Performed in the Present Tense

A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s Charlotte Moorman was a bold, barrier-breaking performer and a tireless champion of the avant-garde. Her freewheeling avant garde festivals brought experimental art to a broad public for nearly 20 years. However, recognition of Moorman to date has been limited to her collaborations with other artists—including composer John Cage and KoreanAmerican multimedia artist Nam June Paik—and to her 1967 performance of Paik’s “Opera Sextronique,” for which she became known as the “topless cellist” after being arrested on indecency charges.

The exhibition features original sculptures, photographs, video art works, installations, newly discovered props and costumes for performance art works, annotated music scores, archival materials, film clips and audio recordings. Many of these objects will be drawn from a one-of-a-kind archival resource held at Northwestern University Library, the Charlotte Moorman Archive, acquired by the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections in 2001.

The exhibition has been curated by a collaborative team: Lisa G. Corrin, Director, Block Museum; Corinne Granof, Curator of Academic Programs, Block Museum; Scott Krafft, Curator of the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Libraries; Michelle Puetz, Pick-Laudati Curator of Media Arts, Block Museum; Joan Rothfuss, consulting curator and author of Topless Cellist: The Improbable Life of Charlotte Moorman; and Laura Wertheim Joseph, Consulting Curatorial Associate.

Exhibition design by Dan Silverstein, Associate Director of Collections and Exhibition Management, Block Museum.

Catalogs are available for purchase at the Block for $44

A Feast of Astonishments is organized by the Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, in partnership with Northwestern University Libraries.

This symposium, inspired by the exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, uses the multifaceted practice of the 1960s musician, performance artist, and advocate of the avant-garde as a point of departure.

Performed in the Present Tense considers how Moorman and others since have engaged with (re)performance, the frame of the score, curating, and being curated. Given Moorman’s dedication to creating forums for experimental, cross-disciplinary, collaborative, and boundary-breaking artistic practices, primarily through the vehicle of her Avant-Garde Festivals, Performed in the Present Tense brings together artists and scholars to reflect both on the history and current practices of such work, focusing specifically on the contemporary interest in performance in art museums and galleries. The symposium seeks to challenge how we frame and manage this ongoing discourse.

This symposium examines the interrelation of three tenets of Moorman’s practice— (re)performance, score, and curation —from myriad perspectives pivoting around the questions:

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How do the practices of the Avant-Garde Festival—both the manifold roles of Charlotte Moorman (as avatar, instigator, coordinator, curator) and the work of the many Festival participants—relate to practices today?

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Scores are often diagrammatic or textual, and usually are bound to the page.

What is the translation between the page and the exhibition/performance? How can a static graphic score organize space and objects, catalyze movement, or even serve as a curatorial thesis?

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How, in turn, can curation reignite the meaning of a score?

How does a performance curator/artist embody the roles of collaborator, producer, instigator?

This symposium has been organized jointly by Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, a program supported by the Department of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Block Museum of Art.

Welcome Susy Bielak and Amanda Graham, symposium conveners Interpretation of John Cage’s Indeterminacy (1958) and Fontana Mix (1958) Ira S. Murfin and Stephan Moore

Trio A Pressured (1966, 1999-2016): Forward - Retrograde - In The Midnight Hour Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. Taught by Pat Catterson. Performed by Elliot Gordon Mercer Interpretation of Geoff Hendricks’ Erase everything (1964) Didier Morelli Dialogue about the cultural history and politics of (re)performance Moderated by writer and curator Noémie Solomon

Xavier Le Roy, Retrospective, 2014. Photo: Matthew Septimus

10:00 AM

Pulse Piece

10:15 AM

Kaleidoscope: An Introduction

10:30 AM

Roles, Scores, Spaces in the European Context of the 1960s and 1970s

Susy Bielak and Amanda Jane Graham, symposium conveners

Francesca Pola 11:00 AM

11:30 AM

Trust Me: A Minor History Performance Curation in America Amanda Jane Graham

Technologies of Pamphleteering: from Great Bear to Present Tense Danny Snelson and Mashinka Firunts

