It is less a lecture, more like a cartography.
Parts may or may not sync up, we will see.

Ce qui suit est “Une conférence sur la stagnation”
Il s’agit moins d’une conférence que d’une 
cartographie. Ses parties peuvent ou non 
se synchroniser, nous verrons bien.

Dit is “Een lezing over stagnatie.”
Het is minder een lezing, dan een cartografie.
De onderdelen hiervan kunnen wel of niet
synchroon lopen, we zullen het zien.

Trilingual (!) edition. Loose sheets in an envelope. On the same model as Resistance.

Delta is a coming together for choreographic and performative work to be shared and exercised, a place for sharing work by doing the work. A container for participatory projects, dancing, exchange and choreographic inquiries. Delta is organised as evening dance classes, artist zines and thematic publications, like this one: On water histories, narratives and practices. 

Water both divides and merges, varies and manifests in different kinds of shapes and structures, acquiring different relations with its surroundings. As a transformative material, could one say that water has a different kind of logic, another kind of dance? In this publication, the contributors Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried,  D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson, and Alice MacKenzie share their multi-layered practices, writings, memories and scores on water. Inviting you to submerge!

With contributions by: Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris, Paul Maheke, Axel Andersson, Sindri Runudde, Vibeke Hermanrud, Elly Vadseth, Daniela Bershan, Sabrina Seifried, D.N.A. (Dina El Kaisy Friemuth, Neda Sanai and Anita Beikpour), Every Ocean Hughes, Adham Hafez, Pontus Pettersson and Alice MacKenzie.

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris: First Move, Original Rains: a Score for Sensing the Precipitational
Pontus Pettersson: Dripping from my fingertips
Adham Hafez: To dance about nature?
Daniela Bershan in collaboration with Sabrina Seifried: Mapping OCEAN
Sindri Runudde: Chosen by the barnacles
Vibeke Hermanrud in conversation with Elly Vadseth: Submerged
Axel Andersson: Confessions of a swimmer
D.N.A: Hydrocapsules.love
Paul Mahek:e As the Waters Recall
Alice MacKenzie: I know that smell
Every Ocean Hughes: Ocean
Pontus Pettersson: 100 ways of water

Graphic design by Sara Kaaman

Some years ago, Will Holder and Alex Waterman proposed to Robert Ashley that musicians and non-musicians might produce new versions of his operas, by way of typographical scores. The bulk ofYes, But Is It Edible? is a result of that proposal: scores for Dust (1998) and Celestial Excursions (2003). These operas’ characters have, until now, been solely produced by and are the stories exchanged between Ashley and his “band” (singers Sam Ashley, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner, and Jacqueline Humbert); and in landscapes produced by “Blue” Gene Tyranny, Tom Hamilton, David Moodey, Cas Boumans, and Mimi Johnson—the result of a thirty-year relationship.

The scores for Dust and Celestial Excursions are preceded by a selection of Ashley’s work, from 1963 to 2008, drawing attention to the varying relations between instruction and score, and the tones of instructional address. Working with these scores gave us a better sense of how each one produces a specific mode of decision-making, telling us what to put on the pages of the scores, for any reader who follows.

Yes, But Is It Edible? is the fourth in a series of publications produced with or by Will Holder and Alex Waterman that a musicological perspective on scoring speech, and the role of printed matter in collective forms of reading and writing: Agape (Miguel Abreu Gallery, 2007); Between Thought and Sound (The Kitchen, 2008); and The Tiger’s Mind (with Beatrice Gibson; Sternberg Press, 2012).

'To discover a fossil on your tibia: scories and other mutations of scores' is a collection of texts exploring the score as a choreographic tool for writing.

Magdalena Ptasznik, worked on several scores to introduce, instigate, and reflect upon the network of relations with other- than- human existences. She approaches choreography as a generative practice to speculate about future fictions for a world in environmental crisis. By using somatic practices, site-specific materials, storytelling in workshop settings, Magda seeks to empower change through activating collective imaginaries with the audience. For her End Presentation, a publication will be launched with a collection of writings that circulate around the idea of the score as a form of activating self-choreographic agencies.

Magdalena Ptasznik has been exploring choreography and dance through creating performances, dancing in the work of other makers, creating choreography for drama theater, and teaching. Through the last years, she focused on contexts of practice that turn towards creating shared spaces and experiences – teaching, collaborating, and creating performances for the limited public.

