Call for participation
Collaborative performance workshop
For emerging performance artists, actors, singers and musicians

Pablo Helguera: The Well-Tempered Exposition
A project for Location One

Part One of a year-long experimental performance project by Mexican artist Pablo Helguera. Using Bach’s famous keyboard exercises The Well-Tempered Clavier as a starting point, Helguera will organize a series of performance workshops that explore the formal elements of the score.
Interested participants should submit a letter of interest and resume to well-tempered@location1.org
by September 1, 2011.

Workshop Schedule
Preliminary orientation: Friday, September 16th, 5:30-6:30pm
Workshops: Monday and Tuesday Sept 19-20, 5:30-9pm
Performance: September 21, 2011, 7pm

Location One and artist Pablo Helguera are in search of 10 emerging performing artists, actors, singers or musicians interested in participating in a 2-day intensive performance workshop culminating in a public showcase on September 21, 2011.

The Well-Tempered Exposition is a methodical investigation on the formal components of the performance art practice. The project will be developed as a series of scores that will be developed and performed in a series of public experimental workshops at Location One. Upon its completion, The Well-Tempered Exposition will exist as a collection of scores to better understand the rhetoric and compositional structure of performance art as we understand it today.

In this initial workshop participants will collaborate in the interpretation and construction of the first set of scores, to be presented on September 21st, 2011 at Location One.

We are looking for participants with one or more of the following:

• Verbal/public speaking skills
• Musical knowledge/skills
• Acting skills
• Movement skills
• Interest in the history of performance art
• Interest and/or experience in collaborative/ensemble work

Interested participants should submit a letter of interest and resume to well-tempered@location1.org
by September 1, 2011.

About this project at Location One, the artist has written: “To create a group of scores that also serve as a taxonomy of the formal elements of visual performance art would be contradictory, as the notion of performance is so fluid that it escapes any attempt to dissect its components. However, the project proposes that there is a recurrent conceptual vocabulary derived from a shared history, sets of references, and appropriated formats that allow performance art to constantly reinvent itself while at the same time remain identifiable as a meta-discipline of art. The goal of this project is to originate a textbook in the form of 48 scores that examine these different components.”

The project is structured around the existing forms in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722), a collection of keyboard exercises composed in all 24 major and minor keys “for the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.” Bach’s compositions will serve as a guide to construct each one of the 48 scores. Each score will be rehearsed and developed through public workshops and presented in performance evenings. Workshops will be presented free of charge.

About Pablo Helguera

Pablo Helguera (Mexico City, 1971) is a visual and performance artist living in New York. He works in the fields of pedagogy, literature, musical composition, and theater. His projects have included performance lectures, scripted symposia, and panel discussions with or without the knowledge of the audience, as well as a variety of experimental formats of verbal presentation.

Helguera’s works have been presented in many venues such as the Liverpool Biennial, Performa 05, Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, ICA in Boston, MoMA, among others. His play The Juvenal Players, produced by Grand Arts in Kansas City, was presented at The Kitchen in 2010. His orchestral work Endingness was performed by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Leonard Slatkin. He is the author of more than 10 books including Theatrum Anatomicum (and other performance lectures), a collection of performative works. His social practice project The School of Panamerican Unrest (2006) consisted in the creation of a nomadic schoolhouse that traveled by land throughout the Americas from Alaska to Chile, presenting collaborative performance and civic events in over 26 cities. He has been recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Creative Capital Grant; and in 2011 was named the first winner of the International Award for Participatory Art of the Regione Emilia Romagna in Italy. As educator, Helguera has worked in museums for over two decades, currently working as Director of Adult and Academic Programs at The Museum of Modern Art. He is the Pedagogical Curator of the 8th Mercosul Biennial, opening in September 2011.