12:00 PM

Lunch, Gallery Viewing & Scoring the Avant-Garde Student Performances

1:45 PM

Acting Out: Pointing in the Museum Brendan Fernandes

2:15 PM

Framing the Unpredictable, Accounting for the Outcome: On Curating Performance within “Open Plan” Presentational Formats Travis Chamberlain

2:45 PM

Beyond the Present Moment: The Multiple Temporalities in Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy Jenny Schlenzka

3:15 PM

On Curating and Being Curated Brendan Fernandes, Travis Chamberlin, and Jenny Schlenzka

4:00 PM

(Re)Performance of Simon Forti’s Huddle

4:15 PM

Closing Reception

The day will include intermittent student performances of original scores.

Interpretation of John Cage’s Indeterminacy (1958) and Fontana Mix (1958) Ira S. Murfin and Stephan Moore

Indeterminacy, Cage’s collection of personal anecdotes, was first performed in 1958 and

released in a recording by Folkways in 1959. The pieces populate his collections Silence and A Year from Monday “playing the function that odd bits of information play at the ends of columns in a small town newspaper,” and he performed a rotating selection as the “irrelevant accompaniment” to Merce Cunningham’s 1965 dance How to Pass, Kick, Run, and Fall. Alternately understood as poetry, music, and performance score, these enigmatic koan-like anecdotes have become emblematic of Cage’s style and have been frequently taken up by others, recently as a model for Bill T. Jones’ Story/Time. The anecdotes are as often stories Cage was told, things he read, or things that happened to other people, as they are firsthand occurrences from his own life.

Cage wrote, “my intention in putting the stories together in an unplanned way was to suggest that all things – stories, incidental sounds from the environment, and, by extension, beings – are related, and that this complexity is more evident when it is not oversimplified by an idea of relationship in one person’s mind.”

From “John Cage’s Indeterminacy Then and Now: 1992 Introduction” by Richard Kostelanetz: "The idea behind Indeterminacy was, like many Cagean ideas, essentially simple, if

audaciously original. In one acoustic space he would declaim any of ninety stories, taking a minute to finish each one. Thus, those with many words were necessarily read quickly; those with a few words, slowly. In another room, beyond earshot of Cage, the pianist David Tudor, by that time a veteran Cage collaborator, was playing miscellaneous sections from his parts for Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra (1957-58), occasionally playing as well prerecorded tape from another Cage composition Fontana Mix (1958-59). As Cage wrote at the time, ‘David Tudor was free to make any continuity of his choice. There was no rehearsal beforehand involving both the reading and the music, for in all my recent music there are parts but no score.’”

Selections from Indeterminacy will be performed in random order according to the original constraint that they be told in exactly one minute, alongside Fontana Mix (1958), performed by Stephan Moore in a separate room.

Trio A Pressured (1966, 1999-2016): Forward - Retrograde - In The Midnight Hour Choreography by Yvonne Rainer. Taught by Pat Catterson. Performed by Elliot Gordon Mercer

Yvonne Rainer is a leading figure of the American avant-garde whose innovative and influential choreographic output has directly shaped the development of dance since 1960. Trio A consists of a 5-minute sequence of movement comprised of abstract gestures, quotidian activities, and geometric movements that progress in a state of continuous motion. The dance engages the body’s “actual weight, mass, and unenhanced physicality,” and its structure presents no climax or discernible trajectory of development.

Trio A was initially presented as The Mind Is a Muscle, Part I at Judson Church in New

York on January 10, 1966. There it was performed by Rainer, David Gordon, and Steve Paxton simultaneously but not in unison. Since then the dance has taken on myriad forms, from execution by a large group in the nude (Trio A With Flags) to a retrograde version by Pat Catterson to a recent Geriatric with Talking version by Rainer herself. Trio A was documented as a solo by Rainer in 16mm in 1978.

