I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim
3–4 November 2012
A two-day performance event addressing the presentation and performance of speech and language with Nicoline Van Harskamp, Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet, Léa Lagasse, Pierre Leguillon, Sarah Pierce, Alexandre Singh, and Cally Spooner.
Stroom Den Haag
Hogewal 1-9
2514 HA The Hague
The Netherlands
Curated by Capucine Perrot
I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim is a two-day performance event addressing the presentation and performance of speech and language.
Occupying the central foyer of Stroom Den Haag, this event investigates various modes of public presentation as forms of discursive artistic production. Each performance combines the interaction of language with visual and spatial display elements activated by a protagonist. The artists engage directly with the audience to share and produce theoretical and subjective understandings of different subjects through a public reading, student protest, lecture-performance, conversation and role-playing game.
I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim unites a compelling group of artists whose works operate in an area between text, script, performance, action and installation. The works employ different choreographic and rhetorical techniques to both construct and perform narratives.
Through these artists as ‘actors’ and objects as ‘props,’ the two-day event I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim becomes a stage upon which works can be proclaimed.
Nicoline van Harskamp pursues her interest in the use of English as a second language in the new performance Without Title (an Exercise in European English) (2012). The artist makes an appeal to emancipate English from its roots in the British and American empires, and its current use in professional jargon, to celebrate the expressive abundance that it offers as a language.
Louise Hervé & Chloé Maillet call upon literary characters and historical figures as well as different temporalities and contexts in the new work The Wall That Bleeds (Projection and Voice-Over) (2012). For this piece, the artists visited local museums in The Hague to gather clues for their new quest. First speaking the voice-overs on a 16mm silent film, they then diverge into stories of crimes and local curiosities.
Léa Lagasse reconstructs a reading wheel for the performance The Awaken Dreamer (2012) based upon the designs of Agostino Ramelli in the sixteenth century. This circular object allows its user to consult several books at once, creating an active and associative reading experience. A performer operates the reading wheel containing a selection of six books by Vladimir Nabokov. Passages are read aloud linked together by associations and reoccurring literary motifs.
Cally Spooner reflects on the conventions of speech and direct communication in the new work I Have Been ill-advised by my Scriptwriter (2012), which presents a performance about the act of impromptu thinking and speaking. This new work takes the form of a lecture on how to speak publicly, investigating the possibility of communication as a non goal-oriented activity.
Sarah Pierce presents a group performance, Campus (2011), involving six performers that act out the familiar gestures of political protests along with phrases, such as “Exaggerate! Strengthen! Simplify!”, adapted from the one-on-one instruction given to art students during a three-dimensional sculpture class. As the instructor moves from student to student, ideas about technique and observation merge with other acts that involve ‘seeing’ and ‘doing.’
Alexandre Singh uses a pair of overhead projectors and a stack of transparencies in the work Assembly Instructions Lecture, An Immodern Romanticism (2009). He juxtaposes the images culled from Wikipedia and elsewhere on the Internet to construct a chain of interwoven stories and anecdotes. Recounted through documents that blur storytelling, fiction and facts, the artist creates theories, associations and absurd connections supported by ‘evidence’ that ranges from pop culture references to historical facts.
Pierre Leguillon transforms the format and grammar of a 35mm slide projector lecture into a performance. In Non-Happening: After Ad Reinhardt (2011) Leguillon presents 350 historical slides that were used in performance lectures by New York abstract painter Ad Reinhardt. This performance includes an in-conversation about the work of Reinhardt with a special guest.
I Proclaim, You Proclaim, We Proclaim is presented in the context of Expanded Performance, a twelve week programme by Stroom Den Haag investigating performance in the broadest sense of the word, 30 September–16 December 2012.
