In this page I have clustered together selected exercises that in various ways have the same performative agent as dominant. This has been a way for me to analyse what an exercise can exist of and it can be used to create future exercises. However, each exercise and performative agent are still in intra-action and entangled with a complex web of other performative agents.
The documentation on this page is from different projects. When you place a hover on an image or video there will be information about the project the exercise derives from.
I am not completly sure if this is a dominating performative agent in the exercises, but have chosen to include it here as audience and participation is one of the main material that I work with. How do we exercise to have the audience as out main material?
GO TO THE SECOND FLOOR AND HAVE A PILLOW FIGHT. You are three people who get this message at the same time. When you are ready, put your alarm on 3 minutes and start.
Material and objects give unlimited access to experimentation. The concrete object and material have a usage, and it is easy to experiment beyond this usage. This wider usage triggers imagination, freedom and action. Several times the material and objects have had agency to move the participation in a direction I had not or could not plan before hand. Perhaps because of this ability the materiality have to open up for the unexpected, I have found it very interesting to search for material and objects that can be a dominant performative agent in exercises.
To engage with material and objects as an audience in participatory performances diverts the focus away from the audience, into something concrete - and this is helpful in initiating participation.
To just observe a place or to place your body in relation to a place or site is important knowledge in live art. All of the exercises are performed in a place and many of the exercises are initiating a relation to the place. In some cases it is a question of the architectonics of the place, such as in "be a living sculpture as a comment to the site for an hour". In the image connected to this exercise a student remained in this same position for an hour during a gallery opening.
In some cases it is a question of relating to the context of the place as in the exercise "do an action which adds something to a chosen place. In the image related to this exercise, two students are standing still in front of the local police station. They reflected on how this small act made them feel scared and it raised awareness of how the site matters for the experience of performing. In other cases the place serve more as a imagined place, as in the exercise where you imagine bicyling to certain places.
The same exercise can be repeated very differently when it is done in a different place. The place and site is often a dominant performative agent in the intra-action of the exercise, and it can be through playing with, challenging or destabilizing the conventions of the place, site and context. An thus creating new realities for the place.
Sit at a place where you can feel the weather. Set the alarm on 7 minutes. Feel the weather until the alarm sets off.
Time as a constraint in exercises has opened up many possibilities to explore new understandings of what a performance can be.
Obviously time will be dominant when the exercise should be performed within a certain time restriction, such as in the exercises where you are asked to put on the alarm and do a certain task within a certain time limit or in the derivé exercise "walk for an hour with no purpose. Let yourself be disturbed."
Time will also perform very differently if you are asked to do something very slow, as using 15 minutes to write your name, or on the contrary, that you are asked to do all the exercises in 6 minutes. In this last case, it is not possible to perform the exercise as such.
Perhaps what surprised me most of this performative agent is how there are so many unused potentials in time, which I have not explored in these exercises. Examples on this could be a long durational exercise, an exercise that should be done repeatadly, or at a specific time.
Call one of your parents and tell them that you are going to quit school/your work. After a couple of minutes you tell them that this is just an exercise in quitting.
Time. Use 15 minutes to write your name on an envelope without letting the pen leave the paper. You can make a detour.
DRAINED
Energy Gathering Point
Sit down on the sun chair
put the coffee cup onto the center of your body
breath
feel your strength returning
A giraffe needs only two hours of sleep, while a brown bat needs almost 20 hours of sleep every day and night. How much do you sleep? ASK SOMEONE ELSE THE SAME QUESTION.
The formulation and style of expressing is important in how an exercise is recieved, performed, and contextualised.
The words can be active, mostly verbs, that tell us straight forward what to do.
The words can make a twist, to make you think of something in a new way.
The words
The words are performing
The words can make you imagine something that has not yet happened, or that will never happen.
The exercise can be read as a poem and open up new worlds
The words can reference to anything
In live art, as in performance art, the questioning of identity, how we perform others and ourselves, is an ongoing issue. In the exercise "reconstruct a picture of yourself" the personal history and biography is the material. While a couple of exercises, such as the "write a list of all your identities" and "make a portrait of yourself and plan how to destroy it" initiates the participator to explore their own identity. Also the performers body or voice as material can be the main performative agents.
Especially the projects with a pedagogical contexts had exercises where the performer is an active agent, whereas in participatory installations and performances, it is not as obvious. Perhaps it might even be that I have avoided to have the performer as the main performative agent in the exercises intended for audiences. This is to avoid that the audience are put in the center of attention, but rather be active through a medium that is outside themselves.
Imagine a stage and an audience.
You are going to perform something that is very important for you.
What do you do?
LIBERATED
My Ode to Freedom
A shirt, a sock, a scarf, a shoe,
take one of your clothes,
raise it up the flagpole.
Drink the coffee as an ode to freedom
lower the cloth.