Beginning in 1999 Rainer has staged this iconic performance work in a format she titles Trio A Pressured, an arrangement that presents together a selection of any three or more previous incarnations of the piece. This format serves to expose and juxtapose the extensive performance history of the dance.

Music for In the Midnight Hour by the Chambers Brothers.

Interpretation of Geoff Hendricks’ Erase everything (1964) Didier Morelli In 2010, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York featured the words “ERASE EVERYTHING” on a fluorescent green circular badge above the name and date “Geoff Hendricks 1964.” The pin’s text, a reference to one of six performance scores from 196465 typed on a 5 ½ x 11 sheet of paper by the Fluxus artist Geoffrey Hendricks, was commissioned by MoMA as an interest in 1960s and 1970s performance art practices continues to grow in museum institutions worldwide. In its new portable and wearable form, Erase everything gains a form of mobility, color, exposure, and marketability it did not necessarily have in its paper format, and a great deal can be asked about the shift from the original score as it appears in a laundry list of actions to be completed to its 21st century conception (by the artist) as a single line badge distributed at one of the world’s most renowned art museums. What is MoMA’s role an as art institution—to conserve or to erase by conserving?

In his re-performance of Erase everything (1964) Morelli will engage with the original score as an action to be accomplished, experimented, and played with. Following Fluxus tradition, he will use Hendricks’ original prompt/typewritten score as a launching point to pose questions about erasure of the past, present, and future—in this case the last 50 years of histories. Performing the piece—to which there is no recorded or reported original enactment of—he will consider important shifts in erasing and erasure as Hendricks’ original script was in reaction to a different history. What does it mean to erase everything in 2016 as opposed to 1964, and more importantly does erasing everything in 2016 also mean erasing 1964? Working along these lines, he will develop a palimpsest of writing (timeline, drawing, and text) on the floor of the space and engage in a process of erasing and rebuilding—merging memory, histories, and his active body smearing these elements together.

Roles, Scores, Spaces in the European context of the 1960s and 1970s Francesca Pola

The talk focuses on the roots and development of alternative performance in the European context, featuring unconventional forms of artistic actions, figures and spaces that mapped the pre-history and diversity of this new kind of creative practice and involvement. It presents public and media actions by artists in the ZERO network (19591961), artworks conceived for television in Gerry Schum’s Fernsehgalerie (1968-70), the new relationship gallerist/artist and body/space at Fabio Sargentini’s L’Attico (1968-76), the seminal interdisciplinary show Contemporanea in Rome (1973).

Trust Me: A Minor History of Performance Curation in America Amanda Jane Graham

In his 1964 performance piece First Symphony Fluxus artist Benjamin Patterson asked one member of his audience at a time, “Do you trust me?” Patterson’s question in mind, this presentation considers the issue of trust within the history of performance curation in the United States. Focusing on a series of discrete but related case studies including the controversial 1939 closing of the short-lived Federal Theatre Project funded Dance Center at the Brooklyn Museum and dancer Sara Wookey’s 2011 refusal to participate in Marina Ambramovic’s “exploitative” donor gala performance at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Graham will evince the cultural and political stakes of examining the “minor” history of performance in institutions primarily identified with the plastic arts.

Technologies of Pamphleteering: from Great Bear to Present Tense Mashinka Firunts and Danny Snelson

In conjunction with the Block Museum and the exhibition A Feast of Astonishments: Charlotte Moorman and the Avant-Garde, 1960s-1980s, a rapid-publishing platform entitled Present Tense Pamphlets will publish a series of new score-based works by local

and international artists and writers. Co-edited by Mashinka Firunts and Danny Snelson, the Present Tense Pamphlets platform takes up the tradition of Charlotte Moorman’s Avant-Garde Festivals, Dick Higgins’ Great Bear Pamphlets, and La Monte Young’s An Anthology of Chance Operations, representing an expanded array of score-based practices. In this presentation, Danny Snelson introduces the project, and sketches a brief history of the intersections between the contemporary technologies of experimental performance and radical publishing platforms of the 1960s.

