notes on performance, performance notes, & notes on notes on performance (1)

We are trained to make arguments: but the arts of mediation that would incite absorption, attunement, and excitement are not seen as craft skills for critics. This seems a mistake.

Lauren Berlant, in conversation with Dana Luciano

photo by Valerie Oliveiro

I’m writing a short series on this newsletter about performance writing and writing about and within performance. I couldn’t – and didn’t want to – come up with a less cumbersome name.

This is intentionally in relationship with the New Works 4 Weeks Festival at Red Eye Theater in Minneapolis, a showcase of experimental live performance that’s in its 40th year!! To be completely clear, I am making a performance for the 3rd week of this festival, where I share a night with Marggie Ogas. You can get tickets here. Last night, at the second night of the Works-in-Progress cohort performances, artistic director Val Oliveiro described this festival as ‘May church’ for the Minneapolis arts community, and they were very much describing me in that sentiment.

If you are attending any part of this festival, I would also encourage you to check out José A Luis’s embedded writing in relationship with the artists and festival through Red Eye Theater.

So, all that said, there is a lot of personal creative and community investment for me in writing this series, but I hope that the themes and curiosities that I have feel resonant broadly, no matter where you are. I am curious about how writing lives within performances, how performances are made through writing, and how performances can have many lives when writing is a vehicle.

I went to the second night of the Works-in-Progress with the intention to write about the 5 short pieces made for the weekend. I enjoyed what this practice brought to my viewership – what it felt like to have my eyes and my ears so wide open, what it felt like to be scribbling in the dark across my open notebook. I take a lot of pleasure in notes, reading about notetaking, looking at others’ notes (Garth Greenwell’s newsletter about taking notes makes me actively horny because I am a nerd). But unlike close reading a written text, “reading” performance happens so quickly at first, and your hand can’t move fast enough. Then, there’s all the resonances that come with the after-images, when you’ve left the show, when you see what sticks with you in your dreams/in a few months/in a different shape of your life.

I think this process is thrilling, erotic, and revelatory. I’m often thinking so much about performances that I have witnessed, and the ability to attend to that witnessing (to shape it in a way, to come to performance with the intention to receive and then reflect/respond) is very precious to me. But not like holding a baby duckling. Like thumbing a bruise.

The pieces in Works-in-Progress made me consider portals, infection, emergence, mythology, fairy tales, time travel, clubbing, knots, carnivals, worship, writing, writing, writing, writing. I am sure I was in part noticing this because I do have a piece showing in two weeks that is very writing-heavy, but there was so much LANGUAGE in these pieces. These are my notes on the pieces that I saw, and some cursory processing.

Bri Blakey’s “remember future mornings – again and again” made me consider a belief that I’ve held for a long time about a relationship between dancers and poets: that both dancers and poets express something that can’t actually be expressed through their medium of choice, but that through their trying against the limitations of both body and language, something inexpressible ultimately emerges. Or something like that?? Honestly, I felt captivated by Blakey’s ability to convey the sense that air has in dispersing and gathering subjectivities, griefs, lineages, tomorrows. The words that they shared within their piece drifted with their silks, stuck to me, then dispersed just as easily. I wondered, at the end, how much do words remain?

These questions around languaging impermanence also showed up in “talk to me like THIS:” by snem DeSellier. I was struck by moments of feeling inundated by language in this work, and then also stomaching the strangeness of mundane, bureaucratic concepts emerging as figures of tenderness. DeSellier pealed, kissed the floor, erupted in song. I was dazzled by the sense of red as both inside and also STOP.

More red in “It’s Inside” by D Hunter, a piece that was horror and glam and contemporary and gothic. There’s a garment in this piece that is an entire character in itself, which strikes such a nerve in its relationship to queer monstrosity. Still thinking about red, still thinking about STOP. Thinking about being caught, and then growing into what you’ve become ensnared within. Was reminded of the fungus-woman hybrid figure in River Solomon’s Sorrowland.

Jess Kiel-Wornson’s “Hymn to Elsewhere(s), an excerpt” made me so curious about the piece’s architecture and genealogy. There’s a figure of a changeling or a child that can be played by multiple people, perhaps a child explicitly trying to be replaced. There are multiple elements of audience participation which – once I understood the piece as something like a true fairy tale – I saw as lure and fate equally. What I’m sitting with: in the post-show conversation, Kiel-Wornson spoke to this sense that “objects talk” and the inspiration of Sara Ahmed’s discussion of “Happy Objects.” (I am only skimming it right now, but so happy because it has a description of the movie Bend It Like Beckham, which I was obviously obsessed with as a 12 year old. This moment is one of my favorite kinds of associative moves, when a text comes into my life specifically through performance.)

The final piece “Langlappe Yearning” by Taylor West was a journey, from dream to embodiment and sea to shore. I enjoyed all of the elements of characterization in this piece and thinking about/alongside the ways that people can become mythic. And how stories of journeying (and of returning) take on a shimmering quality when they become maps for liberation - emotive/emotional cartography felt very present for me in this piece.

I’ll keep sitting with these shapes and their after-images, and I’m curious to see how I’ll reflect on the whole as the weeks pass. My friend Corinne Teed speaks about an anthology as a form of intentional community, which makes me consider that a performance arts festival is something like a procession?

Tonight, May 24th, is the last night of Works-in-Progress, and I urge you to get a ticket if you’re in Minneapolis. Share with me what sticks with you, and then together we will make a palimpsest.

Also - do any of you know of any writing on writing about performance? Theories of archiving audienceship maybe? Send them my way please!!