Talk Act 2: Scoring Performance Jade Montserrat

Future Collect artist Jade Montserrat invites fellow creative practitioners Jack Tan and Amy Lawrence to join her in a conversation exploring what it means to score a performance.  Making connections between everyday performativity and structured theatrical performance, the discussion will consider how the performing body and a language of gestural notation might inform the drafting of documents and the implementation of organisational policy.  Montserrat is in the process of creating new work for her Future Collect commission at Manchester Art Gallery, encompassing performance, works on paper and a publication, as she explores questions of care in relation to both objects and people in the context of the gallery’s collection and collecting practices. As part of her research process, she has initiated a series of public events in collaboration with other Northern based creative practitioners. Act 2 will inform the making of a new performance, which in its initial development is taking cues from the theatrical oeuvre of Ira Aldridge, responding to the site of Manchester Art Gallery and keeping in mind our current context of physical distancing.

Biographies

Amy Lawrence creates performative and visual projects using experimental choreography, audio and visual arts often in the form of gatherings, workshops and immersive experiences across galleries, theatre and site specific locations in public spaces.  She produces platforms of live, experimental work, and more recently has begun offering consultations to arts organisations around anti-racism actions and policy making.

Jack Tan makes work that explores the connection between the social, the legal and art. Using social relations and cultural norms as material, he creates performances, performatives, sculpture, video and participatory projects that highlight the rules – customs, rituals, habits and theories – that guide human behaviour.  Prior to becoming an artist, Tan trained as a lawyer and worked in civil litigation as well as in NGOs undertaking human rights cases, policy and anti-racist campaigning work.

Image: Jade Montserrat, “Shadowing/Revue: Ecclesiastes”, 2017.