Phylactère is born from a deep desire to transcribe performance, with authentic, subjective and spontaneous point of views; giving voice to amateurs, artists, designers and thinkers alike. Phylactère is published once a year. Each issue takes an onomatopoeia as its theme. Phylactère publishes transitional writings and in turn welcomes the discrepancies between a script, the performed action, to its translation; with an extreme and adventurous attention given to contexts, gestures, emotions and spaces put at stake during this transcription.

Phylactère is digging into post-performance, allowing those who weren’t present to get a reading of it and experience it from another perspective. This first issue has the theme of the French onomatopoeia Patati Patata: an inexhaustible and endless chatter, long or short discourse, gossip, word of mouth, whispers… Patati Patata or «Yada Yada Yada» in English, is a too much of speech, an endless story, an et cetera expressed out loud. Phylactère is a journal composed of multiple voices, initiated by Roxanne Maillet and Auriane Preud’homme, produced by RondPoint Projects and published by Immixtion Books.

Contributors : Alexandru Balgiu, Anna Tuccio, Anne Marchis Mouren, ArianE Sirota, Barbara Quintin & Liv Schulman, Barthélémy Cardonne, Camille Soulat, Dorota Gaweda & Egle Kulbokaite, etaïnn zwer, Ilke Gers, Josèfa Ntjam, Laure Vigna, Louise Siffert, Lou-Maria Le Brusq, Maria Barnas, Marouchka Payen, Martha Salimbeni, officeabc, Philippe Goguely, Sarah Korzec, Simili Gum, Sven Dehens et Uta Eisenreich.

Texts in English and French
Graphic Design : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet 

The definitive text of Atalanta (Acts of God), which has been performed internationally since the 1980s, includes the entire libretto and an afterword by Ashley, compiled and edited by Sumner Carnahan. 

Robert Ashley is a prolific composer and writer, best known for his work in new forms of opera: epic prose poems he sets to music, which have been awarded, commissioned, and performed internationally for over forty-five years. In the 1960s, Ashley organized Ann Arbor's legendary ONCE Festival and directed the ONCE Group. During the 1970s, he directed the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College, toured with the Sonic Arts Union, and wrote and produced Perfect Lives, an opera for television widely praised as the precursor of music-television.

Lingua Press, 1988

Gaburo was born in Somerville, New Jersey. He served as a professor of music at the University of Illinois, the University of California, San Diego, and the University of Iowa. His notable students include James Tenney and Allen Strange. He is renowned as a teacher, pioneer of electronics in music, jazz pianist, writer, ecologist, publisher, and proponent of compositional linguistics.

In 1968, he joined the faculty at the new San Diego campus of the University of California where in 1972 a Rockefeller Foundation grant enabled him to start NMCE IV, this time with an actor, a virtuoso speaker, a mime, a gymnast, and a sound-movement artist (Rosen and Moore 2001). Until his resignation from UCSD in 1975 he produced a large number of integrated theatrical works, such as the collection Lingua and Privacy.

In 1975, Gaburo founded Lingua Press, which produces scores, books, records, audio tapes, videotapes, and films (Rosen and Moore 2001). This firm is dedicated to putting forth unique artist-produced works in all media having to do with language and music. Many of the publications have been exhibited in book art shows throughout the world. Gaburo lived in the Anzo-Borrego desert writing and teaching from 1980 until 1983. In 1980, he was artistic director for the first "authentic" production of Harry Partch's The Bewitched for the Berlin Festival (recorded on Enclosure Five: Harry Partch, innova 405). His understanding of Partch's concept of corporeality has deep connections with his own concern for physicality and how it informs compositions. His 1982 tape work, RE-RUN, for instance, was generated after a 20-hour sensory deprivation exercise.

He became Director of the Experimental Music Studio at the University of Iowa in 1983. The studio put intensive focus on composition, technology, psycho-acoustic perception, performance, and the affirmation of the uniqueness of the individual to create his/her own language reality. At the studio, he founded the Seminar for Cognitive Studies, a forum for discussion of the creative process. His concern for the investigation of music as legitimate research, and composition as the creation of intrinsic appropriate language, led to a series of readings in compositional linguistics for solo performer.

He most often made innovative use of electronics and explored tonality, serialism, and what he called "compositional linguistics" such as in his LINGUA series (Listening). He also wrote minimal pieces such as The Flow of (u) for three voices singing unison.

Gaburo died in 1993 in Iowa City, Iowa.

The archive of his life's work is held at the University of Illinois Music Library.

