metropolis m

And You Were Wonderful, On Stage started with you and Annie [Godfrey Larmon] inviting me to make a performance for the Stedelijk Museum. Annie introduced me to Bernard Steigler’s writings about the proletarianising impact of technics, if they were misused. Technics could be your satellite navigation or smart phone, but they could equally be understood as an institution or Ritalin, an algorithm, etc. In short, something external to you, which you could delegate to, and come to depend on, to achieve that which you could not achieve unaided. At the time, I was working for an advertising agency part time. I’d been put on a project where we would ask clients’ employees to tell us their personal ‘stories’; then use these as TV commercials to reflect the client’s corporate brand values. The problem was that real people speaking naturally about their real (non-work) lives wouldn’t automatically reflect the brand values, at least not in the way that the corporation and the agency wanted them too. So my job was to take their voice transcriptions, rearrange them, so they better reflected the brand. Then I was to give them back to the employee as a script of themselves, talking about themselves, and transmitting the corporation they worked for via personal stories of their ‘self’. I became really fascinated by this movement; this choreographing of a live voice into something polished and useful. At the same time, a number of current affairs were making headlines: Beyoncé lip-synching at the presidential inauguration and breaking America’s heart for her lack of realness; Lance Armstrong doping and apologizing via the chat show medium of Oprah; Michael Gove automating British education for testing testing testing; Jon Favreau, Obama’s speech writer, leaving the White House for Hollywood screenwriting; and Scooter Braun – Justin Bieber’s manager – losing control of his teenage client to unruly behaviors including on-stage puking, then regaining his control via Twitter. I saw in all of these a technic: a pre-record, a speechwriter, cortisol, a one-size-fits-all-plan, a managed pop star. Like the employee’s tweaked and engineered voice, these technics were arriving so that an individual (or a corporation) could manage and maintain high performance and industry standards. This got me thinking again about choreographic shifts from life and movement to technical deadness, and I decided I wanted to stage this shift in response to my invitation from you. For starters, I knew this shift had no visual form but should be represented through a linguistic and acoustic apparatus that could compose and choreograph the moment in which spectacle and technics migrated into the voice, and into language itself. The piece would begin with a chorus line gossiping about the current affairs. Their language would be mobile, fractured somehow very open and this would increasingly fill up with my meeting notes from the agency – transforming their chatter into repetitious jargon about how to make values real and guard the brand. I needed to find an acoustic, linguistic form that could help move the scattered/poetic gossip into technical sameness, and that form was the Broadway musical.

The video installation is made up from five characters – which are more like five functions of film production (image, sound track, scene structure, adverts, stage sets and crew) and they all carry a different voice. So you have a scene announcer played by the opera singer Hai Ting Chin, who structures the 36 minute film by announcing five acts using a sung YouTube comment that relates to the current affair which the particular act is dealing with. The voiceover is delivered by five women on a sound stage. Backing dancers are positioned as an image that keeps you transfixed. Then there’s sets and technical: stage hands and crew, who move furniture and walls continuously and who record the piece. Lastly, a prerecorded advert of an employee being corrected for camera by an interviewer – which I call the ‘off camera dialogue’. The voiceover in the film is what was once the language and singing of the chorus line. This is and always has been female voices speaking news feeds, bitching from gossip sites, political speeches and also my own prose and dialogue. It’s a fractured, poetic assemblage that is fragile; it’s full of edges, no centre, no climax. It ducks about all over the place – a voice calling from the distance here, a sudden surge of voices screeching, then vanish into sudden silence, lots of fast exchanges, drawn out sounds. Gradually this language is taken over with the ad agency meeting notes. These notes are modular, instructive, and repetitive. They are seductive in their conservatism and sameness and I decided their new form should be show tunes, which I developed with the artist and composer Peter Joslyn. As for the scene announcer, I evolved her through a work I made at Kunstverein Munich. I took the YouTube comments that had been left in response to the current affairs I’d been working with and arranged them into short operas, which would be performed at the Kunstverein once a week. I wanted a technical delivery that carried trauma and fury, as that’s what I felt the YouTube comments did and that’s also what I felt opera singers do. So this was another register of language: the digital, anonymous media comment that carried the irrational voice of public and consumer outrage.

