2/14: Performing in Brooklyn with No Wave Performance Task Force

The No Wave Performance Task Force is a forum for feminist performance that happily embraces first wave and second wave feminism, and imagines what feminism looks like after those waves, in the post-wave, in the no wave, for all of us.There is still so much each of us, in our respective fields, don’t know about the experience of artists in other genres. We are often surprised by the commonalities and differences between us. We are surprised at our own ignorances. And so, it becomes clear that we need to understand one another better. We need experience in one another’s fields and with each other’s ways of working in order to construct a Bill of Rights that would be applicable to performers across our disciplines.

We will have to construct a new way of working that will give us insight, one not based on collaboration, but on mutual submersion. The tricky thing about this mutual submersion is that it cannot be directorial. None of us wants to be placed under the authority of our peers as a form of research. As such, our work becomes a way of engaging in performance as social practice, through participation.

It was clear from the beginning that the No Wave Performance Task Force is a name that can frame any feminist, activist performance that women construct with the intention of investigating new modes by which we can challenge structures that the devalue and demean the human component (performers) in our human-based fields (performance). Women have therefore started claiming it and exploring it as a platform.One of the most essential elements of the task force in inclusivity. That inclusivity isn’t perfect, we don’t know how to make it perfect. But the task force is here, as well, as an offering to women in performance to find common meeting grounds.

Simply: We begin by engaging with one another, within this simple, as of yet amorphous framework of the taskforce itself, compiling our experiences and what we learn into that frame, and then discovering how our engagement then translates into our own practices, our own works, our own disciplines, our own ways of living as artists.

The No Wave Performance Task Force is a shared space for women. It isn’t about furthering the career of any particular artist, but it does exist as a way of doing so as a necessary grounds for mutual support. In the duality of cooperation and competition that exists in the artworld, The No Wave Performance Task Force exists as an element of the cooperation part of things.

From the original Call to Action:
Why does the No Wave Performance Task Force Exist?

1. We are working in a field that seems to exist outside the normal societal expectations of labor and compensation. If we do not begin to take action and imagine what might be appropriate parameters, we will fail to give ourselves any guidelines. Without self-induced guidelines, we leave it up to others to define our worth for us, which has historically meant that our worth reduces and our resources reflect that.

2. We work in a field in which the profiling of race, gender, hotness, age, you name it, is not only encouraged, it is considered an important part of our work, and provides numerous frames by which curators argue the social value of our work. Performance is therefore, for better or for worse, an incredibly discriminatory field. The identities we display, and those sussed out from us in interviews and reviews, determine how desirable we are to directors, curators, granting organizations, and audiences. In some way, we have to address this, and we have to figure out how to support (and how to challenge) one another within this context of production.

3. As we vie for institutional resources, we pit ourselves in competition with one another. What are the repercussions of this? On what basis do we cooperate? What are our ethical obligations to one another as we face a situation in which there are not enough resources for all of us, or even most of us, or really, even, some of us? In an economy that so values rarities, struggle, and exclusivity, how might inclusivity also operate?This document will behave as a living document, and will be, from its inception, open to the continued discourses around ethics in performance processes. Though the task force will root the Bill of Rights in feminist standpoints, the document will be free to explode multi-directionally from there.The task force is for women, women-kind, women-identified, partially female-identified, people who have vaginas, people who is some way, somehow, in some part of themselves, identify as female. We’re not going to split hairs about it, but what we are looking for is people who feel they can share in female-hood in some way rather than empathize with female-hood. Call us matriarchs, whatever, the ethical demands of the performance field probably shouldn’t be placed in the hands of its men. Let the Bill of Rights begin with a spectrum of women.Why is this happening?

There is an immense diversity of ways in which all of us go about addressing ethics, and in most cases it stems directly from personal experiences. We’ve all had different struggles, but we believe we’re all grappling with interconnected systems of injustice, and that therefore though our activism is decentralized by the diversity of struggles we face, we can be united on the basis of a few simple principals. We believe that finding common ground will help us contextualize ourselves in relationship to each other.

 

We believe that many investigations of ethics in the creation of art, be it the labor of performers, diversity of bodies, power dynamics in rehearsal, or issues of money and payment, relate directly to feminist discourses.