Critical Correspondence

MR Festival 2009: Role Call: Hostess, Prophet

by Clare Byrne
MR Festival Spring 2009: Roll Call

At the MARKET at AUNTS, the artwork – made on-the-spot, freely (and freely given away) by anyone who showed up to make it, the week before at FACTORY – was bartered away with beer, objects, art, and I’m sure winks and nods – all valuable commodities. I really appreciate the idea of this exchange. I wish I’d been there to experience it, but being here in Vermont, I asked Will Rawls onsite to barter something – my art, my life – away for a piece. I’m excited to see what I get, and what I might owe, in a currency I can really relish.

Here’s what AUNTS says about itself:

“AUNTS is readymade!!! Like loft parties, birthdays and DIY punk shows, AUNTS events occur in ad-hoc, domestic, out-of-doors, the theater and found spaces. AUNTS events are rigorous; dancers dance, collaborate and socialize with each other, amateurs, guests, the space, the walls, energy flow, non-dancers and non-humans. Conventional audience/performer configurations abound inside a structure of rules and traditions of performance that are completely decimated. The audience is boyfriends and lesbians and the dancers. Dance as liberation against art, regulation, commercialism and itself and those who practice it!”

— www.auntsisdance.com

Lately thinking of myself less as an artist with rights – to earn as much as a lawyer – or as much as a visual artist – or put on a show selling $40 tickets – or to break even on a show – or to get as many gigs as anyone else – or get paid for dancing – or to be taken seriously as a dancer.

It affects – it releases – how I think of my audience, how I occupy my role. I’m less an artist-citizen, more a hostess: I have desired guests and invited them. I’m giving a party – my job is to address the guests’ needs. They have wanted to come. We will each give and take, there’s mutual consumption (and in a party of performance on bodies, received by bodies, we are really the food).

Seems to me our party of contemporary/experimental movement has been trying to move away the rude intercession of the ticket, the fee prompted the middleman for a long time but keeps getting nagged, made to feel unworthy, guilty, silly, ungrounded by a business sensibility concerned with new work to market, the quality of the field, and building audiences.

Curation, originally a religious power-holding hierarchy, seems a ridiculous interjector in experimental dance – but there it is – limiting, conferring opportunity and status. Presenters, press, granting organizations, and other artists occupy this role, unwittingly or not. I know we want new work to support, but we act – in this role are strapped in, bound to act – like we want to sell it.

I’m not sure we as artists would prefer the actuality of experimental dance making lots of money should it happen to us. Not sure it’s a money issue, anyway – more a size and proximity issue. I believe that we have found ourselves at this smaller, more intimate party because we want to be here; we are by preference small-time hostesses and guests – who prize the exchange of sitting down at a table, in a direct exchange.

Sitting down with my audience: I have no option but to give them an experience – a pleasurable experience, a painful experience, a transcendent experience, an interminable experience, a fleeting experience, a boring experience. I’ve somehow arrived at this moment – this crazy inevitability! No matter how I scroll back, scrambling to remember how I got myself here, what insanity of desire brought me to this plank-walk, I have got to do it. Performing – a crazy pressure-cooker willingly undertaken.

In the do-or-die sensation in the moments before performance I find myself summoning another model: a prophetess – who, finding herself in intractable situations, steps out, calls out the provoked and provoking channeling – unsure of the reception – unsure of livelihood or life! – yet sure the message must be delivered.

It’s like splatting out naked on a barren rock to be eaten intestines and all by buzzards. But it’s also somehow penetratingly narrow, this exposure – it seems that a path of total commitment is cleft in that rock – so only some parts are exposed and eaten, and only some things are done. Seems it’s more about what is left out, not able to be done, than what is. Within this narrow way – a practice of art making – what I want to work toward is the rightness, or the “riteness” of my message. None of this has anything to do with rights.

The do-or-die performance sensation, and the next one – the inevitable overcoming, the step onstage – these sensations are the most accurate cues I can follow in how to live all the other moments, and my roles.

The splatting-out-but-narrowing way is a relinquishing of liberty that brings with it a surprisingly sweet taste, expansive on the tongue. It releases – opens up – rather than closes down what and how my art is, and whom it’s for. Particularly this last one. Maybe we spend more of our artistic careers than we realize making work for a few shadowy authority figures, looming there in our background – a way of talking to them, responding to them, getting approval from them. By some catch, being released from this (or fully embracing it?) – making work flung out for the gods, for the people, trees, boyfriends, birds, bees who need to receive it – for the guests! – is a revelation.