During covid-19 in 2020, PERFORMANCY FORUM operates as an online platform-across-platforms, researching adaptations and potentials for live art under and within such conditions.
www.PERFORMANCYFORUM.net is home to a public zoom link where we meet each Monday at 8pm EST
documentation, upcoming session info, and how to get involved may also be found on the homepage of the PF website
Framing CORPUS COLISEUM:
PERFORMANCY FORUM: CORPUS COLISEUM*
where and how is “live performance”? between the hot summer street and the cold flat screen is there potential for an arena of excess, a collective inquiry, a stage, a site for appearances and activations that move, motivate, and share e-motion? ALL SUMMER 2020: Every Monday night 8pm EST public zoom link, migration to twitch, IG, H00PS.NET, other sites/platforms as needed.
Conscientiously-assembled corpora account for and value affects, presences, and perceptions, countermanding the “lawfully inevitable” tragedies of free market (un)incorporation. As the corpses stack up, (in)sensible embodiments, spectacles, and documents must appear to (re)(de)compose and (re)present specific sorts of immortalities in the form(s) of rituals, representations, and self-recognitions, contributing to the construction of immediately habitable situations (if not [im]potential futures).
A: participatory rituals marking, mourning, or intentionally burying ways of seeing and perceiving. Just as we mourn our humxn dead and dying and grieve our ability to assemble without fear, we long and labor for the death of capitalism, an end to colonialism, and the fall of empire with its white supremacy, patriarchy, and other complexes of mass conception and corporeal control. These rituals suspend disbelief in energetic efficacy, staging collectivities that blur the lines between private and public and between either 1) those gatherings which memorialize, grieve, mourn the dead & difficult and/or 2) those demonstrations which demand, call for, declare the deaths of particular ways of seeing, ordering, and performing realities & selves. Rituals take place over the internet or dispersed throughout bodies in different locations, those “present” may be involved in the action(s) or processes undertaken, presences and absences are hereby emphasized.
B: durational (3hr+) or short-form (-1hr), high-affect performances-as-art, intentionally attempting to materialize shared states of emotion (or “affective space”), researching potential for moving each other, touching each other, through composed spectatorships, staged theorizations, and active testimony; each score involves the “artist” presenting “a performance” and interpretive instructions, response-forms, or questions for witnesses to pursue/answer. Ways of receiving images, actions, expressions, and communications are specifically addressed as we research the capacities (and optimistically/desperately search for any potentially-interesting allowances) of “live” performance art. Artists rigorously consider frames, mediation schemas, and “platform” (e.g. “where” and how performance can unfold/how it is mediated, accessed, etc)
C: taking forms of moderated discussion and debate, these sessions focus on forms of tragedy, what it means to “garden,” biotic sublimation vs. systemic capitulation, glitch tactics, and more, as thinker-practitioners step out of imperial (academic) and industrial (artworld) contexts in order to move more fluidly and directly between theory and practice. Grounding subject matters and opening up “one to the many” modes of address, these formally-democratic conversations dig into the hard labor of adapting and designing methods, modes, and strategies rooted in perspectives, values, ethics, and beliefs (and vice versa, to analyze the consequential/implied perspectives, value, ethics, and assumptions inherent in particular methodologies, ideologies, and ways of acting).
* CORPORA, plural “corpus;” body or embodiment, subject matter, work by an author, metabolic and digestive parts of the body. CORPUS CALLOSUM, the nerves connecting the two hemispheres of the brain, COLISEUM, an ampitheatre or site for public spectacle, most famously The Colosseum (Flavian Ampitheatre) at the center of the city of Rome, Italy.