Scores & Scripts

Acoustic Thought
Snejanka Mihaylova
The Last Books - 20.00€ -

Acoustic Thought is an exegesis of the Gospel of Thomas, an apocryphal gospel found at Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945.
 
With a score for six female voices by Lisa Holmqvist; a collage of writings by medieval female mystics; and photographs taken by Jeff Weber at the Coptic Museum in Cairo, during a research period at Beirut project space.
 
The book’s covers reconstruct patterns found on the covers of Nag Hammadi Codex II, which, as well as the Gospel of Thomas, contains the Apocryphon of John, the Gospel of Philip, the Hypostasis of the Archons, On the Origin of the World, the Exegesis on the Soul, and the Book of Thomas the Contender.
 
Presented and performed during Perfomance Days, Amsterdam (November 2014) and Hotel Theory, REDCAT, Los Angeles (November 2015).

Writing in Space, 1973–2019
Lorraine O'Grady
Duke University Press - 28.00€ -  out of stock

Writing in Space, 1973-2019 gathers the writings of conceptual artist Lorraine O'Grady, who for over forty years has investigated the complicated relationship between text and image.

A firsthand account of O'Grady's wide-ranging practice, this volume contains statements, scripts, and previously unpublished notes charting the development of her performance work and conceptual photography; her art and music criticism that appeared in the Village Voice and Artforum; critical and theoretical essays on art and culture, including her classic "Olympia's Maid"; and interviews in which O'Grady maps, expands, and complicates the intellectual terrain of her work. She examines issues ranging from black female subjectivity to diaspora and race and representation in contemporary art, exploring both their personal and their institutional implications.

O'Grady's writings—introduced in this collection by critic and curator Aruna D'Souza—offer a unique window into her artistic and intellectual evolution while consistently plumbing the political possibilities of art.

Edited by Aruna D'Souza

Maquillage as Meditation: Carmelo Bene and the Undead
Sara Giannini
If I Can't Dance - 20.00€ -

Partly a script, partly a personal voyage into the psyche of diseducation, this book happens, has happened and will happen on the 31st of October in a place called ‘The Palace of Melancholy’. In this temporal and spatial loop, the figure of Italian actor, author, director, philosopher, and public persona Carmelo Bene is summoned to hopefully be dismissed once and for all. Bene is looked at by the author reluctantly and yet resolutely through inner voices of dissent, shame and rebellion. He is imagined in gatherings that didn’t happen and read through an epistemology of contradiction. In Giannini’s company and support, Snejanka Mihaylova, Jacopo Miliani, and Arnisa Zeqo probe the walls of the Palace, looking for an exit.

She Gave It To Me I Gave It To Her
Clara Amaral
Kunstverein Amsterdam - 25.00€ -  out of stock

She gave it to me I got it from her—a poem that choreographs her hands and voice—her voice that reads out loud the book—becoming script—becoming performance—becoming archive — the permanence of her voice in the book—in the book—the presence and absence of their names—She gave it to me I got it from her—It's a book and a choreography, read out loud and handled by a performer, for a group of people.

Clara Amaral is an artist working with text and performance. Her artistic practice is situated in an interdisciplinary perspective, questioning what it means to be a reader, to be a writer, aiming to expand existing modes of reading and writing. Central to her practice is the investigation of innovative publishing modalities and the performative aspect of writing and language through an intersectional feminist approach. www.misted.cc

Written and choreographed by Clara Amaral
Graphic Design Ronja Andersen and Karoline Swiezynski
Copy editor Isabelle Sully
Conceptualization and fabrication of objects Olga Micińska in dialogue with Clara Amaral
Published by Kunstverein Publishing

The Tiger's Mind
Beatrice Gibson
Sternberg Press - 22.00€ -  out of stock

The project initiated by artist and filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and typographer Will Holder, based on the eponymous score written by Cornelius Cardew in 1967.

