Credits

• Billing

  a canary torsi Artistic Team:

  • Concept, Direction & Original Scores by Yanira Castro
  • Manuals Written, Compiled and Designed by Yanira Castro & Kathy Couch
  • Audio & Video Performed by devynn emory & David Thomson
  • Music and Audio Design by Stephan Moore
  • Photographs by Simon Courchel Project
  • Coordination by LD DeArmon

• About the Project

  Originally premiered in New York as a performance embodied by its audience in 2019, Last Audience is now a visually arresting artist’s book where the machinations of the work are laid bare. Each audience member receives a set of printed manuals containing 28 performance scores via mail or a downloadable PDF. The instructional scores invite the audience member to interpret, re-create, and enact the performance. Last Audience comes straight to the recipient, and happens anywhere and anytime they want, punctuated with chances to connect in real-time with the artists and fellow audience members in virtual space. The audience becomes the assembly, the performers, the set and sound designer, and the director, expanding theater back to an earlier form, gathered around the hearth.

  Drawing on iconic images in US history, theater’s ancient roots in Greek tragedy, and the structure of a requiem mass, these scores are, in artist Yanira Castro’s words, “a manual for collective imagination on reckoning.” Last Audience pushes us to create our world anew, together, in a time of upheaval. The scores specify movement, text, sound, and scenic elements, as well as a recipe, but can be arranged in any order. Do some or all of them at home, outdoors, alone, or with family and friends. Exactly how, where, when, and who takes part in Last Audience is for the audience members to imagine.

  This Last Audience is much bigger than any one of its participants. It invites audience members to connect with their fellow performers by sharing images of their performances through an online archive, and in two virtual gatherings hosted by the creative team behind the project, Yanira Castro, Kathy Couch, Stephan Moore, Leslie Cuyjet, devynn emory, and David Thomson. The online archive for the project is available at lastaudience.com.

• About the Artists

  In 2009, Puerto Rican artist and choreographer Yanira Castro formed the interdisciplinary collaborative a canary torsi, an anagram of her name.

  a canary torsi‘s work examines the moment of encounter between public bodies: performer and audience. As a collective, its work investigates issues at the foundation of performance: what brings people together, the nature of the space people inhabit, and how every aspect of their convergence is loaded with cultural, social, historical and personal choices that inform who they are, how they form meaning and how power is structured. The indeterminate performative systems develop by a canary torsi often utilize technology as a catalyst of spontaneous structures, patterns, and instructions to complicate authorship, ensure multiplicity and to impart the work with moments of vibrantly alive unpredictability.

  Ranging from immersive performance environments to responsive video installations and online archives, a canary torsi explores the relationship between spectator and event, developing scenarios where the audience’s presence dramatically impact the experienced outcome of the work.

  To learn more, visit acanarytorsi.org.

  Yanira Castro is a Puerto Rican artist based in Brooklyn. In 2009, she formed the interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi, an anagram of her name. a canary torsi’s work borrows from dance, performance, theater, and visual art often utilizing in-teractive technology to form hybrid projects. The work focuses on the significance of gathering and watching—the historical, political and social resonances of the act of being present together in performance, investigating the encounter of public bodies: the event and the audience. In the work, Castro negotiates complexities of sources, authorship, and practice with a team of collaborators (including audience) to build the work as a communal act. Castro has received commissions from New York Live Arts, The Invisible Dog Art Center, The Chocolate Factory Theater, Abrons Art Center, Danspace Project, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, touring nationally and internationally. She received a 2009 Bessie Award for “Dark Horse/Black Forest” presented by PS 122 in the lobby restroom of the Gershwin Hotel. The archive for her participatory performance project, The People to Come was featured in the New Museum’s exhibit, “Performance Archiving Performance,” in 2013.

  Her fellowships and residencies include: New York Live Arts Live Feed Artist (2020-2018), Yaddo Fellow (2018), Marble House Project Artist (2018), Gibney’s DiP Resident Artist program (2017), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Extended Life Dance Development participant (2017-2015), _IN RESIDENCE Artist at Dancehouse in Melbourne, Australia (2016), BRIClab Artist (2016), Returning Choreographic Fellow at the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography (2013-14), Vermont Performance Lab Artist (2012), Dance New Amsterdam Artist in Residence (2013), Artist Ne(s)t AIR (2007, Romania), Sugar Salon Fellow (2007), and Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center Fellow (2006, Italy). She has been recognized with various awards for her work, including the New York Foundation for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, the New England Foundation for the Arts’s National Dance Project, MAP Fund, The Jerome Foundation, New Music USA, Trust for Mutual Under-standing, USArtists International and a NYSCA Theater Commission.

  Castro received her BA in theater and dance and literature from Amherst College. In 2007, she received an honorary doctorate in the arts from her alma mater.

  Jorge Felix is an artist and community curator born and raised in Puerto Rico and based in Chicago. He is known for his shaped canvases in his Body Construction series that have been exhibited in solo and group shows. He was a member and organizer of coop studio-galleries in Wicker Park, where he responded to gentrification in the area by engaging in community activism. In addition to his work as a graphic artist, illustrator, and set designer, his practice as a community curator was developed by experiences working with organizations such as the Field Museum’s Cultural Connections program, Chicago Arts Partnerships in Education (CAPE), National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts and Culture, and the National Boricua Human Rights Network. His curatorial projects include Not Enough Space, which toured internationally telling the story of two Puerto Rican political prisoners unfairly incarcerated in isolation in a maximum-security prison; “Faces of Puerto Rican Migration” documenting migration stories from Puerto Rico to Chicago from the 1930s to the 1950s; and La Primera Parada: Chicago’s Stonewall Moments documenting the first time an LGBTQ community group demanded inclusion in their community parades, including the Bud Billiken, Mexican Independence Day, and Puerto Rican parades.

  To reconcile his community organizing with his artwork, Felix took his art to the streets by developing the Sofrito Conversations series, a social-performance that engages the public in conversations at community festivals, libraries, and cultural centers while preparing his grandmother’s recipe of sofrito. Sofrito Conversations are anecdotal cooking presentations about Felix’s experiences working as an artist, community curatorial work, and community organizer.

  Felix holds an MFA in painting from Bowling Green State University and a master’s in arts administration (MAAA) from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

  Marshall Hatch Jr. is the cofounder and executive director of the ​MAAFA Redemption Project​, a faith-based residential institute for Black and Brown young men who are furthest from opportunity. The project provides them with housing, job skills development, educational opportunities, and wrap-around social services. These supports are supplemented with programming that focuses on the arts, cultural identity development, spiritual enrichment, transformative travel, civic empowerment, and insistent life coaching and mentoring.