Performing Arts

A short text or a long line written by Mette Edvardsen for Etcetera magazine (June 2018) on an invitation to elaborate on her approach to text, writing and speech from a choreographic point of view. Held by a cardboard cover, the text is here published on its own as a very slim book.

Moments Before the Wind is a heterogeneous collection of notes on scenography that offers a glimpse into the poetics and artistic practice of Jozef Wouters. These reflections on space, scenography, art making and institutional critique have developed over the years as they were written out loud in various contexts. Now settling on the page among built and unbuilt spaces, they’re an invitation to the reader to think along or against, and think up space for oneself. Edited by Jeroen Peeters; graphic design by Filiep Tacq.

Jozef Wouters is a scenographer and theatre maker based in Brussels, who develops work in collaboration with his Decoratelier. Decoratelier is also a workplace for set designers and artists, and provides room for cross-disciplinary ventures and social experiment.

Fairy Tales gathers the unconventional verse dramolettes of the Swiss writer Robert Walser. Narrated in Walser's inimitable, playful language, these theatrical pieces overturn traditional notions of the fairy tale, transforming the Brothers Grimm into metatheater, even metareflections.

Snow White forgives the evil queen for trying to kill her, Cinderella doubts her prince and enjoys being hated by her evil stepsisters; the Fairy Tale itself is a character who encourages her to stay within the confines of the story. Sleeping Beauty, the royal family, and its retainers are not happy about being woken from their sleep by an absurd, unpretentious, Walser-like hero. Mary and Joseph are taken aback by what lies in store for their baby Jesus.

Robert Walser (1878-1956) was born in Switzerland. He left school at fourteen and led a wandering and precarious existence working as a bank clerk, a butler in a castle, and an inventor's assistant while producing essays, stories, and novels. In 1933 he abandoned writing and entered a sanatorium—where he remained for the rest of his life. "I am not here to write," Walser said, "but to be mad."

Published 2015

This publication is part of Backward Sway | Upper Beam | Forward Swivel | Lower Bound - a site specific exhibition by Marie Raffn realized at Theatre Academy Helsinki in February 2019. The publication is a score of performative action developed in correspondence with the exhibition and the performance; Reading and Interpretation of - and inside - a spatial score by dancers Taru Miettinen and Aino Puhonen which took place during its opening days.

The scripts of Romy Rüegger's performances: a constellation of texts, largely written to be spoken. The scripts as they are printed do not document the performances primarily. They are indications of spacial and temporal layering, juxtapositions of aesthetic and poetic elements and bodies. Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping.

Romy Rüegger (born 1983, lives and works in Zurich) is an artist and writer working with sound-based practices and shared listening. Her writings for performances, audio works and choreographed spaces draw on anti-racist and intersectional politics of language and memory. Recent performances, audio works and publication contributions include Synthetic Stream Plays (Kunsthalle Basel, 2018), Binary Codes as NO (Gasworks, London, 2018), “I am the Wall” (in: Grounds for Possible Music, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2018), Reina llora*, Reads (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2017), I am the Wall (Q-O2 / Performatik Festival, Brussels, 2017), History is Closed Today (Helmhaus, Zurich, 2017), J'ai everyday ma substance (in collaboration with Anna Frei, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, 2017).

Published 2018

Locked down at home during the first wave of Covid-19, David Weber-Krebs kept on thinking about the day when theatres would open their doors again. At that point, it was somehow difficult to even picture that moment.

On the 8th of April, 2020, in the middle of the lockdown, David sent an e-mail to his peers: artists, scholars, curators, and spectators belonging to different art communities. In this e-mail, there was a simple question: What will happen on your first theatre visit after the lockdown?

It was an invitation to imagine the future of theatre from this very specific moment when theatres were all closed and when it was not clear how and when and if they would open again.

With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Kristof van Baarle, Sven Age Birkeland, Antonia Baehr, Caroline Barneaud, Nicole Beutler, Maaike Bleeker, Julien Bruneau, Pieter De Buysser, Alondra Castellanos, Chloé Chignell, Amélie Coster, Jasper Delbecke, Zoë Demoustier, Wouter De Raeve, Charlotte De Somviele, Katja Dreyer, Jeroen Fabius, Silvia Fanti, Far, Nicolas Galeazzi, Emilie Gallier, Nada Gambier, Melih Gencboyaci, Konstantina Georgelou, Kristof van Gestel, Matthieu Goeury, Maximilian Haas, Ant Hampton, David Helbich, Marijke Hoogenboom, Rita Hofwijk, Breg Horemans, Asa Horvitz, Dolores Hulan, Mette Ingvartsen, Myriam Van Imschoot and Marcus Bergner (MM), Stefan Kaegi, Edyta Kozak, Bojana Kunst, Rudi Laermans, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Heike Langsdorf, Mylène Lauzon, André Lepecki, Kopano Maroga, Ivana Müller, Phoebe Osborne, Leonie Persyn, Julie Pfleiderer, Antoine Pickels, Amanda Piña, Jan-Philipp Possmann, Fransien van der Putt, Irena Radmanovic, Anna Rispoli, Martina Ruhsam, Jonas Rutgeerts, Nienke Scholts, Ula Sickle, Michael Simon, Karoline Skuseth, Lara Staal, Christel Stalpaert, Danae Theodoridou, Pankaj Tiwari, Vera Tussing, Marie Urban, Michiel Vandevelde, Hidde Aans Verkade, Mathilde Villeneuve, Georg Weinand, Stefanie Wenner, Siegmar Zacharias, Andros Zins-Browne.

