Breathing Exercises - Instructions

Here are the set of instructions I read in the performance Breathing Exercises to Raise the Collective Heart Rate and Forget About Your Butterflies.

for Performer and/or Audience

1. Stand up straight, hands at your sides, chest out, head facing forward with your chin up.

2. Inhale, slowly raising your arms from your sides up above your head.

3. Repeat as many times as desired.

4. After repeating step 2 enough times begin to incorporate the body in the upward motion created by the arms (i.e. standing on the tips of your toes, jumping, etc.). Breathing rate can increase as well.

5. Rn around your stage performing steps 2 through 4. (Participating audience members may run in place or in a small circle)

6. Continue running until your heart rate has increased noticeably and/or fatigue has set in.

7. Stop.

8. Cool down by repeating steps 2 and shaking your hand and feet.

Fluxus Scores

While I was in Chicago I got to sit through three days of Fluxus performances (some of which I got to participate in) enacted in the main lobby area of museum. Here are a few scores they performed that they also handed out to the audience.

(click on images to view larger version)

What I realized most about the Fluxus performances was that a lot of them were just plain old fun. One thing I think I had forgotten about in all my attempts to locate my work in academia was "play." I forgot about playing - playing music, playing the stage, playing characters, etc.

I had some wonderful conversations with Nancy Tien - a former sculpture undergrad from UF who's now in the performance department at SAIC - about performing, play, trust, absurdity, and fun. It was really refreshing. The simplicity of the performances caught me off guard at first. I found myself thinking a lot of it was dumb...until I participated in a few of the performances. While some were more successful than others I found that the space of the gallery itself changed. The relationship between audience members that were willing to participate and those that weren't changed. The relationship between the artists and the audience members changed. And probably most important of all - it was all relatively accessible. I think more people (including myself) were more confused at times because of the absurdity of the performances and not because they were over intellectualized. They were simple and poignant. I enjoyed that about them.

Mark-Making/Scores

Here are some examples of composers who took the idea of a compositional score and bent it. The visual represented the concept - music and composition through indeterminacy and chance. Many of them were called "Mobile Works" because they were written in separated parts, allowing for the performer to choose when and what to play as well as what order it is played in. Ultimately, authorship comes in to question - is it the composer's piece because they wrote the score? Or does it become the performer's piece because their interpretation changes the piece from performance to performance? I like the blurriness of definitions there.

Anthony Braxton



Christian Wolff



Sylvano Bussotti



Cornelius Cardew

Chalkboard (2010)

A picture I posted below from the Economist article that I linked up is of this piece. Marclay's new work brings together two things I'm interested in: participation and scores.

Making Marks

There's No Sound In My Head from lateral on Vimeo.

Documentary by Robert Arnold about Mark Applebaum's Metaphysics of Notation.

Available on DVD at: http://innova.mu/artist1.asp?skuID=436

This documentary about Mark Applebaum's process of making music and scores was really inspiring. Thoughts about interpretation, artistic license, authorship, mark-making, performance are swimming through my head. For a while I've toyed with the idea of having some kind of score available for the audience, based on the performance.