June Highlight - “The Dotted Line”

Continuing our theme of exchanges, this month I wanted to highlight the role that contracts have played in my past works. While some of the exchanges in my work are more implicit, or even non-verbal, I started exploring exchanges with audiences in a very literal and detailed way, which jump-started my education in crafting “a fair trade.”

Alright, on to June!

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[MISSING] was my first project in which I really reckoned with my curiosity about other people’s lives, and about the ways that the Asks I made of audiences needed to be recognized and compensated. I felt like the questions I wanted to wrestle with were too large to be answered from my own experience alone, and if I wanted more data, I was going to need to give something in return. So in the interest of tackling my research question “What does it mean to miss someone or something?” and with the guidance of my phenomenal mentor and lovingly skeptical critic Debra Levine, I hammered out a deal I could present to possible participants:

"If you could send a letter to anyone in the world, who would you choose?"

Participants were offered an envelope, paper, and what a 20 year old Yannick understood to be a nice pen (which I was constantly afraid someone would take). I told the participant that if they would write a letter right then and there, I would take it (unopened and unread) to the post office and pay to send it. In return, I asked them to join me for a 5 minute recorded interview when they were done.

In the process of crafting this offer, I found that approaching an audience member as someone I was making a deal with forced me to be much more specific about what exactly I was doing: What were my expectations? What was I willing to do? How valuable was their input to me really? And how valuable was it to them?

My mentor reminded me of the tradition of Fluxus Scores, where artists would write the “score” for an event, occurrence, or performance. Instead of musical notation, these scores consisted of brief, sometimes enigmatic instructions in prose.

Cheers

Conduct a large crowd of people to the house of a stranger. Knock on the door. When

someone opens the door, the crowd applauds and cheers vigorously.

All depart silently.

(KEN FRIEDMAN, 1965. Accessed from The Fluxus Performance Workbook, )

I loved the portability of these invitations — something small enough to fit on a scrap of paper in your pocket — and the way that they could operate on a few different scales: you could watch someone perform it, perform it yourself, or just imagine it. The act of reading the score accomplishes a sort of concert-for-one in your own head. On the other hand, while I love the poetry of these offerings, I was aware of the way that all of the negative space they leave to fill asks an enormous amount of vulnerability from a stranger, especially when I am asking them to do something alongside me. I felt it was important to avoid the power imbalance of “I know how this works and you don’t,” and to make sure someone knew I wasn’t making the whole thing up as I went along. So despite the fact that I am the first to admit I’m a bit pretentious (the actual title of my published thesis was [_______], which I still stand by and will spend the rest of my life apologizing for), I decided I was going to need a firmer set of rules.

Rules for Action: “Send a Letter Anywhere,” 2013

You’ll notice I say the rules “will not be provided,” which seems to pretty immediately contradict my commitment to avoiding a power imbalance. Looking back several years later, I think there were three main considerations I had in this choice. The first was a drive to lower the barrier for entry; as solicitation was strictly forbidden in the city, I was depending on the curiosity of passersby to find participants, and even a very curious (read: nosy) person like me is likely to walk away if they are told they have to read a full page of instructions. Instead, in my work I lean on providing participants with prompts like “Do you understand? Do you have any questions for me?” to allow each person to inform themselves to their own comfort level. This leads us to our second consideration, which is allowing for flexibility of interpretation. Former head of the NYU Abu Dhabi Theatre Program Rubén Polendo used to finish every set of instructions with the phrase “whatever you think I said, that’s what I meant.” Among its many purposes, the phrase was meant to encourage us to act confidently and creatively in the ambiguities of a prompt or instruction. Similarly, while the rules made sure I knew precisely what I was doing, part of my drive to be in conversation with audiences was to encounter surprising ideas and responses. I wanted the experience of my exchange with a participant to feel like something we made together; the implication of being handed a sheet of all the rules is that the interaction is already defined.

Finally, I opted to not provide this text and instead make myself the resource for answering questions because I am the more entertaining choice. Designing this exchange quickly became far more interesting to me than any play I was supposed to write, and it strengthened my resolve that each stage of developing the performance should be a complete performance, in and of itself [1]. At the end of the day, my goal with this work wasn’t really to answer my research question, but rather to share the experience of really asking it. The more I could apply what I knew about crafting engagements to the details of these exchanges, the more they seemed as well positioned as (if not better than) a more traditional theatrical performance for pointing someone to the question at hand.

