TBA:20
a canary torsi / Yanira Castro
Last Audience: a performance manual
Co-Presented with Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA)
Organized by Tara Aisha Willis
Date
September 20 | 4:00 PM PDT | CLOSED CAPTIONING | TICKETS/WATCH
Description
Last Audience: a performance manual is a set of performance scores for the public to bring live theater into the intimacy of their own homes. Created by the collaborative group, a canary torsi, the work—inspired by requiems—is imagined as “manuals for a collective imagination on reckoning. ”The project is accompanied by a website that indexes the experience of the public through photographs that participants share of the aftermath of performing, keeping a record of the collective imagination. The project will be kicked off at the TBA Festival with a virtual event, One Body. Throughout the fall, you can join the artists and fellow audience members as the project unveils in virtual gatherings through the MCA Chicago.
Each audience member of One Body will receive a portion of the scores as a thematic sample as a downloadable PDF. The scores are an invitation, with modular instructions, to interpret, (re)create, and enact your own requiem. You take on the tasks of making, performing, and witnessing. The full publication, a set of printed manuals containing 28 performance scores, will be available for purchase through the MCA website and will be released in November 2020. Additional programming for Last Audience: a performance manual will occur at MCA where the programming will further develop October-December.
This publication project is developed and produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA) and curated by Tara Aisha WiIllis, Associate Curator, Performance, and Public Practice.
Artist Bio
a canary torsi is a Bessie-award-winning, interdisciplinary group of artists formed by Puerto Rican artist and choreographer Yanira Castro. a canary torsi’s work examines the encounter between spectator and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s presence dramatically impacts the work. We investigate what brings us together, the nature of the space we inhabit, and how every aspect of our convergence is loaded with cultural, social, historical, and personal dynamics that influence how we form meaning and how power is structured. We develop indeterminate systems that catalyze—in performance—spontaneous structures, patterns, and instructions. We do this to complicate authorship, ensure multiplicity, and form the work together in real-time. This way of working is for us a conscious de-centered politic. a canary torsi persists in the idea that live performance is uneasy communal action.
Program Sponsorship
The creation of the performance, Last Audience, was made possible, in part, by New York Live Arts’ Live Feed creative residency program, which supports and nurtures the development of new work with residencies and commissions generated over two years. Lead support of Live Feed is generously provided by Partners for New Performance and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Last Audience was also made possible by the generous support of The MAP Fund, supported by the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; a NYSCA Individual Artists’ Theatre Artist Commission made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; and by a grant from New Music USA, made possible by annual program support and/or endowment gifts from Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust, New York State Council on the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, Howard Gilman Foundation, Helen F. Whitaker Fund, The Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc., The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Baisley Powell Elebash Fund, The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
The development of Last Audience was made possible, in part, with artistic residencies at Yaddo, Marble House Project, Headlong, and a production residency at Amherst College.
TBA:20 INSTITUTE