Performing Precarity

Laurence Crane, Anders Førisdal, LEA Ye Gyoung, Io A. Sivertsen, Lisa Streich, Jennifer Torrence and Ellen Ugelvik

To be a contemporary music performer today is to have a deeply fragmented practice. The performer’s role is no longer simply a matter of mastering her instrument and executing a score. Music practices are increasingly incorporating new instruments and technologies, methods of creating works, audience interaction and situations of interdependence between performer subjects. The performer finds herself unable to keep a sense of mastery over the performance. In other words, performing is increasingly precarious.

Abstract for ‘Paths of Precarity: Reflections on Fractured Passages’ 12.01.2024

Professor Darla Crispin

The collaborative artistic research project, ‘Performing Precarity’, involved a talented team of creators and thinkers. Spanning the period before, during and after the Covid 19 outbreak, it prompted those involved – as, indeed, it did those in any walk of life - to reconfigure their approach in light of the consequences of that ongoing crisis. Although the interrogation of ‘precarity’ was a concept developed before the pandemic, it proved prescient as a means of contextualising the wholesale destabilisation which unfolded. The artworks that emerged from the project reflect the reality of the straitened circumstances surrounding their creation, but also speak to the more general constraints on creative processes during that period, given the limitations imposed by social distancing, home working and shielding.

Any project has a shape and trajectory that is akin to a journey, always aiming towards a destination but prone to missteps, but also propitious diversions, along the way. Given the external circumstances, it was natural that the journey of ‘Performing Precarity’ should entail more than the usual share of such adaptations, reorientations and revelations. Accordingly, this article uses the motif of the journey to frame a series of responses to specific works within the body of outputs that the project has generated, threading its way from one to the next as though tracing on foot a whole network of interconnecting, and sometimes divergent, pathways.

Among the themes explored in the article are those of ecological stress, illness, immunocompromise and autoethnography, these being located within a narrative framework that identifies moments of critical choice and suggests how they may be navigated by the artist/traveller. The aim is to provide a form of artistic response that also takes on the nature of artistic participation. More widely, the strategy adopted posits a means of reading artistic research work that bypasses judgment in favour of dialogue and the sharing of stories. As such, it seeks to honour the openness to vulnerability that is central to the project, and which was so wholeheartedly and fruitfully embraced by the participants. Just as they have sought to reveal the potential expressive power that lies in precarity, it advocates a mode of discourse and critical interpretation that is at once highly personal and, because of our shared humanity, capable of resonating across a range of readers and audiences.

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