In 2010, a production process was instigated by filmmaker Beatrice Gibson and typographer Will Holder, with the intention of using British composer Cornelius Cardew's musical score The Tiger's Mind as a means of producing speech. Since the score concerns the changing relations between six characters in production, practitioners from other fields (musicians and visual artists) were invited to three conversations at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Kunstverein in Amsterdam, and CAC Brétigny. 

After each conversation, a printed document was made and distributed amongst the characters, to serve as a score for subsequent conversations. Any other ends would be found in conversation. After some time it became clear that a film would be made: Beatrice Gibson's The Tiger's Mind. This book is a document of its making.

Reading Room: An Experiment in Expanded Reading
Harriet Plewis
Synchronise Witches Press - 18.50€ -  out of stock

“Reading Room: meeting the universe halfway is a book – a collection of five booklets – that came out of a multi-sensory project created by Harriet Plewis that attempted to make sense of a key text by theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad.

The volume contains a booklet describing the ideas, experiments and practices of expanded reading in reference to Barad’s text, and the remaining four booklets are workbooks, or manuals, to help people replicate or expand on the ideas themselves. The books were produced by the artist in collaboration with Sam Whetton and Chery Styles.”

5x A5 booklets, All black & white digitally printed, 4x saddle stitched 1x perfect bound. Comes sandwiched between embossed card.

News Animations
Simone Forti
Nero Editions - 25.00€ -  out of stock

A reference book containing all the transcripts of Simone Forti's News Animations.

The book is the complete collection of Simone Forti's News Animations, one of the works that best reveal her artistic practice. The news and, more broadly, the most pressing issues of the global socio-political situation, are used to explore the potential of language, its dimensions, and its combination with dance, movements, words, images, and music. Simone Forti has always "danced" the news, it's the way she tells them. But, above all, it's the way she internalizes them, feels them, and processes them. Through a stream of consciousness, the artist grants voice and body to thoughts about the world, its conflicts, war, injustices, and inequalities. 

The volume collects Simone Forti's News Animations from 1980 to 2018—through the transcriptions of the performances, images, and drawings—seeking to capture their spirit, their poetic stance and, mostly, understand how they manage to describe the society and the world we live in.

Introduction by Luca Lo Pinto
Published August 2021

Intourism
Kadri Noormets
Lugemik - 10.00€ -  out of stock

INTOURISM is the space of organised concentration, playing a story about how a man who has no identification documents travels the world. how he was banned from entering a country for life. how he’s got no clue what to do with that and then how he remembers nothing about it. it’s a tale of adventure, anything and everything he runs into during his travels. of course it’s meditative manipulation and a question of feeling; activation of inner civilisation by passion, by calming down or by nothing at all. the altering of text into a metaphor that defines man.

The play is published as two books, one in Estonian and one in English.

kadrinoormets: in december last year peeter rästas came to me with a proposal. the same evening I accepted it – we did not marry. I love rästas but not necessarily theatre – the same night I began to write, I prepared – the text ended up being dedicated to rästas. six months later I gave him a text set of a hundred to read and get to know – rästas wasn’t too excited about it, but I certainly was. rästas seemed sceptical, he approached it with the thespian distrust of abstract (body-)patterns within the formula of stagetext; in terms of understanding, of course. that distrust suited me, scepticism as sweet starting potential – I knew that it would pass – rästas hasn’t stopped.

Borrowing Positions
Various
Lugemik - 17.50€ -  out of stock

Borrowing Positions: Role-Playing Design & Architecture is a speculative book which reflects on the design- and architecture-centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Plays) organized by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book explores issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care responsibilities and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

The book consists of three parts: an overview of previous LARPs and their theoretical background; reflections (essays, visual essays and interviews) on LARP-related issues; and a practical (DIY) section – a step-by-step guide on how to organize your own design LARP.

Contributors to the book vary from architecture and design practitioners to performance artists working with role-play and fiction. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in inderdisciplinary practices in design and architecture.