In I saw the world collapse and it was only a word, published on the occasion of his concert in December 2019 at Albertinum, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Hassan Khan articulates the communal yet individualized feelings of sadness and trouble before they coalesce into larger structures and institutions through a libretto for five vocalists, showing us the fleeting moments of the world as it is collapsing rather than only the dust of its collapse. The work is characterized by layered fragments that gesture toward a tonality and unity that nearly coalesce, but that dissipate as soon as they emerge. The collapsing word could be anything: the death of a family member; a defeated revolution; a heartbreak. It means something different from one place, one individual, to the next while still existing so broadly that it defines a more communal experience felt across the globe. A collapse from what? Rather than a doomsday message, it intimates that perhaps the world isn't really collapsing at all. Instead, Khan poses collapse as an ever-present underlying condition, challenging much contemporary intellectualizing that positions the current moment as somehow peculiar or extraordinary. 

"1) Blame your partner for every disaster that has even occurred: G. 
2) Oscillate in confusion between these two pitches using a glissando to come and go at a narcotic speed: A♭ C♭. 
3) Argue with your best friend while looking at them using this progression: G – B – D – E♯. 
4) Demand an apology using the progression: E – C – A♭♭ – F. 
5) Beg for forgiveness by using the two highest pitches you can reach. 
6) Ask a question by humming this progression: E♭♭ – D♭ – Ax – A♯. 
7) Lose interest in everything using this progression: F – A – C – C♯."

Hassan Khan (born 1975 in London, lives and works in Cairo) works with image, sound, text, space and situation.

This publication is part of Backward Sway | Upper Beam | Forward Swivel | Lower Bound - a site specific exhibition by Marie Raffn realized at Theatre Academy Helsinki in February 2019. The publication is a score of performative action developed in correspondence with the exhibition and the performance; Reading and Interpretation of - and inside - a spatial score by dancers Taru Miettinen and Aino Puhonen which took place during its opening days.

The scripts of Romy Rüegger's performances: a constellation of texts, largely written to be spoken. The scripts as they are printed do not document the performances primarily. They are indications of spacial and temporal layering, juxtapositions of aesthetic and poetic elements and bodies. Overlapping every day observations with archival material, confronting, jumping.

Romy Rüegger (born 1983, lives and works in Zurich) is an artist and writer working with sound-based practices and shared listening. Her writings for performances, audio works and choreographed spaces draw on anti-racist and intersectional politics of language and memory. Recent performances, audio works and publication contributions include Synthetic Stream Plays (Kunsthalle Basel, 2018), Binary Codes as NO (Gasworks, London, 2018), “I am the Wall” (in: Grounds for Possible Music, Errant Bodies Press, Berlin, 2018), Reina llora*, Reads (Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, 2017), I am the Wall (Q-O2 / Performatik Festival, Brussels, 2017), History is Closed Today (Helmhaus, Zurich, 2017), J'ai everyday ma substance (in collaboration with Anna Frei, Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck, 2017).

Published 2018

Locked down at home during the first wave of Covid-19, David Weber-Krebs kept on thinking about the day when theatres would open their doors again. At that point, it was somehow difficult to even picture that moment.

On the 8th of April, 2020, in the middle of the lockdown, David sent an e-mail to his peers: artists, scholars, curators, and spectators belonging to different art communities. In this e-mail, there was a simple question: What will happen on your first theatre visit after the lockdown?

It was an invitation to imagine the future of theatre from this very specific moment when theatres were all closed and when it was not clear how and when and if they would open again.

With contributions by: Paula Almiron, Kristof van Baarle, Sven Age Birkeland, Antonia Baehr, Caroline Barneaud, Nicole Beutler, Maaike Bleeker, Julien Bruneau, Pieter De Buysser, Alondra Castellanos, Chloé Chignell, Amélie Coster, Jasper Delbecke, Zoë Demoustier, Wouter De Raeve, Charlotte De Somviele, Katja Dreyer, Jeroen Fabius, Silvia Fanti, Far, Nicolas Galeazzi, Emilie Gallier, Nada Gambier, Melih Gencboyaci, Konstantina Georgelou, Kristof van Gestel, Matthieu Goeury, Maximilian Haas, Ant Hampton, David Helbich, Marijke Hoogenboom, Rita Hofwijk, Breg Horemans, Asa Horvitz, Dolores Hulan, Mette Ingvartsen, Myriam Van Imschoot and Marcus Bergner (MM), Stefan Kaegi, Edyta Kozak, Bojana Kunst, Rudi Laermans, Sarah van Lamsweerde, Heike Langsdorf, Mylène Lauzon, André Lepecki, Kopano Maroga, Ivana Müller, Phoebe Osborne, Leonie Persyn, Julie Pfleiderer, Antoine Pickels, Amanda Piña, Jan-Philipp Possmann, Fransien van der Putt, Irena Radmanovic, Anna Rispoli, Martina Ruhsam, Jonas Rutgeerts, Nienke Scholts, Ula Sickle, Michael Simon, Karoline Skuseth, Lara Staal, Christel Stalpaert, Danae Theodoridou, Pankaj Tiwari, Vera Tussing, Marie Urban, Michiel Vandevelde, Hidde Aans Verkade, Mathilde Villeneuve, Georg Weinand, Stefanie Wenner, Siegmar Zacharias, Andros Zins-Browne.

