There isn’t much to say about the trip up and back to NYC other than it was long. Almost 12 hours from Greensboro to Brooklyn and another AIRB&B crash pad. This one was not as lush as the last but did have three beds in three rooms and not much else. But then again when your sole reason for being is a place to rest and store your things…. at least there is total privacy, if not TOTAL quiet. Actually I think Belinda and Nathan heard some commotion throughout the night but I slept like a rock. On Saturday we were off and going first stopping at a little brunch place and then we walked around a little as we had time to kill before going over to Green point. Check in started at noon but in all reality it wasn’t going to take us all that long to set up-especially because the sun would not set until sometime after seven or eight in the evening.
When we got to the general location for the festival we immediately found a really nice parking place right across the street from our appointed performance space.
We would be bringing our Future Past performance to the festival with a slight variation. We invited Nathan Halverson to join us in this iteration of the performance. Nathan is a friend and colleague from the VCU graduate program currently doing his second year stint focusing in sound. He had previously accompanied us up to the Staten Island festival Lumen several months ago in which he performed a piece that he and another artist had put together combining video and sound.
The second component that is new is the addition of the Greensboro massacre walking tour 88 seconds that refuse to end. For the past several performances I have been incorporating an app that I have on my iphone that pipes in police, fire and ems broadcasts from a multitude of location across the united states. The use of police bands is slightly morose, however it piques my interest in this idea of listening to the airwaves and waiting for a transmission. With police scanners it seems that the fascination with monitoring them brings a different sort of news to the listener. It has a sense of immediacy that the broadcast news and papers cannot afford. This immediacy also marks a sort of “now” and chance occurrence in being here much like shortwave and crystal radio enthusiast. The randomness and chance meeting of another voice in space, an as of yet unpinpointable or expected location, yielding an equally uncertain quantity of information or quality of exchange.
Using the walking tour plays very nicely into our concept of location/dislocation as we are bringing elements from the recording, no longer a broadcast (and in reality never was) but being brought to a new location in order to talk about a very real location and a very real event and trying to convey it though this new meta language of remixing and recombining with video and live performative elements.
Everything was set up in a timely fashion and without much fuss. Our arena consisted of a handball court with the wall as our screen of which we filled. The court then formed a space in which people filtered in and out as the wished. We decided to perform for the entirety of the festival as a sort of exercise. Normally our sets have been short, and for this piece the agreed upon time limit was fifteen minutes, five more than normal. For this version we performed for five hours.
The reaction was nothing short of fantastic. As an exercise in longevity and existing within a dynamic environment for which in all in tense purposes no social or performative walls existed the public invariably interacted with our work and us as we performed it. There were many people who simply wanted to confirm their suspicions of what kind of hardware/software we were using, while others wanted to know what we were actually doing- or even if we were doing anything at all. There was much interest in almost all aspects of the piece, visually, audibly and conceptually.
While it was really nerve racking at times to try and answer questions while attending to the piece it allowed for the attempt to do so. Overall it reinforced the initial impulse for our group to be an improvisational effort. After a while I brought out the whole recording of the walking tour as an experiment. I was uneasy about using the whole recording for the performance for a variety of reasons. One most notably is its understandably graphic depiction of the actual shoot out itself and the broadcasting of such in a very public space with a variety of ages of children. Also I was afraid that it might make the piece too didactic or too specific. After all our performance is not about Greensboro even though it persists in our psyche quite heavily. But in the end there were many people who despite the other hundreds of sights and sensations to experience in the festival decided to sit down and listen. During the walking tour the video still played, as did I and Nathan and the others in a rotating fashion providing a subtext and cushion for the rather stark narration.
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