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad
Pia Louwerens
Self-Published - 16.00€ -  out of stock

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad is an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of a performance artist who lands a part-time job as an Embedded Artistic Researcher in an art institution. Invested in queer theory and institutional critique, she sets out to perform the artist 'differently' through a process of negation and passivity, inadvertently causing her relationship with the insitution's curator to grow increasingly speculative and paranoid. Louwerens dresses her protagonist in the different professional guises of artistic labour. Het experiences as tour guide, security guard, artist, hostess and researcher at different institutions begin to overlap and blend under the name of 'performance'.

I'm Not Sad, The World Is Sad is a fragmented story of paranoid and reparative reading, script and utterance, exposure and vulnerability.

I am Welton Santos.
Sofia Caesar
Self-Published - 40.00€ -

I am Welton Santos reenacts a dialogue between the Brazilian geo-bio-architect Welton Santos and an Interviewer. The book, which is always read collectively, is used in reading performances by groups of at least 3 people.

Printed on the occasion of an artist residency at PAV, Parco d’Arte Vivente, Turin, July 2016. Texts based on transcripts of interviews with Welton Santos.

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I have Been
Rhea Anasta (Ed.)
If I Can't Dance - 15.00€ -  out of stock

Adrian Piper: Performing Objects I Have Been, 1972-2018, is a collection of documents from, or potentially relevant to Adrian Piper's performance Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76) that has been edited by art historian and curator Rhea Anastas. This publication sits within If I Can't Dance, I Don't Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution's Peformance in Residence Series, and its seventh artistic program, Social Movement (2017-18).

Adrian Piper, who lives in Berlin, at the age of seventy-two, is one of America's best-known artists. It so happens she is also one of America's best-known female artists. And yet, to use such a qualifier is to make the mistake of accepting limitations, coerced and containing, for artists and thier work— and, to quote Jacqueline Rose, "to dissolve the very possibility for women of any purchase on historical time." 

This publication focuses on an early performance called Some Reflective Surfaces (1975-76). In it, as Piper dances under spotlights, she stages multiple images and sounds. Over the work's duration, the audience follows the performer's images, physical performance, and sound. In "Artist's Statement" (1999), Piper descrvibes her 1960's work that led up to this one as "concered with duration, repetition, and meditative conciousness of the indexical present." Some Reflective Surfaces was produced in New York at the Fine Arts Building, New York University, in 1975, and then at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1976. The performance has not been staged since. A collection of the documents of Some Reflective Surfaces is reissued in this publication for the first time, along with other writings spanning Piper's work from 1972-2018.

Published 2021. 

"A Lecture on Stagnation"
Cally Spooner
uh books - 20.00€ -  out of stock

It is less a lecture, more like a cartography.
Parts may or may not sync up, we will see.

Ce qui suit est “Une conférence sur la stagnation”
Il s’agit moins d’une conférence que d’une 
cartographie. Ses parties peuvent ou non 
se synchroniser, nous verrons bien.

Dit is “Een lezing over stagnatie.”
Het is minder een lezing, dan een cartografie.
De onderdelen hiervan kunnen wel of niet
synchroon lopen, we zullen zien.

Trilingual (!) edition. Loose sheets in an envelope. On the same model as Resistance.

Delta — An Ocean Call
Izabella Borzecka, Pontus Pettersson (eds.)
PAM Stockholm - 25.00€ -  out of stock

Delta is a coming together for choreographic and performative work to be shared and exercised, a place for sharing work by doing the work. A container for participatory projects, dancing, exchange and choreographic inquiries. Delta is organised as evening dance classes, artist zines and thematic publications, like this one: On water histories, narratives and practices. 

Water both divides and merges, varies and manifests in different kinds of shapes and structures, acquiring different relations with its surroundings. As a transformative material, could one say that water has a different kind of logic, another kind of dance? In this publication, the contributors Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried,  D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson, and Alice MacKenzie share their multi-layered practices, writings, memories and scores on water. Inviting you to submerge!