Acting out: Pointing in the Museum

Brendan Fernandes, Iris Hsu, and Anna Harrer (20 minutes, a performative lecture) Brendan Fernandes will discuss the ways in which museum etiquette has choreographed people to move within this institutional space. Through a performative lecture he will feature his work In Touch, a dance that uses pointing as a gesture to move. Pointing is deemed forbidden in some museums as the movement might instill touching an art work. In this work he is curious about the ways we move in museums and what is considered to be acting out or badly within this space. He will further question a post-colonial hegemony between ballet and West African masquerade that is featured in the dance.

Framing the Unpredictable, Accounting for the Outcome: On Curating Performance within “Open Plan” Presentational Formats Travis Chamberlain

Charlotte Moorman’s programming for the Annual New York Avant Garde Festivals (19631980) utilized a variety of “open plan” presentational formats through which participating artists were invited to explore individual creative agency within the production and presentation of a communal experiential whole. Placing his work within this lineage, curator Travis Chamberlain will detail his 2014-15 project “AUNTSforcamera,” which took the form of an open studio residency in which nine dance-for-camera works were produced simultaneously at the New Museum in New York City and subsequently presented as an immersive installation at the nightclub TrouwAmsterdam (in partnership with the Stedelijk Museum). Using this project and others like it as a jumping off point, Chamberlain will consider questions of curatorial accountability within open plan presentational formats while reflecting on the potential for bias when framing outcomes of such endeavors.

Beyond the Present Moment: The Multiple Temporalities in Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy Jenny Schlenzka

Jenny Schlenzka, Associate Curator, MoMA PS1, has curated performance art and live programs since 2009. Her presentation for Performed in the Present Tense addresses the different strategies and challenges of presenting performance-based works in specific historical contexts. The choreographic exhibition, Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy, which took place at MoMA PS1 in 2014, serves as a key example of the different temporalities a performance work can create.

Susy Bielak is an artist, writer, and the Associate Director of Engagement and Curator of Public Practice at the Block Museum at Northwestern University. Prior to the Block, she served as the Associate Director of Public and Interpretive Programs at the Walker Art Center. As a collaborator and platform creator, Bielak has led projects ranging from a symposium on agonism to an Artists’ Congress. Approaching universities and museums as laboratories and cities as studios, she has organized projects with artists including Simone Forti, Marc Bamuthi Joseph, the Museum of Non Participation, Mark Nowak, and Pedro Reyes. Bielak’s own work has been published and exhibited internationally, including by Art Papers, Poetry Magazine, Experimental Sound Studio, Luis Adelantado Mexico, and the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. Bielak received her MFA from UCSD. Travis Chamberlain is a director and curator based in New York City. His work in performance is interdisciplinary, spanning contemporary theater, dance, cabaret, and performance art practices. As the Associate Curator of Performance at the New Museum, Chamberlain has organized multiple residencies, often with an emphasis on the exhibition of rehearsal-based research produced within open studio environments. These projects include: “Rethinking the Imprint of Judson Dance Theater 50 Years Later” (in partnership with Movement Research, 2012); "Performance Archiving Performance" (2013); "AUNTSforcamera" (commissioned by the Stedelijk Museum and TrouwAmsterdam, 2014-2015); and most recently “X-ID REP” (2015-2016).

Brendan Fernandes is a Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent, currently based in Brooklyn, NY. He completed the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art (2007) and earned his MFA (2005) from The University of Western Ontario and his BFA (2002) from York University in Canada. He has exhibited internationally and nationally including exhibitions at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Art and Design New York, The National Gallery of Canada, Art in General, Mass MoCA, The Andy Warhol Museum, and others.

