On Friday 16th April, at the Nightingale Theatre in Brighton, Jonny Liron and I performed a dance/theatre piece called World of Work as part of the first annual Sussex Poetry Festival.
The score for the piece comprised 62 cards, each measuring 6×4 in., which were created by a range of poets, theatre makers, musicians, visual artists and allied tradespersons, in response to a brief we sent out a couple of weeks earlier:
There are no formal restrictions on what a card might show, except that we do not want to deviate from the 6″x4″ dimensions and we would like the designed element on each card to be on one face only, with the reverse left blank. Cards might show, for example: text to be read, images to be interpreted or recreated, instructions to be followed, notation to be sung / played / performed, found materials to be responded to, any combination of these, or anything else you can think of along these sorts of lines. Any kind of text / graphic / score / stimulus, however proscriptive or indeterminate, is welcome. As well as textual instructions to be printed on a card and followed in performance, you could also send instructions for designing a card or otherwise securing a design — not a card but a meta-card, in other words: this might be useful if, for example, you wanted somehow to leave the precise content of your card partly to chance or a randomized procedure, or if you wanted it to be somehow responsive to the day or place or moment of performance.As the title of the piece suggests, we are inspired particularly in this piece by the notion of the emphatic presentation of performance as a kind of work or labour (which is what we take it to be). Card designs engaging with themes to do with work, labour, occupation, industry, competence, proficiency, output, endurance, value, power relations, the ethics of work and organized labour, work as movement, iterability, ergonomics, time & motion, health & safety, regulation, etc., and the opposites of all of these, are welcome; this list is not exhaustive, and as the performance will itself in any case be signalling in relation to these ideas, we’re also very happy to receive card designs that don’t particularly touch on any of the topics suggested.
Jonny and I looked through the deck of cards the day before the performance, and briefly worked through any that contained instructions which might be too complex to process in media res. Other than that, the only thing we knew about the performance was this: that it would last exactly 43′20″ (the length of our pre-made soundtrack: an edit of Charlemagne Palestine’s Schlongo!!! daLUVdrone [tiny extract here] cumulatively overlaid with the sounds of heavy industry), plus a brief prologue during which Jonny and I would arm-wrestle to determine who would have the privilege of cutting and shuffling the deck of cards. (Jonny won.)
Following my previous post on the wider possibilities for theatre scripts, I thought it might be of interest if I posted here a few of the cards we received and, largely without preparation or rehearsal, performed during the course of the piece. The same question as before applies, I guess: how would you perform these?
Many thanks to all the contributors: not only the 14 represented here but the other 48 who are not (including Transductions contributors Thomas Moore and Kier Cooke Sandvik).
I’ve been looking over these all weekend. Man, these cards are certainly worlds, a kind of wunderkammer, individually and collectively, and it has made me reflect on the interesting relation between performance, arrangement, collection, collectivity and labour – or, what it might mean to imagine an emancipatory ‘worlding’ of work. What with work being such an impoverished (and impoverishing) category at the moment, my own critical sentiment towards it has tended to verge more and more toward anti- or post-work theory, a sort of intuitive ‘against’. But this has stopped that trend in its track, I think. I really have been enjoying this not only in terms of thinking about how a performance might open out from these cards (which, of course, mandates a good deal of improvisatory and performative skill) but also how the method of performing off cards thinks an alliance between a vision (in the cards) and an instantiation (in the acting out) that allows for freedom in the process of its taking shape, away from ends and means: “this might be useful if, for example, you wanted somehow to leave the precise content of your card partly to chance or a randomized procedure, or if you wanted it to be somehow responsive to the day or place or moment of performance.” I’m not exactly sure what I’m driving at here but it’s something to do with a departure from prompts and performances, as the managerially calibrated and incessantly rated existential nightmares we face in the post-Fordist workplace, toward a system which arises from a sort of artistic flow and invention, which fluxes from instruction into creative decision, in a way that maintains fidelity to the integrity of a task via a freedom from the mechanisms of control: a world of work, in this sense, would mean the world itself maintains and delivers a responsive engineering, a workable chance.
shit, i couldn’t possibly follow up david’s brilliant comment, except to say i’m thrilled i got to partake in this, and i urge people to go to chris’ blog and read and see more of this.