Firstly I was thinking about the employee’s immaterial labor. About she/he putting his or her ‘own self’ and speech to work for the corporation’s TV commercial. Then there was the labor at the agency – both of my communications and their communications to me. I was mostly interested in what was happening to the employee; carrying the corporation in their body and in their voice, so that the corporation could become more like a person. In the process, the employee also becomes the corporation. I guess you could say they internalized their workplace and then performed that internalization. Hannah Arendt has talked about this, later picked up by Paolo Virno, that we are biological laboring flows. We’ll only stop that flow when we cease to be entirely. Work (which is different to labor) leads to external, namable production outside of ourselves, but in the case of immaterial labor, such as that of the employees (or equally like the labor of the traditional performance artist), production is object-less. There is no external work, the work is carried within the performing, speaking body. I feel this is really confusing; to not leave a trace, to have no externalized products that you can leave behind and trade. Instead you wind up carrying a capitalist workplace, its values and its language (that are not your own values and language) in your voice and your body. Your voice and body is the site in which you trans-individuate, it’s where you produce subjectivity and consciousness. But then you have to also sub-let part of this site to an employer, a corporation, or an industry. It’s something that Maurizio Lazzarato calls performatives. I’m calling that an ‘out-source’: the moment when you hand your speaking and thinking over to something outside of you. But then this other thing happened: by expanding the musical and working with an increasing amount of other people, to grow this project, I had to over-extend myself and delegate to the performances of 32 women, or to Peter, or Adam, and I came to understand this as a kind of ‘outsourcing’, a big lip-sync. I kept thinking: Shit, I basically proletarianized myself, by which I mean I lost knowledge and somehow felt alienated from my production even though (and in fact because) it was growing and advancing successfully, though somehow without me.

I would say liveness is present because the film is shot in a single take and it’s the first ever take. It’s also the first time and the last time that the whole cast and crew came together. To me something is living when it’s working something out, when it’s showing something that has never happened before and never can happen again, when something assembles and disassembles. This film captures that first coming together as well as its dispersal. I think moments that enact this are, perhaps, the moments where things go wrong. A dancer loses her inner ear head set and can no longer perform because she’s lost the backing track. Half way through, all the cameras stop working and the production has to pause. Or, my favorite, when Hai Ting has to leave the shoot, right before the finale, because she had a plane to catch. Right before the dramatic ending we have to say goodbye to her via the overhead speaker. She takes this little bow and leaves the set. It’s important to me because it’s the moment where it became impossible to reshoot. It landed where it landed, and like all the best things (I think), it arrived in the margins of last minuteness, so much so that the film nearly didn’t exist at all as it is. I suppose I’m trying to say: the film is fragile. To me, that fragility is liveness, it’s the living. It was important for me that this final element of the work talked of its live (event-based) precedents because the whole project is dealing in what living matter is: where it can be found and where it is suppressed or controlled for the sake of high achievements and accumulation. Rosi Braidotti talks about capitalism as being the force that controls all that lives. I’m trying to find the sites where ‘that which lives’ is accommodated and organized but not controlled. For instance, by the time I’d finished the ‘live event’ musical at Tate, it had become a big touring show which was very good at being itself and repeating itself, and I therefore considered it to be no longer living. I was managing it so that it could be the same each time it was presented, and each time be a ‘good’ product(ion). Instead I started to rethink the project and its content entirely, for camera which was something I did not know how to do. I never want my live performances to be filmed because they are built to be seen by an audience that physically shares the same space and time as the performers and the performance. This means I have always come up against a problem when it comes to documenting my work. I recognize it’s important to do so, for posterity, to get the next gig, to have something to show in a magazine, etc. But all the usual modes that one might think to reach for, such as films or photographs of the action, cannot accommodate the parts that are, for instance, deliberately playing in non- action, or more fragile, imperceptible nuances. For instance, And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, as a ‘live performance’ has absolutely no centre, by which I mean, there is no primary narrative to follow. Although there might be a performer speaking in one part of the museum, and that might seem like where you need to focus, there’s also eighteen other performers scattered elsewhere who will also be delivering some language, some movement, rearranging themselves and the movement of the piece. Everything is equally important, as is the audience, within whom the performers are immersed. Documentation takes away the decision on where to look next. For these reasons, I was happy to totally re-think my live event works for cameras. In this case, that meant building new content that was specific to the medium of film and disembodiment, content that could use this to speak of technical bodies and technical dependency. I also wanted to find some way to document the work and find a well-functioning archive for the dances, the songs, the performances, the devising. A great deal of conversations, relationships and people needed to find a sustainable place, and this place is in the 6 unedited feeds, arranged across 5 screens and four speakers at the Stedelijk Museum. This installation is now what I understand to be And You Were Wonderful, On Stage. A work in itself, but also the culmination and documentation of a two-year process and a research project about the making technical of life and language.