With contributions by: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson and Alice MacKenzie.

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris: First Move, Original Rains: a Score for Sensing the Precipitational
Pontus Pettersson: Dripping from my fingertips
Adham Hafez: To dance about nature?
Daniela Bershan in collaboration with Sabrina Seifried: Mapping OCEAN
Sindri Runudde: Chosen by the barnacles
Vibeke Hermanrud in conversation with Elly Vadseth: Submerged
Axel Andersson: Confessions of a swimmer
D.N.A: Hydrocapsules.love
Paul Mahek:e As the Waters Recall
Alice MacKenzie: I know that smell
Every Ocean Hughes: Ocean
Pontus Pettersson: 100 ways of water

Graphic design by Sara Kaaman

Yes, But Is It Edible?
Will Holder, Alex Waterman, Robert Ashley
New Documents - 46.00€ -  out of stock

Some years ago, Will Holder and Alex Waterman proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk ofYes, But Is It Edible? is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his “band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); and in landscapes produced by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson—the result of a thirty-year relationship.

The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.

Yes, But Is It Edible? is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Will Holder and Alex Waterman that a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agape (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); and The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson; Sternberg Press, 2012).

to discover a fossil on your tibia: scories and other mutations of scores
Magdalena Ptasznik
a.pass - 7.50€ -  out of stock

'To discover a fossil on your tibia: scories and other mutations of scores' is a collection of texts exploring the score as a choreographic tool for writing.

Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.

Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public.

Revue Phylactère n° 1 Patati Patata
Auriane Preud'homme, Roxanne Maillet
immixition books - 25.00€ -  out of stock

Phylactère is born from a deep desire to transcribe performance, with authentic, subjective and spontaneous point of views; giving voice to amateurs, artists, designers and thinkers alike. Phylactère is published once a year. Each issue takes an onomatopoeia as its theme. Phylactère publishes transitional writings and in turn welcomes the discrepancies between a script, the performed action, to its translation; with an extreme and adventurous attention given to contexts, gestures, emotions and spaces put at stake during this transcription.

Phylactère is digging into post-performance, allowing those who weren’t present to get a reading of it and experience it from another perspective. This first issue has the theme of the French onomatopoeia Patati Patata: an inexhaustible and endless chatter, long or short discourse, gossip, word of mouth, whispers… Patati Patata or «Yada Yada Yada» in English, is a too much of speech, an endless story, an et cetera expressed out loud. Phylactère is a journal composed of multiple voices, initiated by Roxanne Maillet and Auriane Preud’homme, produced by RondPoint Projects and published by Immixtion Books.

Contributors : Alexandru Balgiu, Anna Tuccio, Anne Marchis Mouren, ArianE Sirota, Barbara Quintin & Liv Schulman, Barthélémy Cardonne, Camille Soulat, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, etaïnn zwer, Ilke Gers, Josèfa Ntjam, Laure Vigna, Louise Siffert, Lou-Maria Le Brusq, Maria Barnas, Marouchka Payen, Martha Salimbeni, officeabc, Philippe Goguely, Sarah Korzec, Simili Gum, Sven Dehens et Uta Eisenreich.

Texts in English and French
Graphic Design : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet 

Atalanta (Acts of God)
Robert Ashley
Burning Books - 24.00€ -  out of stock

The definitive text of Atalanta (Acts of God), which has been performed internationally since the 1980s, includes the entire libretto and an afterword by Ashley, compiled and edited by Sumner Carnahan. 

Robert Ashley is a prolific composer and writer, best known for his work in new forms of opera: epic prose poems he sets to music, which have been awarded, commissioned, and performed internationally for over forty-five years. In the 1960s, Ashley organized Ann Arbor's legendary ONCE Festival and directed the ONCE Group. During the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, toured with the Sonic Arts Union, and wrote and produced Perfect Lives, an opera for television widely praised as the precursor of music-television.