David — thanks so much for this fascinating response. If I’m understanding you correctly, then I think you’ve picked up on what for me is a deep ambivalence in the argument of the work, one that feels like it’s kind of tremulating right now in the run-up to Thursday’s general election in the UK and the strong likelihood that the ‘New Labour’ era is coming to a close. One of the defining gestures of New Labour, to my mind, has been the rewiring of narratives about work. One impetus behind our piece, World of Work, for me at least, was a response to the way that artistic labour has been so quickly and frictionlessly elided in the past decade or so with the broader category of “cultural industries”. This then allows for artistic practice to be seen to function as “work” because it promotes and propels the flow of cultural capital (which is hardly different from fiscal capital in its utility); and this is possible in part because of a new template of work that’s just as you describe, a narrative of flux (to use a positive light), or (to switch that light off for a second) radical instability, contingency and doubt. Artists are taken to be exemplars of a skippy, skatey sort of self-actualization, a nimble, superficial, wholly opportunistic view of portfolio-centred “career-building” and “value generation”. Whereas it strikes me that my sense of myself as a worker in art has much more in common with the supposedly vanquished model of the job for life — whether or not that comes with an embedded sense of ‘vocation’, or whether it’s as much about the nonmobility that arises from a heavily demanding working life lived at the edge of poverty.
The upside of which, as you brilliantly capture, is the relative lack of alienation in my working experience, a sense of work/life continuity (in other words my work is bigger than, but not overwhelmingly bigger than, my life) that I think suggests the other proposal that World of Work is keen to espouse: that is, a kind of inchoate or endlessly reinscribed (and by extension plausibly queer) erotics of work, work or labour as an engine of physical and sensual intimacies. Your phrase “fidelity to … the task” seems to me to contain and imply this very suggestively, in the full radiance of erotic attentivity as an index of radical political activity without commodity.
If that makes sense…
Thanks for the shout, Kier. Your card elicited what was for me the highlight of the performance. A perfectly judged piece of stimulus.
Chris, yes, very much agreed on all you say here. What I meant in terms of ‘flux’ above was a different kind of work where instruction itself – here, still quite stolidly the prerogative of a management that – perhaps – in crisis times might swap its individual faces but which quite definitely maintains its character as a class – is transformed by handing a certain integral provision of trust and the resources (rather than mere ‘responsibility’) over to the worker of its implementation. Part of my trouble with the new labour narratives of work have been their relentless intolerance for the unemployable – and, I’m positive, to a large degree the massive rise in numbers of persons on disability pensions for mental illness owes volumes to the way the demand for flexibility as well as absolute aestheticization, constant responsibility and so on in the workplace has essentially made work nonviable for larges portions of our populations (me included, actually). And the increasing response to that is not to revolutionise work, of course, but rather to razor the benefits that (barely) keep the ill afloat. I find it interesting, then, that what your theatrical piece seems to have been exploring is an ars erotica of work, almost, that is about a certain intimacy between a job and its doing. Your sense of feeling toward art as a job for life has a lot of power in that regard but actually, there’s another dimension almost of the vocation of living that I find is embedded behind that and which really has me intrigued. For me, two particular problems stand out in the realm of work, that can’t be gotten by just by an anti-capitalist critique: first, the fact that many jobs are not desirable (janitor or fast-food server is the often-summoned avatar of this) and second, the fact that jobs demand a certain competence no matter what that can be sure to always have a certain quotient of people who are unable to comport to its level of proficiency, without the ‘pardonable’ (though I don’t mean privileged: I mean written off) exemption of a physical or mental disability to fall back on. Even art requires competence and, in turn, some work resists an art of intimacy, let alone erotics. However, what your performance has made me think about is whether artistry cannot be a kind of ‘unemployment’ in employment – an idea which I’m afraid does not stretch much beyond that phrase at the moment. But it would function on the premise that one’s fundamental employment is to one’s life in the social, and a certain ‘unemployability’ would obtain in every employment. In this, one would, for instance – and I know this is vague, but nonetheless – be accommodated with freedom to fail without losing the option to practice a vocation or would be able to be judged on a task by some measure other than competence alone – perhaps love, for instance; or one would be sponsored (financially and psychically) to spend time finding a field in which they had a facility, rather than dumped into work post-haste; or allowed to look for work anew as the task they’re in grew tired or old; or to be well-compensated for the most menial tasks, rather than the worst work being paid the absolute least, as is the modus operandi of capital, so that financial incentives would work to maintain the necessary in lush compensation rather than sap the marrow as well as the profit from it, as is the case in the spiritless, unappreciated labour we have today. All of this really seems to have peered through at me in vivid terms because of this project and I really appreciate it.