The final iteration of Rainer's dance rant A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies, accompanied by texts offering a real-time account of Rainer's creative process.

Choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer has long investigated the ways in which movement can be a political act in and of itself—on the stage, on the screen, or at the lectern. In Revisions, Rainer pushes her interest in embodied activism to a new arena: what she calls the “dance rant.” This volume includes the final iteration of Rainer's latest dance rant, entitled A Truncated History of the Universe for Dummies. This performance piece evolved in live presentations in Dublin, Stockholm, and New York before being expanded and adapted in written form here. In this now-completed work, Rainer mobilizes her rage and bafflement at contemporary political events through the guise of Apollo, Leader of the Muses.

Revisions also includes a compilation of emails and diary entries that provide a real-time account of Rainer's process of creating and workshopping a dance. “Pedagogical Vaudeville 3” reveals Rainer's consistent interest in reworking and reconsidering material across multiple mediums, formats, and contexts, and offers a unique glimpse at the working methods of one of this century's preeminent dance artists.

Bookended with an introduction by artist and scholar Gregg Bordowitz and an analysis of Rainer's AG Indexical with a Little Help from H. M. by dance historian Anna Staniczenko, these texts serve not only as a revision of the conventional understanding of five decades of Rainer's production, but also as a timely manual for performance as an act of resistance.

Alexandra Kollontai was a Russian revolutionary who was appointed commissar of social welfare after the October Revolution and later one of the world’s first woman ambassadors. She fought for abortion rights, secularized marriage, and paid maternity leave—and considered “comradely love” to be a political force. This reader, in which artists and thinkers revisit Kollontai’s legacy in light of current feminist struggles, stems from a research project by CuratorLab at Konstfack and Tensta konsthall that accompanied Dora García’s exhibition “Red Love.” It also features the first English translation of the 1977 biographical play Kollontai by Swedish writer Agneta Pleijel.

Edited by MARIA LIND, MICHELE MASUCCI, JOANNA WARSZA
Contributions by BINI ADAMCZAK, SARA AHMED, GIULIA ANDREANI, LISE HALLER BAGGESEN, DORA GARCÍA, MICHAEL HARDT, MARIA LIND, MICHELE MASUCCI, ALLA MITROFANOVA, MARTYNA NOWICKA-WOJNOWSKA, PONTUS PETTERSSON, JONATHAN BROOKS PLATT, AGNETA PLEIJEL, NINA POWER, PAUL B. PRECIADO, THOMAS RAFA, ALICJA ROGALSKA, MOHAMMAD SALEMY, SALLY SCHONFELDT, AARON SCHUSTER, SOPHIA TABATADZE, PETRA BAUER & REBECKA THOR, OXANA TIMOFEEVA, JOANNA WARSZA, HANNAH ZAFIROPOULOS

This publication gathers reflections on and responses to the School for Temporary Liveness, a week-long event that brought performances, workshops, talks, conversations, and new formats for study together within the poetic frame of a school. All who participated were invited to consider themselves students of the school, and to move through several zones of encounter —the Classroom, the Library, Study Hall, and Night School— each of which engaged different modes of viewing and participation, thereby generating radically different choreographies of assembly for the practice of study. The contributions in this publication, all written by students of the school, animate the matter of betweenness that became, upon reflection, the most essential part of the school’s pedagogy. What these generous contributions make clear is that knowledge is not produced by school, rather, it emerges from our experiences of moving through school. Such knowledge becomes tangible to us through what we notice, what we remember, and most crucially, how we weave these experiences together.

Contributions by: Lauren Bakst, Rebecca Schneider, Jon Baldwin, Thomas F. DeFrantz, Andrew J. Smyth, Connie Yu, VK Preston and Donna Faye Burchfield.

Foregrounding the slippages between doing and undoing or not doing, speech and movement-based forms of address, and improvisation and the score, Lauren Bakst traces the forms performance takes, be they in our everyday experiences, intimate and personal relationships, memories, or on stage.

Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. Working at the interstices of language and movement, Bakst stages critical phenomenologies of performance. Her video, publication, and performance works have been commissioned by BAM/Wendy's Subway, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, and Pioneer Works. Lauren teaches in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts School of Dance, where she is currently curating The School for Temporary Liveness, to which rile* was invited to participate in its second edition over the spring of 2020.

The Immeasurable Want of Light is a collection of many short plays drawn from Mubashshir’s two-year personal practice of writing a play a day to capture and express the ever-shifting perspective of living in black skin. Inspired by Chris Ofili’s Afro Muses, each play is distinct in subject, form and tone, presenting a constellation of theatrical portraits.

Daaimah Mubashshir is based in NYC. Awards include a 2019 Core Writer Fellowship at The Playwrights Center (MN), a 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, and a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Other published works include The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and Molasses and A Blue Coat (Kenyon Review). www.daaimahmubashshir.com

Blending epic tragedy, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk, Is God Is is a revenge tale about twin sisters. In this award-winning work by playwright Aleshea Harris, emotions are laid bare through dialogue and visual gaps in language.

Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. What to Send Up When It Goes Down, a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-blackness, had its critically-acclaimed NYC premiere in 2018, was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine and was nominated for a Drama Desk award.

Mixing live performance with algorithms and interfaces, A Piece of Work is the second project in Annie Dorsen’s “algorithmic theater” series. A digital Hamlet for a post-humanist age, A Piece of Work deploys a set of ingeniously designed computer algorithms to generate real-time adaptations of Shakespeare’s original play. New scenes, songs, scores and visuals emerge from an intricate web of technology. With an introduction by Dorsen, and screen-shots of the system as it runs, this book elaborates both the technological and the poetic procedures of algorithmic theater.

Annie Dorsen is a director and writer, whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance.

As the founding father of the radical dance form that he called Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is a legendary figure in the history of art and contemporary dance. Though influenced by Western artists and writers—the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman, the writings of Artaud, de Sade, Bataille, and Genet, and the drawings and paintings of Goya, Picasso, Toyen, Beardsley, and others–he was dedicated to the particular experience of the marginalized, Japanese suffering body after World War II.

In the mid-1970s, Hijikata became concerned with developing notation for his Butoh, and some of these Butoh-fu notations remain, largely in the form of notebooks transcribed by his disciples. Costume en Face is the first publication of one of Hijikata’s notebook notations in either English or Japanese. In it we can see, for the first time, the profound interconnectedness of language and body in Hijikata’s process of composition.

Tatsumi Hijikata was born in Japan in 1928. He founded the radical dance form known as Butoh, which requires dancers to internalize complex and often grotesque images, experiences and perspectives in order to produce precise movements. Even after his abrupt death in 1986, his dance works and writings continue to be extremely influential.

A Midsummer Night’s Press and Sinister Wisdom are pleased to announce the publication of Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker with a new introduction by poet and scholar Judy Grahn; an afterword by volume editor Julie R. Enszer, with extensive notes on the poems; photographs of Parker and a bibliography.

'In The Complete Works of Pat Parker, we have a trove of her artistic and political engagements-poetry and stories and plays and speeches; these are not separate realities. They intertwine in her now classic works, Movement in Black (1978), Womanslaughter (1978), and Jonestown & Other Madness (1985). But here too are less celebrated and uncollected works, plays especially, that show off Parker’s willingness to experiment, to push us towards more politicized realities.' - Alexis de Veaux

Included in Sinister Wisdom 102: The Complete Works of Pat Parker are Parker’s masterwork, Movement in Black, as well as Jonestown & other madness. Parker’s prose writing is collected in The Complete Works along with two unpublished plays and a number of previously uncollected poems. Editor Julie R. Enszer notes, “The breadth of creative output collected here demonstrates the seriousness of Parker’s overall work as a writer. Beginning in 1963, when she was nineteen years old, and continuing until she died in 1989, Parker took her work as a writer seriously. Gathering as much of it as possible into a single volume invites readers to take it seriously as well.”

The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters' disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond.
—from the introduction by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine's first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?

Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles's intentions. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist's studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what—and who—is actually on display.

On the occasion of Merce Cunningham's centennial comes this edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist's book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham's compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing.

Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as "the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance ... [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein's and Stanislavsky's classics on the artistic process." By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns.

Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham's enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They ex­plore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of orga­nizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

Practicing Futures through Voicing, the second book in this series, connects with the first book’s concern with how practices destabi­lize and (re)constitute the concept of conditioning. It does so by questioning how to process life in a way that allows us to create volume, take space, and find our (tone of) voice—first in our immediate surroundings and, through this, in the world as it struggles and moves toward ongoing futures.

