Artists Space

No Total

Amelia Bande
Daniel Carter
Khaela Maricich
Glendalys Medina

Performances
March 29, 2016, 7:30pm

This evening comes from the sentiment, or commitment, or conviction of wanting to be in dialogue with people who make and think about performances.

Two cars sitting on a city street in front of a dumpster covered with a tarp.
[Two cars sitting on a city street in front of a dumpster covered with a tarp.]

We are trying to convey our concern with care towards making spaces or articulating and disarticulating what is needed for a performance to emerge and be held or supported and recognized.

The sentiment we felt between us could be described as a sense of "longing outside belonging," or perhaps it's fine if it gets misheard, as "longing outside the longing."

We recently saw a film together called Regrouping by Lizzie Borden, in which a character reflected that the nature of the group was that everyone felt they were somehow personally alienated inside the group, but they were all too intimidated by the desire for unity that they didn't make a space to express these feelings.

We imagine each person here is the means for their fulfillment.

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The bookstore is closed tonight.

It will have already started when you arrive. Glendalys is performing in the shop closet downstairs.

During the performances, the bar will be closed. Khaela, Amelia and Daniel will perform upstairs.

Everything that is work will be addressed as labor.

There will be times that those working don't have to work and can watch.

We have already choreographed the space. But maybe that isn't obvious or this doesn't do what we think it's doing.

We thought that lighting was important and fell into the trap of thinking how it can control the audience.

There will be visible music.

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Approximate order of appearances:

Continuous from 7.30pm:
Glendalys Medina

The performance, "Dear Me" is a 2-minute love song. Medina sings to one person at a time, in a small pitch black room. The performance will take place in the lower level. Please ask for the attendant Stephanie Lindquist if you wish to view the performance.

8.15pm:
Khaela Maricich

Maricich will give a presentation about an experimental performance series called No Microphone that took place in NYC during the mid-2010s. The series sprang up as an organic response to the stultifying atmosphere of late-stage, winner take all capitalism pervasive in that era. Occurring in a different Manhattan arts location each month, the series operated with minimal infrastructure and brought together artists of all levels of exposure and from an expansive range of cliques and disciplines, creating a site for exploring not yet commodified materials. Maricich will be talking in particular about how participation in the series shaped her own performance work.

8.45pm:
Amelia Bande
The Purpose of Color
A musical reading

From my bed I can see the Empire State Building far away. A small head of light, with patterns and colors that change every night, commemorating each time a different event or occasion. I wonder about these lights. Like lines and shapes of a national flag. Or a filter created to go over my profile picture online.

9pm:
Daniel Carter

Writer, composer, multi-reed/trumpet player, who, since coming to New York in 1970, has sought out people, situations, dimensionalities, that encourage free artistic, political, philosophical, spiritual, human, expression/life…cosmic/beyond cosmic diversity, within cosmic/beyond cosmic unity...

The group No Total is a contemplation, growing without anticipation of arriving. We take position. We meet with one another, read, discuss, and sometimes write. We are curious about what happens surrounding knowledge and production. We surround.

We meet to share and change where, when, and how we work. There is a kind of work we want to do – the work of caring for one another, our practices, ourselves. This work is quite different from the work we need to do for subsistence, to provide the resources to take care of ourselves and others. We have day jobs and night jobs. We are thinking about these things.

We are implicated and escaping. We are in the know. We are partially funded, sharing spaces, and in need. We are parts. We are Ensemble. Our liminal bodies in the queered sphere are not lack.

We use our common senses to navigate a commons.

No Total is invitational.