In the performance writing residency So So Silky Silky Silk: Scoring Yellow Towel, choreographer and live artist Dana Michel joins poet and editor Michael Nardone in order to create a score of Michel’s iterative, improvisational choreographic work Yellow Towel (2013). This solo piece – which Michel has performed over the past 5 years and was recently awarded the Venice Biennale’s Silver Lion for innovation in dance – is exceptional for its excavation of a range of subjectivities and embodiments. Throughout, the performance’s principals of uncertainty and ambiguous signalling equally unnerve and enthrall.
‘I am always trying to run away from any pinning down of what I am trying to do or say,’ Michel states of the work. ‘I have made a space to kind of communicate that like a cacophony.’ In scoring Yellow Towel, Michel and Nardone begin with a series of questions to address the itinerant and obscure aspects of the work: What is legible in the movement of performance? What traces does its ephemeral moments leave? How to notate the duration of gesture, of utterance? To what extent, and how specifically, does the performance exceed any capacity for its documentation?
While focusing specifically on Yellow Towel, it is Michel and Nardone’s intention to address a number of textual and ethical issues concerning performance and inscription that are global in their concern: Who performs, for whom, and to what ends? Who writes, who records? What are the techniques and technologies that mediate performance? How might a score function as a vital element of a work without fixing in place its desired fugitivity?
Within the working context of the gallery, these concerns extend to the technologies of display, to the temporality and spatiality of the exhibition, but also to the performing body/bodies and the specifics of being in-relation in and with public(s) and the institution.
The two go into the six-week performance writing residency at SBC with an array of documents, as well as objects and materials used in the research and performance phases of Yellow Towel itself. Along with Michel’s diaries, documentary videos, transcripts of the choreography and iterations of her original script, these materials will inform the score, while also forming the basis of an emerging archive in the gallery. Over the course of the residency, Michel and Nardone will shape and add to these materials with recordings of conversations on their process of articulating a score for the work.
04.09.2018 – 13.10.2018
SBC Gallery of Contemporary Art