Fernandes has participated in numerous residency programs including The Canada Council for the Arts International Residency in Trinidad and Tobago (2006), The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Work Space (2008), Swing Space (2009) and Process Space (2014) programs. He is currently an artist in residence at Northwestern University in the Department of Dance Studies.

Mashinka Firunts is a PhD candidate in the University of Pennsylvania’s History of Art department, where her research focuses on performance, new media, and social practice. Her dissertation traces the history of the lecture-performance as an aesthetic form from the 1960s to the present. She is a member of the group Research Service, co-founded with Avi Alpert and Danny Snelson.

Their projects explore performative scholarship and media pedagogy, and have been presented at venues including the Palais de Tokyo, Judson Church, Lisa Cooley Gallery, and the Drawing Center. In 2015, she co-curated the video program Vulnerable Systems at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia) with Jeanne Dreskin and Roksana Filipowska.

Amanda Jane Graham is the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Dance Studies at Northwestern University. She received her PhD from the University of Rochester in Visual and Cultural Studies. Her teaching and research focuses on post 1960 American dance, art, architecture, and urban development. Amanda’s dissertation, “The Myth of Movement: Trisha Brown and Lucinda Childs Dancing on the New York City Grid, 1970-1980,” examines how New York City experimental dance moved from informal performance spaces like rooftops and mixed use lofts to the formal proscenium stage.

Amanda has published articles on dance, visual art, and culture and media in journals including Dance Chronicle and Art Journal. Her current book project, Dance on Display: A Performance History of the Visual Art Museum, follows live dance and dance-related ephemera into and out of museum exhibitions, collections, and archives.

Elliot Gordon Mercer is a professional dancer, dance notator, and dramaturg. At Northwestern he is a Ph.D. candidate in the Interdisciplinary Program in Theatre & Drama, where his research centers on processes for dance reconstruction and the development of choreographic legacy plans. Elliot curated the exhibit Mapping Dance: The Scores of Anna Halprin, currently on view at the Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco.

Stephan Moore is a composer, improviser, audio artist, sound designer, teacher, and curator based in Chicago. His creative work currently manifests as electronic studio compositions, solo and group improvisations, sound installation works, scores for collaborative performance pieces, and sound designs for unusual circumstances. Evidence, his long-standing project with Scott Smallwood, has performed widely and released several recordings over the past 15 years. He is the president of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, and is a lecturer in Sound Art and Sound Design in the Department of Radio, Television and Film at Northwestern University.

Didier Morelli is an interdisciplinary artist who combines practice and research in both his academic and performative explorations.

His live art practice includes endurance-based durational actions and contextually specific relational interactions. His studio-based work, which includes drawing, collage, photography, and video, has been shown in solo exhibitions (notably at the Katherine Mulherin Gallery in Toronto) as well as in group exhibitions (the Audain Gallery in Vancouver and at the Civic Space in Windsor). He has performed at Nuit Blanche (Montreal, 2013) and at the 7a*11d International Festival of Performance Art (Toronto, 2014). In 2015, he held a two-week residency at Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago) as part of the programming for the Chicago Architecture Biennial where he performed, exhibited, and coordinated a panel with local artists, critics, and scholars. Born and raised in Montreal, Didier Morelli is presently a PhD student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University, in Chicago, Illinois.

Ira S. Murfin is a theatre artist, writer, and scholar. He is a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary PhD in Theatre & Drama at Northwestern University, currently completing a dissertation examining talk-based performances in the post-1960s American avant-garde. Critical and creative writing has appeared in Theatre

Topics, Theatre Journal, Theatre Research International, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 491, elimae, Fiction at Work, Chicago Art Criticism, Chicago Arts Journal, and Requited, where he is also Performance Editor. His solo and collaborative performance work

has been seen at MCA Chicago, Links Hall, Rhinoceros Theatre Festival, among other venues. Ira also occasionally makes work as a member of the theatrical devising collective the Laboratory for the Development of Substitute Materials.