Whole Language Language : (1976-1977)
Kenneth Gaburo
Lingua Press - 28.00€ -  out of stock

Lingua Press, 1988

Gaburo was born in Somerville, New Jersey. He served as a professor of music at the University of Illinois, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Iowa. His notable students include James Tenney and Allen Strange. He is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics.

In 1968, he joined the faculty at the new San Diego campus of the University of California where in 1972 a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to start NMCE IV, this time with an actor, a virtuoso speaker, a mime, a gymnast, and a sound-movement artist (Rosen and Moore 2001). Until his resignation from UCSD in 1975 he produced a large number of integrated theatrical works, such as the collection Lingua and Privacy.

In 1975, Gaburo founded Lingua Press, which produces scores, books, records, audio tapes, videotapes, and films (Rosen and Moore 2001). This firm is dedicated to putting forth unique artist-produced works in all media having to do with language and music. Many of the publications have been exhibited in book art shows throughout the world. Gaburo lived in the Anzo-Borrego desert writing and teaching from 1980 until 1983. In 1980, he was artistic director for the first "authentic" production of Harry Partch's The Bewitched for the Berlin Festival (recorded on Enclosure Five: Harry Partch, innova 405). His understanding of Partch's concept of corporeality has deep connections with his own concern for physicality and how it informs compositions. His 1982 tape work, RE-RUN, for instance, was generated after a 20-hour sensory deprivation exercise.

He became Director of the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Iowa in 1983. The studio put intensive focus on composition, technology, psycho-acoustic perception, performance, and the affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual to create his/her own language reality. At the studio, he founded the Seminar for Cognitive Studies, a forum for discussion of the creative process. His concern for the investigation of music as legitimate research, and composition as the creation of intrinsic appropriate language, led to a series of readings in compositional linguistics for solo performer.

He most often made innovative use of electronics and explored tonality, serialism, and what he called "compositional linguistics" such as in his LINGUA series (Listening). He also wrote minimal pieces such as The Flow of (u) for three voices singing unison.

Gaburo died in 1993 in Iowa City, Iowa.

The archive of his life's work is held at the University of Illinois Music Library.

I saw the world collapse and it was only a word
Hassan Khan
Mousse Publishing - 22.00€ -  out of stock

In I saw the world collapse and it was only a word, published on the occasion of his concert in December 2019 at Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Hassan Khan articulates the communal yet individualized feelings of sadness and trouble before they coalesce into larger structures and institutions through a libretto for five vocalists, showing us the fleeting moments of the world as it is collapsing rather than only the dust of its collapse. The work is characterized by layered fragments that gesture toward a tonality and unity that nearly coalesce, but that dissipate as soon as they emerge. The collapsing word could be anything: the death of a family member; a defeated revolution; a heartbreak. It means something different from one place, one individual, to the next while still existing so broadly that it defines a more communal experience felt across the globe. A collapse from what? Rather than a doomsday message, it intimates that perhaps the world isn't really collapsing at all. Instead, Khan poses collapse as an ever-present underlying condition, challenging much contemporary intellectualizing that positions the current moment as somehow peculiar or extraordinary. 

"1) Blame your partner for every disaster that has even occurred: G. 
2) Oscillate in confusion between these two pitches using a glissando to come and go at a narcotic speed: A♭ C♭. 
3) Argue with your best friend while looking at them using this progression: G – B – D – E♯. 
4) Demand an apology using the progression: E – C – A♭♭ – F. 
5) Beg for forgiveness by using the two highest pitches you can reach. 
6) Ask a question by humming this progression: E♭♭ – D♭ – Ax – A♯. 
7) Lose interest in everything using this progression: F – A – C – C♯."

Hassan Khan (born 1975 in London, lives and works in Cairo) works with image, sound, text, space and situation.

Backward Sway
Marie Raffn
Forlaget Gestus - 30.00€ -  out of stock

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.

Language Is Skin: Scripts for Performances
Romy Rüegger
Archive Books - 18.00€ -  out of stock

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

cart (0)