December 4, 2014
I have a performance work documentation for my bilingual text-film-performance work SIX NIGHTS IN IGNAZ GUNTHER HAUS coming out in Ugly Duckling Presse‘s visionary Emergency Index anthology – it’s a powerful and I think very electrifying collection of notable live performance works from this year.
CHECK IT OUT HERE!
I conceived of SIX NIGHTS as I fought to understand the eroticization of the post-genocidal body – the be fetishization and sexualization of the “survivor body” at a site of genocide. When everyone who looks like you has been murdered en masse, perpetrator society then eroticizes the zoo body. The rare bird body. The One That Got Away. What happens next is complicated, and difficult, and uncomfortable, but very very interesting.
PRE SALE ONLY: Order a copy, and ask your local librarian to add it to their holdings; use the code “performthis” for a $10 pre-sale discount until December 15th.
The title of the piece was taken from the name of a house where I stayed in Munich – one of the only structures to survive the carpet bombings – and the work itself explores the endless conjecture of what I heard and overheard might happen or be made to happen there. Later, I returned to Germany with collaborating composer Arthur Kell and collaborating choreographer Alexx Shilling, worked with translator Uljana Wolf to put the text into German, and we were pleased to perform the work throughout Germany, with special emphasis on presenting it to the male descendants of Nazi-era Germans.
“While we argue about what performance documentation might mean, every year countless performances are lost to history. In book form, Emergency Index attempts to capture a broad snapshot of the “state of the field” of performance, as it exists right now, and as described by artists themselves. Volume 3 is here, with more than 700 pages documenting hundreds of recent performances across unexpected genres and from all over the world. This is an amazing resource for scholars, teachers, appropriators, artists, nihilists and anyone making performance.
Your support makes Emergency Index possible. This is not an exaggeration. Order a copy, and ask your local librarian to add it to their holdings; use the code “performthis” for a $10 pre-sale discount until December 15th.
Also, if you made an innovative performance work in 2014, and would like to document it in the next volume of Emergency Index, submissions are now open! Check out the website for more info: www.emergencyindex.com.
Emergency INDEX is an ambitious attempt to create a yearly, paper-based, and durable document of the “state of the field” of performance, based on hundreds of actual performances made that year, all over the world. Please “like” our Facebook page to stay updated on the publication and Index-related events.