Last Audience:
a performance manual
2020
“Can I imagine what it would be like for thousands of people—a country even—to do these scores? To ‘write instructions that direct a person through the act of asking for mercy?’ To embody those who have knelt before us—Colin Kaepernick, St. Francis of Assisi, Archangel Gabriel, civil rights demonstrators?”
— Kristen Shahverdian for ThINKingDANCE, “Living in the Fracture: Scores for our Last Audience”
Last Audience: a performance manual reconsidered performance for the public during the pandemic and the social and political upheavals of 2020. Published by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the manual contains 28 performance scores that invite the public to interpret, recreate, and enact a performance through audio, video and text-based scores. Drawing on western theater’s roots in Greek tragedy, and the structure of the requiem mass, these scores form a manual for a collective imagination on reckoning.
Team
Concept, Director, Writer of Original Scores: Yanira Castro
Co-writers of Manual: Yanira Castro, Kathy Couch
Additional Writers: Leslie Cuyjet (Warning Solo), devynn emory, Pamela Vail, David Thomson
Audio & Video Performers: Yanira Castro, Kathy Couch, devynn emory, David Thomson
Composer, Audio Designer: Stephan Moore
Video Designer: Peter Richards
Website Management: Leslie Cuyjet
Website Designer: Fei Liu
Photographer: Simon Courchel
Performers in Photographs: Leslie Cuyjet, Kirsten Michelle Schnittker
Costume Designer (Warning): Miodrag Guberinic
Project Coordinator: LD DeArmon
Virtual Events
Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, TBA Festival, September 20, 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, October 24, 2020
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, December 13, 2020
NALAC’s National Latinx Summit, September 30, 2021
Press
Kristen Shahverdian for ThINKingDANCE, “Living in the Fracture: Scores for our Last Audience”
Siobhan Burke for The New York Times, “Make Some Noise and Move: A Choreographer Provides Instructions”
Gregory King for See Chicago Dance, “The MCA experiments with DIY art in ‘Last Audience,’ a dialogic, at-home performance on reckoning and remembrance”
Kerry Reid for the Chicago Reader, “The MCA and Smart Museum provide tool kits for plague times”
Funding
Last Audience: a performance manual was developed and produced by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Special thanks to The Invisible Dog Art Center and Northampton Community Arts Trust for providing the locations for the video and photo shoots.
