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2025
‘Audience, Performer, and Score Meet at an Execution: Walking a Tightrope of Superfluously Specific Nothings as Well as Somethings Inside the Golden Ratio of 420 Mississippi’s.’
Cantos #7, Collingwood House (2025)
Curated by Isabella Hone Saunders

A prompt from David Wojnarowicz’s Weight of the Earth inspired a fascist work of totalitarian control that could have been written by Mussolini as a small, unhinged child.

Performed by:
Joanna Lloyd as JOANNA
Daniel Ward as DANIEL
Phillip Adams as PHILLIP
Thomas Woodman as TOM

Video Credit: Jordan James Kaye. 

This work was built from two rehearsals.
In the first rehearsal, the performers learnt the score.
In the second, we fucked it up.

In the first rehearsal, the performers executed a score composed of superfluously specific somethings and nothings—an overly detailed, almost imperceptible sequence of timed actions. Gesture, thought, pause, and sound scored. Each performer followed the instructions precisely, wrangling themselves (sometimes torturously) in line with them—a cooked tightrope of standing, walking, sipping, scratching, waiting.

What is usually second nature, like shifting weight or scratching your nose, became an over-curated, over-analysed, hyper-managed event. It was life or death in this world to factor in ten Mississippis of dissociation before filling a glass of water just over halfway.

In the second rehearsal, notes arrived to sabotage what had been built. Actions were changed, cut, or forbidden. Performers were told to remember these changes only halfway through already doing them—mid-sip, mid-turn, mid-line—realising too late that what they were doing had been cut. Now they were live, and they’d messed up. “Shits”, stutters, and recoveries followed as they tried to continue as if nothing had happened.

This work was unnecessarily demanding in all the wrong ways—the performers making every desperate effort to appear normal while riding a score that was actively sabotaging them. They were instructed that under no circumstances could they attract the viewer’s attention, so every move became disastrous. Every fumble, fuck-up, recovery, remembering, and forgetting folded into the Jenga tower: a constant performance of trying to appear natural and fine and normal under absurd conditions, all while the mind is screaming—wait… fuck… wasn’t that bit cut???!

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