Francesca Pola is an Italian art historian, curator, and writer. Since 1999 she has been teaching and conducting research at the Institute for the History of Art of the UniversitĂ Cattolica (where she graduated, specialized and received her PhD with full marks and honors and is currently Adjunct Professor). Her studies have focused, in particular, on twentieth century sculpture, American art from the 1920s to the period after WWII, Italian and International Postwar Art of the 1950s and1960s, topics of cultural identity connected to artistic practices from the 1950s to today, and abstract art from the 1980s to the present. Her books and essays have been published by major Italian and foreign institutions. She is currently Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Italian Studies at Northwestern University.

Jenny Schlenzka is the Associate Curator at MoMA PS1, New York where she has been establishing a weekly live program called Sunday Sessions and commissioned larger projects by artists such as Trajal Harrell, Ragnar Kjartansson, Marten Spångberg, and Anne Imhof. Interested in expanding the nature of exhibition making Schlenzka organized Retrospective by Xavier Le Roy (2014) and Anne Imhof: DEAL (2015), both exhibitions with a strong performance component. From 2008-2012 she was Assistant Curator for Performance in the Department of Media and Performance Art at MoMA, where she was the first curator to focus on presenting, collecting, as well as exhibiting performance-based art, and where she worked with artists like Tehching Hsieh, Simone Forti, Roman Ondák, Jerome Bel, Allora & Calzadilla, and Grand Openings among many others.

Danny Snelson is a writer, editor, and archivist. His online editorial work can be found on UbuWeb, PennSound, Eclipse, and the EPC. He is the publisher of Edit Publications and founding editor of the Reissues project at Jacket2. With Avi Alpert and Mashinka Firunts, he works as one-third of the academic performance group Research Service. His work in variable formats has been variously screened, published, or performed at venues including The New Museum, Palais de Tokyo, LUMA Foundation, The Drawing Center, Centre Pompidou, Printed Matter, and elsewhere. He currently works as the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities in the English Department and the Alice Kaplan Institute of the Humanities at Northwestern University.

Noémie Solomon works as a writer, teacher, performer, dramaturge, and curator in the field of contemporary choreography. Before joining the TAPS department at Brown University, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral fellow in the Faculty of Arts at McGill University, Montréal, where she researched dance in Québec after 1948 around questions of movement, minority, and belonging. She holds a PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and a MA in Dance Studies from the Université Paris VIII. She edited DANSE: an anthology (Les Presses du reel, 2014). She worked as a choreographer and performer on the redoing of Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 parts, directed by André Lepecki (Haus der Kunst, 2006; PERFORMA 2007) which was awarded best performance in 2007 by the Association Internationale des Critiques d'Art.

Coordinated with A Feast of Astonishments, this class studied visual and performance artists such as Dick Higgins, composer La Monte Young, choreographer Anna Halprin, and architect Lawrence Halprin, who proposed that scores extend "in all fields of human endeavor." Inspired by these figures and the wide array of scores in Northwestern University Music Library's John Cage Notations Collection, students analyzed the score as an independent graphic art object and applied their analysis of the score towards their original performances today.

Student Performers from Scoring the Avant-Garde include: Savannah Birnbaum - Radio/Television/Film, Junior

I need a human project

An unedited recording of interchanges between college girls that highlights the hyper self-aware and performative nature of millennial culture and seeks to question the relationship to public and private.

Isabelle Carter - Undeclared, Junior

Synesthete

This audiovisual piece or “auditory painting” by two musicians is a response to warm and cool colors, connecting the senses of sight and sound. The work ultimately challenges aesthetic philosopher Nelson Goodman’s assertion that a painting cannot be a score.

