Video still of devynn emory from “Dust,” one of twenty-eight audio, video, and/or text-based scores in Last Audience: a performance manual
Who: Yanira Castro, Kathy Couch, Stephan Moore, David Hamilton Thomson, LD DeArmon, Marshall Hatch Jr., Tara Aisha Willis
What: Sneak peek of Last Audience: a performance manual
Where: MCA Chicago Zoom
When: Saturday, October 24, $10 (manual $15-$40), 2:00
Why: When innovative choreographer Yanira Castro began working on Last Audience in the summer of 2018, she could not have predicted how timely it would become, now reinvented for a pandemic with so many of us stuck at home, trapped by a deadly virus, and entertainment venues shuttered all over the city and across the country. Influenced by the concept of reckonings, the requiem mass, Greek tragedy, and Artur von Ferraris’ 1918 painting The Last Audience of the Hapsburgs, specifically how it relates to the current president, the Puerto Rican-born, New York-based Castro (Performance | Portrait, Paradis) has forged ahead with the project as a format for people to create their own works using a manual, consisting of twenty-eight multimedia performance scores to be brought to life wherever you are sheltering in place, building a different kind of artistic community in the age of Covid-19. “This is a manual for you to make a requiem, your Last Audience,” Castro writes in an opening “Dear Participant” letter. “I understand performance as an act of complicity. Specifically, it is a call to practice a social politic — to gather, to take on roles, to repeat ritual, to weave incantation, to cite oracles, to imagine myth. Like all rituals, it is mystery. Like many communal acts, it is uneasy.” The manual, developed and produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, divides the scores into “One Body,” “Sever,” “Mercy,” “Judgment,” and “Blessing”; it also features video by Peter Richards, website design by Fei Liu, and photographs by Simon Courchel, including shots of contributing writer Leslie Cuyjet and Kirsten Michelle Schnittker in performance.
Last Audience manual features photos by Simon Courchel
On October 24 at 2:00, Castro, who runs a canary torsi, will be joined by contributing writers and audio/video performers Devynn Emory, David Hamilton Thomson, and Kathy Couch (who also compiled and designed the manual with Castro), music and audio designer Stephan Moore, project coordinator LD DeArmon, MAAFA Redemption Project executive director Marshall Hatch Jr., and MCA associate curator Tara Aisha Willis for a live discussion and Q&A, tracking the evolution of the project, which premiered October 2019 at New York Live Arts and had its virtual launch September 20 at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art’s TBA Festival. There will also be a live, private event on December 13 if you purchase the manual by October 22. As it says on the Last Audience website, in which you can add your own images and experiences, “Your refusal is yours. As is your agreement. And your ambivalence. Take care.”