The nineteenth annual Performance Studies international conference (PSi 19) featured over one hundred performances praxis sessions, workshops and installations as well as approximately one hundred and eighty panels roundtables, and lectures.
Art installations and performances filled the open spaces on Stanford University’s campus in courtyards, fountains, and theatres. The shortest performance lasted one second the longest ran nineteen hours.
The headlining performances included the following…
2: Untitled explored the relationship between memory in the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the issues of performance documentation. The materials for this performance are the choreography of Roger Federer’s tennis match versus Tipsarevic on Nov. 6 2012, Proust’s mémoire involontaire and memories of Artaud from friends, his sister and his psychiatrist. Issues at stake were the mixtures of virtual/ actual/possible, the role memory plays in performance and the ethics and aesthetics of theatre making as subtraction with a beginning long before the public show followed by no ending.
Falling into Place by Gretchen Schiller takes the form of an intimate fifteen-minute guided sound and video installation. Each participant was invited into a dimly lit room, guided by a soft-spoken librarian, and invited to touch, catch and hold the traces of place with different custom-designed audiovisual-furniture environments. The different multisensory interfaces hold secrets that the participant is asked to investigate.
The Symphonic Body is a performance made entirely from gestures. It is a movement-based orchestral work performed by people from across the Stanford University campus. Instead of instruments, individuals in this orchestra perform gestural portraits based on the motions of their workday. These portraits are individual dances, custom-made for each person, choreographed from the movements they already do. The particular choreographed gestures themselves become part of a larger movement tapestry within each performer and within the piece as a whole. By engaging with this performance practice members of the Stanford community come together in concert to expand, renew and re-experience the artistry embedded in the everyday.
Re-reading a film. In a semi-dark room, Margaret Tedesco re-reads entire feature-length films with the sound off, the projection obscured by the viewing position the spectator is usually asked to assume. Using film as a point of transit, she recounts the characters’ actions, gestures, architecture, detail, mood, color, score, and time of day or night, using mostly pronouns [she, he, they, etc.], an oral delivery to describe what is seen. Through narrative retelling, Tedesco transforms film-watching into active participation that directly engages the viewer’s imagination.
The Office for Make Believe is a San Francisco based dream tank that devises strategies for realizing the impossible. They build well researched scenarios based clients’ woolgathering through less than the-state-of-art technology. Their findings are designed and exhibited in forms uniquely suited to each investigation and often materialize as performance, photography, video, writing, and garden variety conversation. In Between the Night Builds, co-director Ryan Tacata spent three days staging the daydreams of gallery visitors.
A durational performance. Raegan performed 232 exchanges in this second iteration, which lasted just over ten hours and fourteen minutes.
The singers are out of breath. The swimmers are out of their depth. At the bottom of windswept sand dune cliffs, the sea glistens. A group of singers and swimmers strike out towards the water’s edge. They each look towards the sea, eyes intent, focused on the horizon, searching for something, is somebody lost at sea? Created by artists Helen Paris and Caroline Wright, Out of Water features a newly commissioned sound-score by composer Jocelyn Pook and singing by UK soprano Laura Wright.
Variazioni su un oggetto di scena (Variations on a Prop, 2002/05/07), for piano and stuffed toys. Var. XXII (Valsugana) Var. XI (Maridemi mi) Var. I (Reposare) Louganis (2007), for piano and TV/VCR combo (video by Terry Berlier)
Tomorrow We Will Run Faster plays with our preconceived notions of live and recorded time. Two women stand in front of a projected clock. As the second-hand ticks and tocks from 12 all the way round to 12 again, the women join in its iterations of time, passing tick and tock across them as if locked in a perpetual dialogue.
Right-Wing Cabaret was an informal, one-night, one-hour cabaret. The goal was performance re-enactment and engagement: to ignite critical and artistic discussion about reactionary, right-wing, and fascist art by performing those works.
Combining a vocal performance with a live soundtrack composed of digitally manipulated sounds, many of which are sourced from the area around the performance venue, performers Michael Hunter and Derek Phillips reconstruct and reinterpret Cage’s iconic 1949 lecture performance.
HONEY explored the exposures between the self and other in this contemplative and weighted durational performance by Stosh Fila and Julie Tolentino. Tolentino is the receiver, endure-r, memory collector, and signifier of death–her mouth open in the shape of the last kiss, the ‘O’ of death. Illuminating the productiveness and destructiveness of the ecstatic state, she swallows, filling and spilling, her ‘O’ of ecstasy enhanced by the drawn out ‘O’ emitted from the multiple hand recorders offering Vargas’ “Soledad” lyrics, to which she moves, records, erases. The partner/performer, Stosh Fila, is overseer, activator and participant. As the designer of the droplet’s shape, intensity, speed, and velocity- -the one who squeezes, advances, and withdraws—Fila’s movement delicately recapitulates each swallow.
PostMexican writer and performance artist Gómez-Peña reflects on the post-9/11 era, the current “border wars” and articulates the formidable challenges that faced Obama. To this effect, the “border artist extraordinaire” uses acid Chicano humor, hybrid literary genres, multilingualism, and activist theory as subversive strategies. Shifting between languages and personae, “Gómez-Peña bombards audiences with his infamous border savvy techno-ideology, ethno-poetics and radical aesthetics.” In this journey to the geographical and psychological outposts of Chicanismo, Gómez-Peña also reflects on identity, race, sexuality, pop culture, current politics and the impact of new technologies in the post-911 era. He also denounces the anti-immigration hysteria and assaults the demonized construction of the US/ Mexican border—a literal and symbolic zone lined with Minute Men, rising nativism, three-ply fences, globalization, and transnational identities.”
Marcia Farquhar, creator and performer of The Omnibus, a thirty hour monologue performed at the National Review of Live Art 2010, on the occasion of its 30th anniversary, offers an entirely new, much abbreviated version titled Long Haul.
Encircled by forty Cambodian clay pots, artist Amy Lee Sanford performs the durational Full Circle by breaking and reassembling each pot, progressively.
Rebecca Chaleff and Rebecca Ormiston’s piece considers how the sun serves as specter and collaborator in their work as scholars and performers.
The fourth installation in Athey’s Incorruptible Flesh series. “Messianic Remains” continues the artist’s exploration of the continuation of his own post-AIDS body. Previous installments were done in collaboration with the late Lawrence Steger, who died of AIDS during the mid-late 1990s, and in the new millennium with London-based artist Dominic Johnson. Between 1996 and 2007, performances took place in Glasgow, Chelsea Theatre in London, and at the funerals of Leigh Bowery in New York and Amsterdam.
Singing the Rooms is a solo dance-song cycle with koken (“invisible” performers), inspired by the sacred practice for describing and navigating a physical landscape in real- time through repeating the words of the songs. Taking off from the Goldilocks story, the audience joins the protagonist to become curious strangers in the house.