Wei Theresa Da - Economics/Math Methods in the Social Sciences/Business Institutions, Sophomore

From a Box to a Fluxus Box

An interactive production that invites the audience to fill a Fluxus-inspired box with original words created under the influence of the pre-existing Fluxus "remains."

Matthew DeGregorio - Economics/Statistics, Senior

She hides near rain.

This digital work is inspired by John Cage's attempts to design a deterministic process, Jackson Mac Low's writing style and method, and Fluxus emphasis on randomness. The viewer becomes the artist by typing a word, name, or phrase into the program which will, in turn, produce a new code-based poem.

Florence Fu - Journalism/Art History, Sophomore

PULSE

A simple instructional score that asks participants to take their own pulse, and that of a partner. By vocalizing these rhythms the room becomes rich with sound and syncopation.

Anna-Celeste Harrer - Dance/Theatre, Sophomore

Control Piece

A movement-based experiment in power dynamics, three performers execute actions based on an alphabetic score and the verbal cues of a “Time Keeper.”

Iris Hsu - International Studies/Dance, Senior

Dance Remains

A chance-based movement exploration of the deaths of Avant-Garde artists Charlotte Moorman, John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Lawrence Halprin. What remains after an artist dies? How do we remember them in and through our bodies?

Russell Iceberg - String Instruments, Junior Autumn Selove - String Instruments, Senior Bailey Wantuch - String Instruments/Art History, Junior

Trio for Canonized Repertoire

Two violinists and a harpist perform sections from the concert musician’s conventional classical repertoire. Ambulatory viewers determine the order and the duration of the musicians’ performance by affixing and removing sections of scores, thus creating a collaborative score in flux.

Kentaro Kunamomido – Art Theory and Practice, MFA Graduate Student

Trans_pacific

Trans_pacific considers thinking-with-trans* as a method of articulating third spaces hidden by

linguistic binaries. Like the free trade agreement from which the project borrows its name, Trans_pacific seeks a deregulated mode of subjectivity, unlimited by boundaries between states.

Sydney Lindsey - Psychology/IMC Certificate/Art History, Junior

Infinitus

An interactive digital piece based on a scored ambulatory expedition through Ukrainian Village in Chicago, Illinois. By scrolling and clicking on the track pad, viewers manipulate colors, photographs, and ambient sounds.

Julia Poppy – Art History, Junior

Memoir in 20 Moments

Highlighting the flexibility of the personal narrative, this work is comprised of twenty memory-scores typed on notecards and scattered throughout the museum. The audience is free to take these memories and pretend as if they are their own.

Riona Ryan - Composition, Freshman

gravel/spine/lake/skin

gravel/spine/lake/skin is electronic and vocal improvisation based entirely on Twitter and Facebook responses to the question: when have you felt physical and emotional sensations with equal force?

With her vocal fluctuations and distortions, the performer seeks to empathize with the embodied emotions of those in her digital network.

Vil Zsolnay - Physics, Senior

It's hard to start a family when you still can't find your wife

A keyboard performance as practice and in process amidst a sea of Chinese food containers.

Simone Forti, Huddle (1961) Performed by: Thomas Love, Alissa Chanin, Sarah Estrela, Mlondi Zondi, Riona Ryan, Artemisa Clark, Skye Geerts, and Didier Morelli One of Simone Forti’s dance constructions of 1961, Huddle is a piece in which dancers gather in a tightly packed group, then take turns climbing over the mass, forming a living sculpture. Participants from a workshop Forti conducted at Northwestern in February come together to perform the work.

This symposium has been made possible through the support of the following Northwestern Departments:

Block Museum Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities Department of Art History Department of Art Theory & Practice Dance Program, School of Communication Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Department of Performance Studies

A special thanks to Susan Manning, Professor of English, Theatre, and Performance Studies

This symposium has been organized jointly by Mellon Dance Studies in/and the Humanities, a program supported by the Department of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, and the Block Museum of Art. www.mellondancestudies.org • www.blockmuseum.northwestern.edu