Exit Ambition is a catalogue of practices, documents, videos, and other projects - virtual & actual. The book operates as an incomplete index of a series of installations, instructions, anti-plays, performance scores, descriptions, etc.

Jake Reber lives and works in Buffalo, NY, where he co-curates hystericallyreal.com.

Endless Shout asks how, why and where performance and improvisation can take place inside a museum.

The book documents a six-month series of experimental performances organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, where five participants--Raúl de Nieves, Danielle Goldman, George Lewis, The Otolith Group and taisha paggett--collectively led a series of improvisation experiments. These include Miya Masaoka's A Line Becomes a Circle, which pays tribute to Shiki Masaoka, a subversive Japanese haiku writer; jumatatu m. poe and Jerome "Donte" Beacham's Let 'im Move You, addressing the history of J-Sette, a dance form popularized at historically black colleges; and A Recital for Terry Admins by composer George Lewis. The book includes an essay by curator Anthony Elms, conversations with Jennie C. Jones and Wadada Leo Smith on themes of rhythm, rehearsal and improvisation, plus new works created specifically for the book, such as a script by The Otolith Group on blackness and digital color correction.

Foregrounding the slippages between doing and undoing or not doing, speech and movement-based forms of address, and improvisation and the score, Lauren Bakst traces the forms performance takes, be they in our everyday experiences, intimate and personal relationships, memories, or on stage.

Lauren Bakst is an artist and writer living in New York. Working at the interstices of language and movement, Bakst stages critical phenomenologies of performance. Her video, publication, and performance works have been commissioned by BAM/Wendy's Subway, Dance and Process at The Kitchen, Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery, Danspace Project, SculptureCenter, and Pioneer Works. Lauren teaches in Philadelphia at the University of the Arts School of Dance, where she is currently curating The School for Temporary Liveness, to which rile* was invited to participate in its second edition over the spring of 2020.

The Immeasurable Want of Light is a collection of many short plays drawn from Mubashshir’s two-year personal practice of writing a play a day to capture and express the ever-shifting perspective of living in black skin. Inspired by Chris Ofili’s Afro Muses, each play is distinct in subject, form and tone, presenting a constellation of theatrical portraits.

Daaimah Mubashshir is based in NYC. Awards include a 2019 Core Writer Fellowship at The Playwrights Center (MN), a 2018 Audrey Residency (New Georges), a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, a Catwalk Institute Residency, and a Foundation of Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant. Other published works include The Zero Loop (No Tokens Journal), Come with Me - Solve for X in The Occasional 2, edited by Will Arbery (53rd State Press), and Molasses and A Blue Coat (Kenyon Review). www.daaimahmubashshir.com

Blending epic tragedy, the Spaghetti Western, hip-hop and Afropunk, Is God Is is a revenge tale about twin sisters. In this award-winning work by playwright Aleshea Harris, emotions are laid bare through dialogue and visual gaps in language.

Aleshea Harris’s play Is God Is (Soho Rep) won the 2016 Relentless Award, an OBIE Award for playwriting in 2017, was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and made The Kilroys’ List of “the most recommended and underproduced plays by trans and female authors of color” for 2017. What to Send Up When It Goes Down, a play-pageant-ritual response to anti-blackness, had its critically-acclaimed NYC premiere in 2018, was featured in the April 2019 issue of American Theatre Magazine and was nominated for a Drama Desk award.

Mixing live performance with algorithms and interfaces, A Piece of Work is the second project in Annie Dorsen’s “algorithmic theater” series. A digital Hamlet for a post-humanist age, A Piece of Work deploys a set of ingeniously designed computer algorithms to generate real-time adaptations of Shakespeare’s original play. New scenes, songs, scores and visuals emerge from an intricate web of technology. With an introduction by Dorsen, and screen-shots of the system as it runs, this book elaborates both the technological and the poetic procedures of algorithmic theater.

Annie Dorsen is a director and writer, whose works explore the intersection of algorithms and live performance.