October 2019

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

Thinking Conditioning through Practice, the first book in this series, addresses the question of how these practices destabilize and (re)constitute the concept of conditioning through six writing processes performed by Alex Arteaga, Julia Barrios de la Mora, Julien Bruneau, Laetitia Gendre & Miram Rohde, Heike Langsdorf and Kristof Van Baarle.

June 2018

Contributions by: Julien de Smet, Ronny Heiremans, Heike Langsdorf, Vanessa Müller, Filip Van Dingenen, Stijn Van Dorpe, Clémentine Vaultier, Katleen Vermeir.

The books included in the series Choreography as Conditioning are rooted in a cycle of work sessions entitled CASC at KASK, in which students work together with invited guests. They explore the notions of choreography, understood as ways of organizing subjects in their surroundings, and conditioning in both art-making and society-making. Where, how, and by whom are things organized and what kind of landscapes of experience are made (im)possible by the practices we enact and encounter?

The Orphans of Tar – A Speculative Opera answers the question posed in the second book by transforming life into voices and presenting possible mindsets through co-authoring a factual fiction. As such, it constitutes a mental space in which ficti­tious characters find an almost disturbing expansion of their thoughts. Accordingly, the book can be considered as an alle­gory of human thoughts as (possible) actions: what could happen becomes what does happen. For better and worse.

October 2019

During seven years, 16 performers spread Lecture For Every One throughout Europe. They intervened in more than 300 different gatherings, from a corporate sales meeting to a brass-band rehearsal and a municipal council. As uninvited guests, they addressed every one with exactly the same text. Until now, the project has remained largely invisible to the wider public. This book now sheds light on the information and expertise Lecture For Every One has generated—feedback, stories and memories from a range of perspectives. It reflects on how places where people gather can become political instances, on the (im)possibility of addressing every one, and on the value of fiction in our daily lives.

Sarah Vanhee is an artist, performer and writer. Her interdisciplinary work moves between the civilian space and the institutional arts sector, and is best known for its radical gestures and its engagement with non-dominant voices and narratives. Since 2007 she has created several onstage per­formances, (semi-)public interventions and site-specific works that have been widely presented internationally.

With texts & contributions by: Adinda Van Geystelen, Anabela Almeida, Anne Thuot, Anton Wilsens, Bojan Djordjev, Carola Bärtschiger, Christine De Smedt, Christophe Slagmuylder, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Deborah Hazler, Edith Goddeeris, Elina Pirinen, Evelyne Coussens, Gurur Ertem, Iiris Viirpalu, Ilse Ghekiere, Jan De Brabanter, Jan de Zutter, Joe Kelleher, Katja Dreyer, Kristien Van den Brande, Kristof Blom, Lara Barsaq, Lex Bohlmeijer, Linda Sepp, Mariel Supka, Marika Ingels, Matthieu Goeury, Mylène Lauzon, Robin Vanbesien, Salka Ardal Rosengren, Sarah Vanagt, Sarah Vanhee, Silvia Bottiroli, Taziana Pyson and many others.

ROT is a publication reflecting the research “Wicked technology/Wild fermentation,” by Sara Manente that focuses on forms and practice of fermentation as ways to rethink bodies and their making. This glossy magazine performs research, aiming to infect the reader, and questioning how to spread, publish, and help the work survive. 

Sara Manente is a performance artist, dance maker and researcher born in Italy and living in Brussels. She is interested in narrowing the distance between the performer, the audience, and the work. Her research starts from a dance practice that problematizes perception, translation, and ways of doing. Her work comes out in hybrid forms: book launch, 3Dfilm, written text, interview, choreographic piece, workshop, telepathic experience, collaboration, et al.

Neighbor’s mutable, shifty narrator alternately reifies and attempts to refuse the constricting, separating, culture-load bearing wall between lovers and neighbors. As antagonisms and intimacies converge, Levitsky troubles the divisions within urban space, and between spatial and ethical frames: “I live on a street where / people turn (on) each other / into a theory.”

This second edition, printed a decade after Neighbor‘s original publication, features an expanded version of the play, “Perfect California: A Family Affair.”

The book Writing Scores is the result of 3 months of written dialogues produced within the group of artistic researchers of a.pass during the Block I /2014 curated by Lilia Mestre. Questions on art, dreams, politics, violence, research, life, practice, bureaucracy, resistance, etcetera, … are addressed and later on re-addressed, revisited and assembled into a book with (at least) three faces… 

BUBBLE SCORE – The Relation between Performance and Writing is the third book of the ScoreScapes publications series. The book contains texts by a.pass researchers, collages as well as Scores for the Reader inserted at the back of the book. 

The book Perform Back Score is the result of 3 months of performed, sketched and written dialogue produced within a group of artistic researchers, each plunging into a study about the Conditions for the Emergence of Poetics. Poetics used here as ‘acts’ that transform our ways of perceiving, as situations that invite another understanding of ‘things’.