ORDUITHE
September 29th & 30th 2010
Curated by Andrew Mitchelson
All images courtesy of Bernard Mills
This Special Edition of Live@8 was made possible by the generous support of the Arts Council of Ireland project award. Orduithe brought together screenings, live work and performance from the UK across 2 days, the 29th and 30th September 2010.
Orduithe looked at rules, instructions and play in relation to performance.
This included artists who created new works to sets of instructions, or artists and writers who looked at the rules and regulations which govern our lives. Playful work also took place where YOU the audience followed sets of instructions.
Video Programme:
Adrien Sina, artist, art historian and theoritician showed three films from a collection called “Farafin a Tabouba - Black and White ethical projects”
Yael Davids' film “The hand is quicker than the eye” was shot in a men’s prison in Belgium and explored the concept of magic.
Live Works:
Rotozazas “Etiquette” took place in Café 8 in the Galway City Museum.
The performance took place at a table for two people with headphones.
Monica Ross “Act 27 Anniversary: Acts of Memory” was a public recitation of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights with co-recitors from Galway who memorized and recalled the Articles along with artist Monica Ross. Special Thanks to everyone who took part in the event at the Galway City Museum.
Thanks to Martin Crosbie at Café 8 in the Museum.
http://youtu.be/qaBfZya1IL4
Siobhan Kane delivered a fascinating and original performative lecture on Irish women’s literature.
Victoria McCormack performed “The Unwanted”
and Ann Maria Healy performed “Untitled”.
Local Galway artists Victoria McCormack and Ann Maria Healy developed performance works in response to UK based artist Karen Christopher. Over 5 weeks in advance of Orduithe, Karen set them the same performative tasks by email. A correspondence was entered into to create new work through instructions. The two Galway artists did not know that they were working to the same set of initial rules.
Mitch & Parry performed “Oceans Apart”.
Oreet Ashery’s ”A Semitic Score” was performed by and featured artist and dancer Ali Kaviani. Vivienne Dick provided the live video feed, to Oreet Ashery performing in London.
FrenchMottershead created “The People’s Series Microperformances”
The audience performed sets of instructions to each other during the evening.
DJ OpJop played only instructed tracks, downloaded directly from the internet as requested by the audience.
More Information on the artists & works:
ROTAZAZA ETIQUETTE
http://www.rotozaza.co.uk/etiquette2.html
Durational participatory work throughout the evening.
Excerpt of the work made by New York Times can be found at:
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/01/16/theater/1194817112282/urbaneye-theater-and-pierogies.html
Etiquette is a half-hour experience for two people in a public space. There is no-one watching - other people in the cafe or bar are not aware of it. You wear headphones which tell you what to say to each other, or to use one of the objects positioned to the side. There is a kind of magic involved - for it to work you just need to listen and respond accordingly. Some say it's good to do this with someone you know, someone to share this with. Others say it works well with a stranger.
Etiquette exposes human communication at both its rawest and most delicate and explores the difficulty of turning our thoughts into words we can trust. A young girl and an old man lead the participants into several micro-situations, often borrowed from film or theatre, wherein the private worlds shared between two people split and reform incessantly.
Alongside their innovative stage works (Doublethink, Five in the Morning) involving instructions to unrehearsed performers, Rotozaza here invite the audience to try it themselves. Etiquette offers the fantasy of speaking with someone without having to plan what you say, and the resulting thrill of disowning responsibility in a performance situation. Conversation is shown to be a kind of theatre whereby 'audience' and 'actor' roles are imperceptibly assumed and exchanged.
Ant Hampton and Silvia Mercuriali (Rotozaza) created the original version of Etiquette with the support of Paul Bennun, founder and director of Somethin' Else. Paul holds internationally recognised awards, co-authored the British Government's recent report on the future of digital music, and has worked with Artangel, John Berger and Theatre de Complicité.
FRENCHMOTTERSHEAD
THE PEOPLE’S SERIES - MICROPERFORMANCE
http://www.frenchmottershead.com/
Durational participatory work throughout the evening.
The People Series is an interactive microperformance game that trades social interaction as a commodity. Designed for art festivals, galleries and social events, the work adapts the technology of the business card to create an experimental social milieu. Each version of the game is site-sensitive with the instructions on the cards depending on the nature of the event and venue.
Players are invited to pick a card at random containing an instruction for a microperformance, which is to be performed (at their will) during the event. Each card contains numbered peel off stickers for players to mark the location of their performance and the artists contact details. All players are briefed not to disclose their instruction and that "tonight we are all performers".
