Protocols, Policies, and Proposals Performed

These works respond to and utilize a series of documents that seek to define and influence cultural care in the art world. Framed as propositions and provocations for improvisatory sounding and physical movement, the series comprises six instructional text and graphic scores.

The text of the original protocols, policies, and proposals is incorporated to varying degrees; sometimes in full as a clear sung recitative, sometimes only as fragments or echoes. These are set alongside seemingly unconnected sensory and gestural memories, childhood stories, and prosaic statistical information from ‘the day job’ of the composer - in a bid to find points of intersection between the everyday intangible experience of anxiety and labor, and the social and political activism and theorization that surrounds it. Performers are directly instructed to actualize the experience of labor and care in temporal and physical ways in a number of instances.

Related themes are present in the image content and design choices, by John Harries. Visual source materials were selected for their relevance to the individual scores, and this content was then obscured by means of gradual, labor-intensive, repetitive processes. The labor in the images is both hidden and foregrounded, the only visual remnant of the original materials.

Written at the invitation of, and protocol, policy, and proposal texts collated by, curator Helena Reckitt
Dedicated to Christine Duncan and The Element Choir
With thanks to John Harries for design concepts and layout.

The later video essay reflected on the creative process, and specifically an ongoing interest in and process of personal discovery about the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles.