This kind of viral, open source, self-perpetuating thing is part of the big dream of Appointment, because it’s about making live art happen in offices with or without me (or ultimately, anyone who refers to himself as an artist.)

EFTN was in Detroit Rock City doing performances of their Appointment pieces, which they made with me this winter in Oslo and then brought to NYU in September (details about both of those trips are in posts below).

I had hoped to be there, but was in the middle of performing GATZ at The Public and couldn’t get away. The day before they did their showing, I got a call from Brendan McCall, the insanely talented and energetic leader of EFTN, asking if I’d try to do my own Appointment via Skype while theirs were going on live.

How could I say no? Jo and I put my son Harry to bed, finished dinner, and I logged in.

The piece I had made for the original round of Appointments I shepherded back in fall 2009 (see details in posts below) has something to do with a disgraced academic, and involves asking each viewer to read the piece to the next viewer. I figured it was worth a shot and since Wayne State would lend itself well to the situation, I had a professor there (Pegi Marshall, awesome) print out a copy of the script on their end, I uploaded some necessary audio“>necessary audio and we gave it a try. I had three appointments, and two of them did it for the next person. I sat back and watched.

What does this mean? Is the performer no longer necessary? Is this a revision of Grotowski’s essential ideal of “one performer, one audience member?” Could it have worked if I was not behind my computer in person, but was just transmitting a recording?

And what about this piece that is self-perpetuating? After it gets rolling, I didn’t even have to be there, because viewers could have just kept doing the script for each other in a loop. Is this a get-rich-quick scheme? Is this live performance without the performer? What is he on about?

Here are two photos, from my POV (Please ignore the messy desk. I don’t know who that belongs to). If anyone is reading this who was there, please feel free to add your thoughts.

Having just seen me perform my Appointment via Skype, Peter takes the bait and reads the text to Clark. The piece goes from mediated to live.

Clark and I discuss the Appointment he's just heard - he's in Detroit, I'm in Brooklyn.

Works at Appointment / NYU were created by: Arya Dovachi, Katie Eisenberg, JC Flores, Mary Howe, Zachary Kislevitz, Natalia Lassalle, Jose Perez IV, Gina Stevenson, Andy Zou. Guest artists from Ensemble Free Theater Norway included: Dushinka Andresen, Lars Chrstian-Bredal, Christopher Pederson Cook, Ida Mailen Hagerup, Dina Naverud, Mette Fjerstad. Brendan McCall and Hank Willenbrink co-directed. Special thanks to NYU/UGD’s Production Director Chris Jaehnig and our amazing stage manager Itunu Balogun.

Appointment / NYU photos by Ida Mailen Hagerup, and Dina Naverud.

And here’s a quick interview between Brendan and me about Appointment:

Bring your own coffee. Friday, 5 March. Noon-3PM.

Pilestredet 29A, 2 etg, 0166 Oslo.

This is the first Appointment since Prelude.

To get them started before I arrive, I gave the following set of instructions. They’ll be making Appointments at a working office downtown.

All pieces must involve:

• a mistaken identity
• a long silence (relative to the length of a piece)
• a moment of counting
• a show of hands
• a shift in time (ie at the end of the piece it is three years after the beginning, or at the end of the piece we realize we are 50 years in the past, which explains a lot)
• a big offer
• also, each piece should use at least one image or video on a computer screen.

Then here are 19 possible scores to use in making your pieces:

Make a piece in which at least one performer is on the phone the whole time. The phone call should reveal something about the viewer’s relationship to the piece.

Make a piece that is entirely silent, not a pantomime, but which tells a story from at least two perspectives.

Make a piece that involves a fall from grace (a boss confesses his surprising impropriety), a lullaby to a dead child, and an offer of a deal that will save face for the boss.

Make a piece in which one performer is supposed to be the boss, and one the assistant, but the roles get either confused or reversed.

Make a piece that involves non-stop talking by one performer and non-stop humming by another.

Make a piece in which both performers are sitting at odd angles and rocking back and forth in their chairs, but make it your goal to keep this fact from the viewer, no matter how impossible it may seem. Perhaps make part of the game to keep the rhythm of your rocking from your scene partner.

Make a piece that involves you and the viewer playing either a board game or a card game.

Make a scene in which the audience member is asked to play a role, with lines, blocking and dramatic resolution. Perhaps they will read their text.

Make a piece in which the story is the same but the actual lines are different each time. This means you have to paraphrase the essential meaning, in a different way, each time you perform it. For this one, you are welcome to use a scene from a play that’s already been written.

Make a piece in which the audience member is the boss. Make them understand by the way you speak to them, body language, what you say, etc. Maybe this piece involves presenting a report, perhaps bad news (we didn’t hit our sales quota, the building fell down, the judge found our client guilty) that you have to spin in a positive way in order to save your own job.

Make a piece that is an inappropriate confession.

Make a piece in which the viewer has just been chosen to take a job with the firm. Unfortunately it is one of your jobs. You don’t know which one of you will get canned. Perhaps the audience member will get to choose.

Make a piece that involves an argument that has begun before the viewer enters, some kind of violence and a surprising departure by one of the performers. The argument should have something to do with the viewer’s arrival, and one performer should be trying to wrap it up to conduct whatever business is at hand with the viewer, while the other is just too carried away.

Make a piece in which both performers spend as much time as possible laughing in an infectious way. The audience member must not be able to resist your charms!

Make a piece that feels like the conversation has been going on since before the viewer arrived, that they are being sucked into it, and that it will go on after they go. Within this, it ought to have a dramatic arc, even if very subtle.

Make a piece in which one performer is trying to talk to the viewer about something important, but is constantly being interrupted by inappropriate ideas, commentary, etc, from the other.

Make a piece in which both performers compete for the affections of the viewer with the most sincere tributes possible – the text and gesture of this piece should be unabashedly, sincerely romantic, not desperate, but ardent.

Make a piece that is a simple story told with the aid of video, about a building that your characters once lived in, or a relationship they were once involved in together, or both. Ideally this story should be very sad, but with a moment of redemption at the end.

Make a piece that involves lots of paperwork. There could be many things for the viewer to sign, many things for you or them to read, for you to file. This piece could be about arcane rules, bureaucracy, and tedium. But there must be something happening of consequence.

Why not read it?

One of our favorite things about these pieces was that, by performing them in a working set of offices, we blurred the lines between art experience and work experience, audience member and performer, and office worker and creator.

Or maybe those lines are always being blurred – we just tried to put a spotlight on it. Because whenever two people are alone in an office, there is always something being performed.

In Aaron Landsman’s piece, audience members were asked at the end, via an audio recording, whether they’d be willing to read the piece to the next viewer, or whether they’d rather Aaron perform the piece himself. Almost no one turned down the opportunity to read. This led to some unexpected and sublime meditations: what happens when two curators read to each other about one taking the other’s job? How do you enable a viewer to capture the subtext of a piece without ever having seen it?

Here’s a link to what Aaron’s invitation to perform sounded like:

Appointment – Aaron Landsman\'s request

Here’s a photo of the ever-intrepid Morgan Jenness reading to the also-intrepid David Townsend.

And here is the amazing Stacey Robinson performing “Blondell Is Businessfied” by Daniel Alexander Jones. In which the unsuspecting viewer is given footwear advice, etiquette instructions, and a taste of Dean Lattislaw and her welcome gift.

Please stay tuned for more upcoming Appointments. We are planning to remount these works sometime soon.

CONTRIBUTE LIKE THIS:

ONE-ON-ONE PERFORMANCES CREATED BY: Brent Green, Daniel Alexander Jones, Sibyl Kempson and Aaron Landsman. Presented by Prelude09

October 2, 5-8 PM
Only 30 slots available, first-come, first-served

What:
Appointment: a collaborative performance event comprised of short, repeatable works staged in small offices for one or two performers and one or two viewers at a time; the first installment in an ongoing series of events curated and directed by Aaron Landsman.

These short works were created by animator Brent Green, writer/performer Daniel Alexander Jones, writer/performer Sibyl Kempson, and Landsman.

This first installment of Appointment is subtitled “The Advisors.” Each artist was tasked with creating an appointment that might actually happen, in their world, in the office of a university. What they came up with is magical, delicious, insane, and sublime.

Appointment makes the mundane unruly, the claustrophobic expansive; it takes a situation that can seem beneath examination and turns it into a cause for pleasure and surprise. Audience members are not only performed for, they are counseled, negotiated and played with, and asked to choose whether and how to participate.

Appointment is “community theater” – an ongoing event that honors a situation many of us go into without even thinking.

How:
Come to the waiting room on the 3rd floor of CUNY’s Graduate Center – 5th Avenue between 34th and 35th Streets – between 5PM and 8PM on October 2, as part of this year’s Prelude Festival and sign up on a waiting list. The next available advisor will be with you. When you’re finished, you can come back and sign up for more, or go check out all the other wonderful events that Prelude has to offer.

Attention:
Please be advised: a handgun, a description of bodily functions, and aural and video recordings may be employed during the course of this event.

The next installment of Appointment will take place in March 2010 at the TITAN Theater School in Oslo, Norway. Ultimately, I hope there will be Appointments happening all over the world, changing places with each other, and created via a series of scores and instructions on the web.

PRODUCED by THINAAR and PRELUDE

Appointment is a series of repeatable, 12-minute performances in small offices for one performer and one audience member at a time. News and updates will appear here, as well as instructions for creating your own appointment in your town, should you so desire.

The first Appointment, subtitled “The Advisors,” will take place on October 2, 2009, in New York City, as part of the annual Prelude Festival at CUNY. The individual appointments will be created with Brent Green, Daniel Alexander Jones and Sibyl Kempson.

The next Appointment will be created and performed in Oslo, Norway with students of the TITAN theater school, in March 2010.

Additional Appointments may happen in Austin, Philadelphia and other locales.