As the founding father of the radical dance form that he called Butoh, Tatsumi Hijikata (1928-1986) is a legendary figure in the history of art and contemporary dance. Though influenced by Western artists and writers—the expressionist dance of Mary Wigman, the writings of Artaud, de Sade, Bataille, and Genet, and the drawings and paintings of Goya, Picasso, Toyen, Beardsley, and others–he was dedicated to the particular experience of the marginalized, Japanese suffering body after World War II.

In the mid-1970s, Hijikata became concerned with developing notation for his Butoh, and some of these Butoh-fu notations remain, largely in the form of notebooks transcribed by his disciples. Costume en Face is the first publication of one of Hijikata’s notebook notations in either English or Japanese. In it we can see, for the first time, the profound interconnectedness of language and body in Hijikata’s process of composition.

Tatsumi Hijikata was born in Japan in 1928. He founded the radical dance form known as Butoh, which requires dancers to internalize complex and often grotesque images, experiences and perspectives in order to produce precise movements. Even after his abrupt death in 1986, his dance works and writings continue to be extremely influential.

March brings together poems and performance texts by Nathalie Rozanes, as well as a conversation with Elizabeth Ward and Tarek Halaby. 

'Maybe I have never made a performance that was not about identification and its complexity. About positioning oneself. Maybe I have never made a piece that is not about how one thing leads to another. Maybe I have never made a piece that is not about process. (...)' 

Published May 2020.

The White Card stages a conversation that is both informed and derailed by the black/white American drama. The scenes in this one-act play, for all the characters' disagreements, stalemates, and seeming impasses, explore what happens if one is willing to stay in the room when it is painful to bear the pressure to listen and the obligation to respond.
--from the introduction by Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine's first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?

Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming artist Charlotte. Their conversation about art and representations of race spirals toward the devastation of Virginia and Charles's intentions. One year later, the second scene brings Charlotte and Charles into the artist's studio, and their confrontation raises both the stakes and the questions of what--and who--is actually on display.

On the occasion of Merce Cunningham's centennial comes this edition of his classic and long-out-of-print artist's book Changes: Notes on Choreography, first published in 1968 by Dick Higgins' Something Else Press. The book presents a revealing exposition of Cunningham's compositional process by way of his working notebooks, containing in-progress notations of individual dances with extensive speculations about the choreographic and artistic problems he was facing.

Illustrated with over 170 photographs and printed in color and black and white, the book was described by its original publisher as "the most comprehensive book on choreography to emerge from the new dance ... [which] will come to stand with Eisenstein's and Stanislavsky's classics on the artistic process." By the time these notebooks were published, Cunningham had already led the Merce Cunningham Dance Company for 15 years, and had collaborated with Cage and others on milestones such as Variations V (1966) and RainForest (1968), the latter with Andy Warhol, David Tudor and Jasper Johns.

Along with his essay collection Dancing in Space and Time (1978), Changes is one of the most significant publications on Cunningham's enduring contributions to dance, which developed through collaboration with John Cage to incorporate formal innovation with regard to chance, silence and stillness.

During seven years, 16 performers spread Lecture For Every One throughout Europe. They intervened in more than 300 different gatherings, from a corporate sales meeting to a brass-band rehearsal and a municipal council. As uninvited guests, they addressed every one with exactly the same text. Until now, the project has remained largely invisible to the wider public. This book now sheds light on the information and expertise Lecture For Every One has generated—feedback, stories and memories from a range of perspectives. It reflects on how places where people gather can become political instances, on the (im)possibility of addressing every one, and on the value of fiction in our daily lives.

Sarah Vanhee is an artist, performer and writer. Her interdisciplinary work moves between the civilian space and the institutional arts sector, and is best known for its radical gestures and its engagement with non-dominant voices and narratives. Since 2007 she has created several onstage per­formances, (semi-)public interventions and site-specific works that have been widely presented internationally.

With texts & contributions by: Adinda Van Geystelen, Anabela Almeida, Anne Thuot, Anton Wilsens, Bojan Djordjev, Carola Bärtschiger, Christine De Smedt, Christophe Slagmuylder, Daniel Blanga Gubbay, Deborah Hazler, Edith Goddeeris, Elina Pirinen, Evelyne Coussens, Gurur Ertem, Iiris Viirpalu, Ilse Ghekiere, Jan De Brabanter, Jan de Zutter, Joe Kelleher, Katja Dreyer, Kristien Van den Brande, Kristof Blom, Lara Barsaq, Lex Bohlmeijer, Linda Sepp, Mariel Supka, Marika Ingels, Matthieu Goeury, Mylène Lauzon, Robin Vanbesien, Salka Ardal Rosengren, Sarah Vanagt, Sarah Vanhee, Silvia Bottiroli, Taziana Pyson and many others.