ANTI-19 – Juror Memoirs During the Lockdown

by Thomas F. DeFrantz

A lifetime ago, before COVID-19, we gathered in Kuopio for the wondrous ANTI-2019 Festival. I was called as a juror for the 2019 International Prize for Live Art. While the work took me far from my family and home in North Carolina of the USA, I was grateful for the opportunity to wonder, alongside audiences in Finland, at the four performances selected for live presentation. At the end of the festival, one of these four artists would receive the grand prize.

In the US context, I have often served as a jurist or adjudicator, a panelist or expert witness to respond to Live Art and performance art, as well as many grant and residency applications. This sort of work is always exciting to me, even as it offers a huge responsibility. Why a focus on this and not that, or the determination of these instead of those? What distinguishes one experience, or an artistic gesture, from another? How shall we assess the encounters with Live Art?

I practice a vigilance toward my creative values, which are against racism, for feminism and affirm queer living. These values were revealed in our artist project meetings in the SLIPPAGE laboratory and performance studio that I direct in the US, and they are ways of being together that I continue to hone in everyday life. I arrived in Kuopio eager for encounters that resist the colonial patriarchies so entangled with contemporary life. In so many places on the planet, people encounter hateful misogyny and blank refusals to acknowledge how queer operations revitalize us all. I came to ANTI ready to be confused and surprised, open to the encounters and eager for ways to be surprised by Live Art that speaks to the particularities of experience.

Kuopio 62.89° North

In the past I had offered creative work in Trondheim, Norway and Umeå, Sweden. Still I was astonished at arrival in yet another Nordic city, nearing Lapland. Surely the indigenous people here have stories to tell about art-making, performance and survival against the odds? Our contemporary Live Art festival moves among landscapes always in formation, never finished, at once quiet and brimming with activity. In September the weather seemed chilly to me, and the drizzling skies called for hearty beer and the necessary purchase of gloves and a hat for warmth.

I took a day or two to walk the city, to venture far afield past the quiet (for me) streets toward the lakes, up and down the hills that surround the streets, and to look at the water. Clearing and sharpening my senses to prepare for the many performances ahead. 2019 brought an incredible array of performances together, including a funerary preparation, participatory archery and an immersive theatrical rendering of a 19th-century wedding. And many, many, discussions and meditations on death and dying, following the theme of the festival.

My juror colleagues hailed from the UK and Finland; Saara Turunen, our excellent leader, and Daniel Brine could not have been better companions on this extravagant adventure. Our work together allowed us many, many conversations and time to explore the creative dossiers of the four shortlisted artists chosen to compete for the prize. We pored over the materials at breakfast and lunch, chatting with curiosity about our divergent points of view and moving closer to each other in order to perform our labour. ANTI Festival’s Artistic Directors Johanna Tuukkanen and Gregg Whelan guided us expertly and gently to the places we needed to be, literally, but always stepping away from the conversation as we uncovered our shared work ethic. The challenge was clear: how to experience the work of these four artists through their portfolios, and through their live performances, to determine the recipient of the prize?

We discussed the ways that Live Art might be constituted in 2019: as actions that question assumptions, traditions or presumptions surrounding performance. That Live Art emerges exactly when boundaries of form are crossed and blurred, and things become confused. We agreed to assume the Live Art was a concept in flux, and also the glue that holds us together.

We met each artist for an hour as a jury, independent of their performances, over the two days of the finalist performances. We discovered the format for these meetings through our shared deliberations: artists would do whatever they wanted for half of that time, and then we would engage each other in the manner we found most useful for the rest of the time. We moved towards some general questions to pose to the artists.

Your work, what is it for?

What will it, and you, do for some sense of community?

What do you want your work to do in the world?

What have you been doing?

How does the work we will experience connect to a body of work, or to a narrative of how you describe what you do?

Does your work tilt towards a future of some sort?

And more questions:

To whom do you want to speak through your work?

What is most important to you?

What has led you here?

What would you like people to see in your work?

And a question that I never knew we would actually ask, but we did every time:

What would you do if you won the award?

