NONSITE || Performance and Discussion with Marcus Civin

If you’re in the Bay area, join the Nonsite Collective this Saturday, November 21, at 3:30 PM for work by Marcus Civin (performance and talk) in discussion with Chris Nagler and Real Time Ethics.

935 Natoma Street, San Francisco

between 10th and 11th Streets

and between Mission and Howard

close to the Civic Center BART Station

and the Van Ness MUNI station

From Chris Nagler:

Marcus Civin’s performance work asks questions about bodily politics, and puts together serial kinetic phrases about his own. He reframes that old contested territory, the ordinary, or ‘pedestrian’ body. His teacher, the choreographer and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer, wrote, in 1968, of her own work as “a control that seems geared to the actual time it takes the actual weight of the body to go through the prescribed motions, rather than an adherence to an imposed ordering of time. In other words, the demands made on the body’s (actual) energy resources appear to be commensurate with the task . . .” Does this equation balance in the ordinary body of today, when the ‘prescribed motions’ are often obscure, charged with impossible simultaneities, or shamed with distant, mechanized heroism. And what to do with all that ‘seeming’ ? 

In his words:

My everyday life reveals my cowardice, my normalcy, my difficulty.

Every time I do my ritual, it is slightly different. I think about what

I would do in an extreme situation. I assume, I would know what to do

in an extreme situation, but I need practice.

Some possible issues and questions that may arise:

What kind of athlete or non-athlete is the contemporary American citizen?

The slapstick histories of multitasking

Do the body’s economies (sexual, affective, energetic) reflect/counter/react to/empty into The Economy? How. specifically?

Is ‘survival’ a performance, a fetish, a nostalgia, an ordinary reality? Which for whom?

Is represented labor still labor and is labored representation still representation? Who says so?

___

From Marcus Civin:

"I had been so confident and now I had an awful feeling that the war had gotten out of my hands" 

                                    --Gertrude Stein as Alice B. Toklas (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas)

With the Nonsite Collective, Marcus Civin will project, re-build, perform gestures and utterances that riff on themes from his recent performance work — performance work that lands a poor, rough tramp behind enemy lines and forces the poor, rough tramp to decide: am I a killer, OR am I a clown?

Or: "In a series, objects become undefined simulacra one of the other. And so, along with the objects, do the people that produce them." -- Jean Baudrillard (Simulations)

I handle an ax, matches, a deck of cards, a spear, drips of water. I make a bathtub. Am I a bathtub. Or: I make a small black painting.

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjarLbD9r30&feature=related

Or: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tcx9BJRadfw

Participants might enjoy watching:

http://www.archive.org/details/busterkeatonfilm (SAMUEL BECKETT, FILM)

and/or

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8727552817849141561# (BUSTER KEATON, HARD TIMES)