However, this process was not really in keeping with the expected development of a Capstone Thesis for a Theater degree, and so when it came time to actually doing these interviews in public in Abu Dhabi, I was told by my department that I had two options.

“You can treat this like a social science project, or you can treat this like an art piece. If it’s Social Science, then you’re going to need IRB approval, because you’re working with Human Subjects. It will mean more work, but it also means the university can back you up if you encounter difficulties conducting interviews in public. If it’s an art piece, you can do what you like, but you’re on your own.”

While I was initially drawn to the structure (and “not wandering blind into unknown legalities”) of the formal IRB process, I found myself stopping short when I encountered the paperwork and media releases they would have required from participants. Aside from being cumbersome (I think a good measure of barriers to entry is “how many times do I have to sign my name before the experience can start?”), they totally obliterated any sense of mutuality and collaboration. While they served many purposes, the effect of these forms was to give me control over all materials and reduce my liability (and thus my university’s). I felt like the experience I was making demanded a different approach, and so I began drafting a contract of my own that felt less unilateral. I thought of my dad, who sometimes rages against unfair contracts by crossing out sections and writing objections in the margins (“this is bullshit” being a frequent entry). While not a sound legal strategy, I liked the notion that a contract could be a place to talk back and have a conversation, rather than to just resign and sign. My first draft came out looking like this:

You’ll notice there’s a box already checked, which I considered to be my minimum requirements for my own participation. However, I also told participants that the blank space was an invitation to propose adjustments or alternate trades, and in at least one instance someone haggled me to help them produce a commercial for their donut store.

I found that participants responded really well to the invitation to change or restate the terms of the agreement. It also helped me to underscore the idea that we had made something together, of which we were both the authors — so much so that many participants became confused at my clumsy use of the term “Artist’s Signature,” and I was asked several times “wait, who’s the artist?” Interestingly, it also seemed to be an effective pitch for getting permission to use the work, and I found that people were often willing to offer control above and beyond what I had asked (generally expressed as some form of “you do you.”

In fact, the phrase was so often repeated that I briefly considered simply making it a checkbox, until I was presented by a participant with an option too tantalizing to pass up.

Moving forward, it was almost always chosen — so much so I considered removing it. After all the work I had done to secure a participant’s trust, I found myself a little uncomfortable with the degree to which I had succeeded, and with the weight that carried. There’s a lot that has been said and written by better minds than mine on the subject of who is granted the benefit of the doubt, and the kinds of privileges that I carry. That said, I think the way that this process forced me to sit with the real minutiae of trust and exchange also helped train me into a more considerate and responsible artist — which I have found comes with a free lifetime supply of extra anxiety, and eventually, better art.

Over the course of my initial research phase, I did 23 interviews in various spots across the city—outside of malls in different neighborhoods, and crashing the outskirts of film festivals and poetry nights. I built a website to host the transcripts, and allow audiences to explore the archive I had built. I also used the stories gathered as the jumping off point for a devised theatre performance, and used the performance as a venue to collect more interviews. I loved the way the eventual structure bent the straight line of “development” into a circle, and provided audiences multiple entry points for exploring the question.

Still, in an odd way, sometimes I think this contract is the thing I am personally most proud of from the entire run of [MISSING]. It certainly had a large impact on my work, and it isn’t hard to recognize its influence on some future projects.

Participant Agreement, “Through Love.” 2016

One major change you can see above (that I only now recognize) is a slow progression from making deals with audiences as myself to negotiating exchanges while performing as a character and/or representing a fictional entity.

But that is a thought for another day.

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And that’s all for the June Archive Highlight - things will probably stay “on theme” for the next month or so in the build up to IF WE WIN. It occurs to me that I could make work that doesn’t take months and years of reflection, gradual development and entirely new skill building to operate, but it remains to be seen if that’s a lesson I’ll ever actually learn. Speaking of which, if all this talk of contracts, exchanges, and the ways we value things gets you excited, consider stepping into one of the upcoming playtests!

In all cases, I’m keen to hear your thoughts on all of this work, and to keep sharing projects past, present and future. And as ever, I’m grateful for your support.

Thanks,

Yannick

[1] Not an intentional reference, but if you haven’t seen it and it’s still available, you should absolutely watch the recorded performance. Honestly, if you are free for the next hour or so, bother someone for their Hulu password and do it now - I’ll be here when you get back. In fact, if you're reading this on here, there's a good chance you're already done.