One footstep. A tug of hair. Chains Rattling. Smoke. Water Body. A body of water.

At a critical moment of rediscovering the “live” I designed ON DURATION to bring together and support durational performance artists for a week of creative research and public praxis that culminated in a daylong durational event.

Marilyn Arsem, Sarah Cameron Sunde, GOODW.Y.N, Verónica Peña, and I met for the first time in-person on Sunday April 3, 2022 to begin the process while our final collaborator Natasha Jozi awaited the arrival of her visa.

Each participating artist works with duration in significant and rigorous ways, yet our practices and orientations to time and rhythm all vary drastically.

The intent was to share, to provoke, to work, and support — with care, sincerity, and curiosity.

Water was a shared material that became primary as we began site investigations and discovered there would be torrential rains on the day of our performance. Indeed, when Marilyn started performing Chernobyl at sunrise (6:05am), the day was damp and gray with a slow drizzle quickly becoming a more steady downpour while Marilyn read.

Across our identities and embodied knowledges, war and its vectors, the relationship between war, violence, and performance art, the state of fleeing, arriving, leaving, and a body’s proximity to presence or ability to cultivate presence within space-times that inherently work against the possibility for being with one another differently — surfaced early and often in our process and praxis work - even in recognizing the unique time-space held by the ON DURATION frame.

We also felt the absence of Natasha and her limbo with border time, the invisible labor that had begun months in advance and the impossibility of mental rest even as a body is not in motion but waits for permission to move.

Curating and both logistically and creatively supporting the group while also figuring out my own performance required trusting my gut, listening deeply to create an overall score, and making quick decisions about my artistic contribution.

I was thankful to learn of the rain and decided to create two installations with large metal basins that would collect rain from moonrise to moonset. The first metal basin was placed outside in a high-traffic area that intersected with entry and exit points each of the ON DURATION performers would traverse throughout the day.

My outdoor basin also faced the indoor “repose room,” which brought group conversations (from the week of praxis) about durational performance and “rest” — about the visibility or invisibility of a body at rest as part of and not separate from “performance”— into the live event. The repose room highlighted “rest” and taking time to care for the body while also playing with power dynamics and presumptions about public and private, activity and inactivity, rest and performance.

During the week, we talked about rest a lot, also harm and directionality — particularly as we discovered shared questions around duration and endurance, and probed our relationships to our own bodies and practices as all of us were returning to “live” performance in the wake of the ongoing pandemic. Many of these “conversations” were embodied in the public praxis sessions where engaging with disability, aging, race, gender, sexuality, climate, and the structures of whiteness that dominate institutional space vibrated and surfaced in ways that exceeded more traditional verbal exchanges or artist talks.

GOODW.Y.N started their performance in the repose room with rituals of care and much later, the group ended together in the repose room, also with rituals of care shared throughout the week.

With the sun beginning to set, thunder and lighting bellowing just above us, GOODW.Y.N’s performance has ended and they are in repose. Marilyn’s performance nears its end closing in on 13 hours, Sarah has been performing for about 5 hours, and I begin to shift from the outside installation down to the second basin I installed under a leaky portion of the roof in the skate house where Veronica performs. The windows in the skate house face a large pond that often spills over and floods during rainstorms, and my slow choreography included moving from the outside basin of rain water, past Sarah at the elm tree, to arrive to the basin under the leaky roof. In this transitional moment of sunset, darkness came swiftly and rain became sleet.

Arriving to the skate house I slowly removed and hung my wet clothes over the basin, the dripping rain in metal created a delicate soundscape in slow rhythm wih Veronica’s shallow breath. Marilyn came to join. Sarah was still with the elm tree, using its descriptive sign posting as shelter. As Verónica got colder, she came out of the suspended fabric and was offered warmth by several audience members who surrounded her — creating an enveloping cocoon with their bodies. I left my basin momentarily to offer heat, body warmth, breath and tears as energy and release, sitting for the first time all day with Verónica, who eventually finds her ending and leaves the skate house for the repose room.

Still barefoot, naked now but wrapped in fabric, I then dragged the basin from the room I had been in to the room with the suspended fabric and made my way to the window to watch the pond overflow during the rain.

What’s Next?

The participating artists and I intend to create a publish an artist book that details our process, performances, and experiences.

Please check back for more details coming soon about the artist book, dates for ON DURATION (2023), and contact me if you are interested in bringing ON DURATION to your venue or institution.

Credits:

ON DURATION (2022) was sponsored by the John B. Hurford ’60 Center for the Arts and Humanities and the Distinguished Visitors Program, Haverford College and supported by the following:

Production Assistant: Alexandra Iglesia

Durational Event Invigilators: Teri Ke, Macintyre Sunde, Purnima M Palawat, Mia Ellis-Einhorn, Matthew Farmer, Luis Rodriguez-Rincon, Liana Wilson-Graff, Eryn Peritz, Liz Burke, Jia Hui Lee, Sofia Esner

Hurford Director & Staff Support: Gustavus Stadler, James Weissinger, Kerry Nelson, Henry Morales with additional thanks to Nicole Ruffin Price

Cinematographer and Editor: Shawn Kornhauser

Public Reflection Documentation: Aby Isakov with special thanks to Vicky Funari

Photographer: Patrick Montero

All candid photographs and video: Alexandra Iglesia with the exception of the last basin dragging video by Sofia Esner

More specific logistical information and bios of each ON DURATION (2022) participating artist can be found at hav.to/onduration.