The stickers correspond to a "key" on display in the venue listing all instructions scripted for the event. This sets up a paradox between the secret knowledge (on the card) and public knowledge (on the key). Throughout the game, the stickers build up across the venue documenting each microperformance and working in conjunction with the key, collectively trace a network of social interaction.
Whether slipped into a wallet, pocket, purse or bag, the card persists as an afterlife of the event. Participants are encouraged to use leftover stickers to document their microperformances elsewhere. The contact details act as a silent injunction: "call FrenchMottershead, visit our website and feedback on your experience."
OREET ASHERY
A SEMITIC SCORE
15 minute performance
In A Semitic Score Ashery writes and records a set of instructions for a dance routine, that will be performed by Marcus Fisher, Ashery’s orthodox Jewish male alter ego. Those same instructions will be given to a local artist from Galway, a Muslim man, embodied by the artist. The artist will never see Marcus’ performance of the instructions and will interpret the vocal instructions and perform them in his own way. The film of Fisher’s Semitic score and the reinterpretation of the instructions will be performed simultaneously. The piece takes its roots from the notion that both Muslims and Jews come from the same Semitic DNA, with the geographical distance between the artists, allowing space for unexpected parallels, to take place.
MITCH & PARRY
OCEANS APART
10 minute performance
Mitch & Parry’s new working project examines the landscape of the body as a space for collecting and exhibiting the stains and marks of loss, love and labour, by developing their work of creating external discourse with internal bodily fluid – creating a tension between provoking and inviting the spectator. The starting point for their collaboration commenced with a set of three rules which the artists gave to each other to frame the work in process, and as each stage ends and the next begins, the viewer is required to renegotiate their relationship to the performers and what they see within the intimate spaces which unfold before them.
ADRIEN SINA
Farafin a ni Toubabou - black and white ethical projects
40 minutes looped
Artist and theoretician Adrien Sina presents a compilation of film works and documentation taken from performances, instruction pieces and videos from 2005-2007. This dvd contains eight works made on location in France, UK and Mali and reflects aspects of Sina's interests in ethics, human rights and political representations through participatory practices.
ACTS OF MEMORY
Marking the 60th anniversary of the Declaration in December 2008 with a performance at the British Library, London, artist Monica Ross is aiming to recite the Declaration from memory in 60 different contexts and events, alone and with others, towards meeting the first call of the Declaration throughout and beyond the anniversary year. A spoken repetition of the Declaration, Anniversary — an act of memory, is an act of witness and a method of publicly drawing attention to the continuing need to re-iterate and know the importance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The project seeks invitations from venues, groups and organisations for solo performances by Monica Ross at relevant events and in meaningful contexts. Opportunities to work with individuals and groups to develop collective and multi-lingual memorisations for public recitation are actively sought and workshops towards realising collective performances can be provided. Solo performances are taking place with partnership venues and new, collective performances are being
developed through collaborations with communities, projects, groups, individuals and organisations. Collective performances draw on the linguistic and cultural diversity of individual participants to reveal the Declaration’s expression of common values and shared aspirations. As an act of memory, the performances are a demonstration of the mental and physical work entailed in remembering and a metaphor for the struggle for memory. Participants are invited to choose one or more articles of the Declaration significant to them and to commit these to memory in a preferred language
and perform them publicly with the artist. To date, collective performances have included contributions in Arabic, Irish, Italian, Macedonian, Punjabi, Spanish, Slovak and Swedish. In attempting to commit the Declaration to memory, the performances are challenged by human error, failure and disappointment, but the commitment to learn and understand the Declaration, and to voice this process publicly, prevails. Rather than the absence of mind associated with learning by rote, the Anniversary
performances propose the attempt to learn the Declaration by heart as a basis for developing presence of mind in relation to Human Rights.
In the next phase of the project Monica Ross is developing an Acts of Memory dvd supported by the Live Art Development Agency and Unbound to highlight the project so far and act as an instruction and learning tool for co-recitors of the Declaration.
JOSHUA SOFAER
PERFORM EVERY DAY
Publication on display
This artist's book seeks to establish a relationship between everyday actions and performance. It encourages us to go about our daily routine, as if it were a work of art. Split into three sections, the book invites us to enact a series of prompts which are taken from our everyday lives and shift our focus from the prosaic, or sometimes mundane, to the sublime and insightful.
“As a child and young man he would get worked up about whether or not what he was feeling was what he was feeling, or if it was rather a put on or an act. He would, for example, worry that his worry was simply something he was playing at. At worst, all his behaviours would appear to him like the making of a drama.
He calmed down when he started to think of his everyday activities as opportunities for performance. He became the audience of his very own private theatre.”