ABOUT
The Panoply Performance Laboratory is an open co-operative for artists working transnationally and across disciplines. We are dedicated to non-hierarchical dialectic and aesthetic exchange, collaboration, and co-apprenticeships (mutual exchange of discipline and craft skills) in performance and Performative art.
MEMBERS1.) We analyze not only conceptual links between bodies of information, but express and describe this information while rupturing and reordering
a.) its authority1
b.) barriers between it and subjective experience/emotion/social reaction
c.) its political agency and cultural implications
d.) its designation as quackery, superstition, or relative empiricism
e.) its index2 or intended referent3
using music/sound, performance (theatre/dance), documentary filmmaking and journalism, historiography and dramaturgy, the visual arts especially sculpture, and media/computer arts. We believe in fitting form to theory and simultaneously expanding the uses of a medium while using its strengths to provide illuminating context for a concept/theory/narrative. Amused by didacticism and discipline, methods of inquiry become both vehicles and subjects for ridicule. Our sense of humor is firmly rooted in honest bafflement/folly and our work swings drastically between educational postdrama and phenomenological phantasmagoria.
2.) As sociologists of knowledge, we find it no longer useful to simply complicate that which is problematic. Deconstruction is the behavioral pattern of a brilliant toddler pressing insistent “whys” and now we have grown up into a violent teenager who knows more about destruction than careful dissection for the purpose of analysis and reconsideration. Having severely mutilated Neverland, we want to grow up (however we must recognize that linear time, now called a construction, can no longer be taken for granted). Growing up in our case shall be reliant on systematic expansion and empathetic engagement/connection with that which is—if not empirically—considered qualia.
3.) We are dedicated to indextual existence, i.e we are the footprint if you are the foot. We are the endnotes to your insistence.4
4.) Transculturalism5 is both a way of life and a way of engaging with reality as filtered through human perspectives. (See “Sustainability” below)
4.5.) The Panoply Performance Laboratory is not an organization.
5.) We count things. John von Neumann writes that “Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin”6 as he worked on the mathematic processes of thermonuclear reactions used for the hydrogen bomb. Pseudoscience and experiment mark our processes. Maps, diagrams, linguistic systems, and scores keep us endlessly squinting as the forest and the trees alternately go in and out of focus.
6.) “The Issues” are important to us. Without judgment, we note the fact that irony has become the modus operandi for our generation and we become more and more bound by our own absurdity the more earnest we become. Free market global economy, environmental degradation and global warming, war for oil, institutionalized, internalized, automatic self-discipline, the privatization of the internet, the demise of the honeybee, and food and water crises intravenously infuse our work with a self-conscious panic. We demonstrate on behalf of the small, sustainable organic farmer, the family-owned business, and the independent media, and we do our best to advocate for equal access to resources including human rights, public government, healthcare, and art. Artmaking as a life choice is only justifiable if it is engaged in political dialogue.
7.) We are raptly waiting for a day when our doppelgangers emerge from the woodwork and offer us the sum of all our parts. For a long time performance has been interested in depicting waiting of this kind, but we now demand emergence. We will manufacture it artificially if necessary, we are just that impatient.
8.) Audience: You have the kind of face that comes through the door before you do. You have short, stubby little hands and fingernails shaped like teabags. You should give in to yourself more, stop trying to regulate your behavior so strictly: people are going to find you strange no matter what you do. You’re never going to please anyone. Your brain is heavy but not large and is the color of a bale of hay that’s been shat on by pigeons in an abandoned barn. You’re good at taking things apart but not at putting them back together. You won’t eat things that you don’t like, not even for nourishment when you’re starving. You wear hats. Your genitals don’t remind us of anything but other genitals. You smell like Basil and pine needles, sometimes like raw celery. You collect pennies without thinking about it. You also believe in luck without thinking about it. You think about conversation as a building, without thinking about buildings as conversations.
9.) Sustainability. On sustainability as a mission statement: The idea of sustainability, as a concept that can be applied to social, emotional, and political systems as well as to aesthetics and the environment, like any other worldview includes tenets. Two of the primary tenets of sustainability theory are: 1.) the edges of any space, be it social, ecological, national, pyschological, etc, are the most fertile and capable of sustaining permanent cycles of innovation and deconstruction due to their wider range of resource types and 2.) working from these edges (i.e. drawing inspiration from more than one "space" at a time in every sense) allows one to both create sustainable systems of artmaking and produce mutations/phenomenon which evolve art as a public and private means of expression and transmission.
9.1) Edge work, in terms of art, means working between mediums. It means working transnationally, and between depleted fields of socio-cultural identity. It also often means working at the periphery of rational vision, where cross-pollination allows ideas to adapt to new conditions of globalization and technology and phenomenal mutations bloom. There is the belief that capitalism, and social phobias including racism, sexism, and xenophobia are a result of failure to adapt to edges and the choice to rather live as a "weed;" trying to dominate the resources of a set environment and infect the world with carbon copies of self.
9.2) Sustainable work therefore might strive to be an adaptation rather than a hybridization. This means it is not the sterile product of competing entities like a mule that is the result of reproduction between a horse and a donkey, but rather a thing that can "reproduce" or sustain itself as a new form used as a tool for communication through art. Literally, what this means, is experimenting a lot with different combinations until one hits on a complex mixture/tincture/mess/system/phrase that fills a need to say something that can't be said with other mediums. This is a life goal; not something one can expect to do with every project. With every project one might expect to get a little closer to living on the edge between art and action and encourage others to do the same. One might wish that this was all more simple...but complicated ideas are an edge between comfort and chaos that most people are afraid of and need (for the sake of sustainable evolution) to plunge into.
10.) It is worth learning the ideas of anyone and everyone.