cant-touch-no-11616999

http://www.sprogonthetyne.com/blog/2016/7/14/playground-project-the-baltic

http://www.thecrackmagazine.com/view-editorial/3638

The Playground Project is realised in cooperation with Kunsthalle Zürich Including work by Marjory Allen (Lady Allen of Hurtwood), Joseph Brown, Riccardo Dalisi, Richard Dattner, Aldo van Eyck, M. Paul Friedberg, Michael Grossert, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, Alfred Ledermann, Yvan Pestalozzi, Group Ludic, Egon Møller-Nielsen, Palle Nielsen, Isamu Noguchi, Sreejata Roy, Niki de Saint Phalle, Josef Schagerl, Mitsuru (Man) Senda, Carl Theodor Sørensen, Alfred Trachsel and more."

Knowing that I am in the process of writing my dissertation, (its working title is An exploration of play in contemporary art), I was sent a link to Adrian Searle's review of the Lygia Clark retrospective at MoMA in The Guardian

It mentions some of the things that are included in my dissertation such as the relationship between audience interaction/participation and play

Lygia Clark at MoMA review – playing cat's cradle at the edge of art

"The Brazilian artist, who died in 1988, was a complex figure, and her life and art followed a convoluted trajectory. It took her from being a painter and leading figure in the Brazilian neo-concretist movement, an offshoot of European constructivism, to becoming a maker of abstract sculptures that were as much propositions as fixed objects. These wonderful plays between the organic and the geometric, between form and formlessness eventually led her away from art altogether, and towards what she came to regard as a kind of therapy, in which objects took the place of speech and gesture.

At various points in the exhibition you can play with replicas of her Bichos (Creatures) which mimic how her larger sculptures were made. As you play with them these small hinged forms flip-flop and fold this way and that. They have a nice weight, and handling them feels a bit like doing card tricks. However, as you turn the articulated metal planes the results always have a jazzy, spiky sort of life. Unlike a card-sharp's sleight of hand, there are no wrong moves here. Putting her art in the hands of her audience, Clark allows us to play out their variations in unpredictable ways.

Other sculptures are more like architectural models for imaginary dwellings. Even when she worked with nothing more than matchboxes – open, closed, piled up, painted – she worked through their repertoire of possibilities. 

Gallery attendants are showing visitors the correct way to handle more of Clark's later objects: mirrored spectacles to be worn by two people; clear plastic envelopes containing water and shells, or air and ping-pong balls. Play doesn't always need to have a purpose. Yet there is something here that has a lot to do with sculpture, with touch, balance and physical coordination. A whole world seems to be here, caught between the density of the stone and the weightlessness of the bag.

Why not make cat's cradles and webs of knotted rubber bands, to get yourself into a tangle? Elsewhere children are gluing paper into Möbius strips, which they twist around their wrists, and manipulating flexible discs of industrial rubber that have been cut to resemble spirals of thick, black orange peel. This is sculpture you can drape over your shoulder, or which can flop over a plinth or hang on the wall like the sloughed skin of some bizarre cold-blooded creature. What curious and compelling forms they are.

Whether this sort of thing actually takes us from passive spectators to active participants is moot. But we do get a feeling that the artist is following the consequences of her work to its limit, and beyond. The limit, for Clark, and for this exhibition, is the abandonment of art altogether, in favour of collective activity and ritualised interactions. We are no longer in a world of spectators and artworks, but in a place where the object – a plastic bag or length of hose – becomes a therapeutic tool, with a function and a use, however obscure it may be."

Courtesy of Guardian News & Media Ltd

To read the full review, visit:
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/29/lygia-clark-review-art-moma-new-york

Visiting Artist - Melanie Manchot

This week's visiting artist was London based Melanie Manchot who works with photography, film, video and installation as part of a performative and participatory practice.

She delivered an excellent presentation, providing a good overview of the development of her work starting with Look At You Loving Me, a series of portraits of her nude mother, and ending with The Gift which is currently being exhibited at Bloomberg SPACE comprising a four-channel video, photography and a set of objects on plinths.



Look At You Loving Me, 2000, Unique Silver Gelatin Prints onto Canvas


Groups + Locations (Moscow)


‘Groups + Locations (Moscow)', is a series of photographs taken at historic sites in and around Moscow. Based on late 19th century group shots, the work refers to a moment when photography played an important role in the Russian people’s comprehension of what their vast lands and its inhabitants looked like.


Neighbours (Berlin), 2006, Six Diptych: Silver Gelatin Print/C-Print


Neighbours (Berlin) is based on a series of six postcards from 1905/06, found in a Berlin antiquarian bookshop when Manchot moved there in 2005. In the original images, a group of people is depicted standing outside the houses where they live and work. On the back of the postcards the exact addresses are given as well as the date of their production. Taking those as instructions for a new set of group portraits Manchot revisited the six locations to see how those sites exist today, one hundred years on, to which extent history has altered the infrastructure and architecture of this city. The artist then invited today’s residents to participate in a new group portrait. The resulting images are a portrait of the changes inscribed in a city, of memory and history as much as of the individuals who have agreed to participate and become part of an image with their neighbours, who most often are strangers to each other as much as to the artist. The work is presented as diptychs of the original postcard and the new photographs.



Celebration (Cyprus Street)


‘Celebration (Cyprus Street)’ is based on the rich history of public street parties in London’s East End. The film takes the viewer along the street in Bethnal Green, with the focal point being the gathering of the community for a group photograph.

Celebration (Cyprus Street)

To make ‘Celebration’, Manchot worked with the residents of Cyprus Street over a period of six months, collaborating on preparations for the party and inviting active participation in the film. The work engages with the East End as a point of arrival to the capital and to Britain. It acknowledges the waves of migration passing through East London over the last centuries and articulates the current make-up of streets as complex multicultural units.


Tracer

The film tracks the movements of a group of parkour runners as they navigate the route of the Great North Run. The structures and spaces they move through are explored in a physical manner, and a understanding of the architecture and environment is established through their direct interact with it. The film begins and ends with the group of parkourists moving as a swarm, but the main body of the film consists of a number of scenes in which a single parkourist is visible.


Twelve


Twelve is a multi channel video installation exploring the intimate stories, rituals, repetitions and ruptures of lives spent in addiction and recovery.

Over the last two years Manchot has worked in dialogue with twelve people in recent recovery from substance misuse, in rehabilitation communities in Liverpool, Oxford and London. Twelve is directly informed by their personal written and oral testimonies, creative conceptions, and performances within final works.

Single sequences are shot as continuous takes, referencing iconic scenes from the films of Michael Haneke, Gus Van Sant, Bela Tarr and Chantal Akerman – a ferry journey across the Mersey, a car wash, the cutting of daisies with small scissors, the obsessive cleaning of a floor – providing the framework for reflections on remembered incidents and states of mind.

www.twelve.org.uk

Melanie spoke of the importance of working closely with the participants in order to develop an understanding and level of trust that was crucial to producing the work. I admire the way that the work does not make a judgement of the people that she works with.

For more information visit http://www.melaniemanchot.net