We surprised each other, I think, in these intimate encounters: the jurors and the artists, each representing their expansive team of collaborators and the many, many gestures of creative life they have brought into the world. These small meetings were like tiny performance events; crafted for us and among us to reveal more of the sensibility that drove their making and their desire to matter in the world. With each gathering, we moved in re-orientated curiosity made anew, marveling at the world-making at hand.

World-Making

Because Live Art is surely world-making; imagining towards and from, through the here and now of performance. We jurors went to the shows along with other audience members, and reflected, imagined and came to love in ways we didn’t know before we met.

We wrote reflective texts for each of the artists met over those two days; these are collective thoughts from the team of jurors.

Keijaun Thomas

Keijaun Thomas reminds us that Live Art can transform how we feel in a second. To work through love and care as an artist – to take care of the audience in an encounter. We commend the strength of a voice questioning identity, which encourages us to question our own. What are the relationships between people and identities? How can we move towards each other? This work is a raft. It helps us to imagine not being afraid of touch. Live Art is a powerful form that can speak toward the marginalized and disenfranchised. Keijaun shows us that Live Art is the perfect form for this work, a true space for expression that may not be found in other art form practices. Bravery, intention and the ability to create emotions through ritual. The work asks: What are we going to do? The work demands: We need you to help us imagine.

Dana Michel

Constant surprises – intimacies and small gestures. Strength and physical ability, resisting presumptions and testing suppositions. Dana Michel makes work in order to see better and know better. She explores an archive enlivened through performance. Lifetimes of experience animated. Interiorities. Intuitive making with objects that become… free! A remarkable poetics of movement and imagery, bound up in an ethically-engaged approach to making and sharing. Modest and accurate, measured and structured. A faltering stagger reminds us to keep moving. A dreamlike character, charismatic and absurdist. We commend this clarity of performance, engaged in identity… dreamlike and touching in its way. A powerful presence of a female body. We commend your vision and your creative path towards remarkable, unexpected images.

Cuqui Jerez

What makes theatre? Things move and we move because of them. Floating, soaring, falling, alongside surges in sound. Again and again, we repeat, with changes in tone and texture; color and light fly by in an open expanse of time. The things resist: they are alive and random, inanimate and structured at once. Digression. Contemplation. Dancing in response to gravity. An Active Uncertainty becomes manifest. Who is backstage? An empty stage is not empty. The politics of beauty in a choreography of dramaturgy. An urgent sense of scale, with an attention to detail. An intellectual, devoted artist living in a love of art. Live Art as a personal exploration, becoming manifest because it must.

Mammalian Diving Reflex

Art is a social practice; we practice to live. Mammalian Diving Reflex offers an amazing body of work that connects people who become the artwork itself. The process of building a life is/as performance. The interplay of spontaneous responses and youthful curiosity. What if we could talk about these things in public? What sort of worlds could we build? Wondering at playing and playing at wondering, we stretch the encounter towards its inevitable futures as an unforgettable experience. What can we learn by participating in such an exercise? What is it to be vulnerable? How can we stand among each other and tell truths? Giving voice to marginalized people through a dynamic, strong process. A testing out for new ways to live together. A social and artistic endeavour to network people across differences.

In the end, we awarded the prize to Dana Michel, with this commendation:

Striking, clear images that arrive unexpectedly. Multitudes of memories wrapped into performance. Everything here matters, everything sounds, everything vibrates.

Congratulations to the 2019 ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art winner, Dana Michel.

**

Heading home, Kuopio became a blur of compelling visions. Cold vistas of hills with trees rising up at a distance in every direction, inlets and lakes, ponds connected and guiding our movement to the airport. So many friendly conversations! I met a young man who had spent his entire life in and around Kuopio, who worked as a guide at one of the performances. I met travellers assembled on business who happened to hear about the festival and came to a show. And young revellers at the intense and totally necessary after-party, which included yet another performance by a rising popular entertainer. Looking back now, in month five of a US COVID-19 lockdown that keeps me home, I remember our gathering as an opening towards the Live Art I imagine we truly need now: work that arrives against racism, for feminism, and that affirms queer living. And I remember being propelled into the world anew, believing now in something else; believing that we can imagine a collective tomorrow that works toward care, each caring towards the other.

Thomas F. DeFrantz is a Director at SLIPPAGE: slippage.org.

The article is part of the Shortlist LIVE! publication #2 , get your copy on our online store!