I had the pleasure of attending four performances of Noemie Lafrance’s White Box Project Installation this weekend. A couple of questions figured prominently for me throughout the piece:
When is the desire to participate in something become strong enough for me to actually participate?
Is spectating, as opposed to participating, a form of doing? How active does the “spectating” need to be?
Is doing something, being a part of something, cancel out the power of observation?
Is it necessary to know who the performers are?
Where is the event and who creates it? Who makes it happen?
Can the audience control or even own the piece- change what the performers had planned? If yes, how much? In other words, how does an artwork balance structure, meaning, and playfulness?
How important is reception to the piece?
As the piece began with the crowd’s murmur getting ostensibly loud, I could feel the tension in the space as the crowd instantly went silent. “Why is everyone quiet?” whispered my 7 year old? “Did it begin?” She didn’t know where to look, and that was part of the suspense. Expectations of what “it” was, and who would actually do “it,” were immediately altered. Onlookers (some of whom were the dancers themselves pretending to be onlookers) looked around for something to happen. We all sensed each other. We began to sense the space, albeit with a heightened awareness, as if we, too, were performers. An airplane, as it happened, coincidentally flew over in the same moment in three of the four shows I saw.
This was a game. But who the players were and what the rules of the game were was still to be decided.
Each crowd was different. Some welcomed the invitation to lie down on the floor. Others hesitated and others visibly rejected it. Why conform to something, these latter seemed to be saying, they didn’t agree to? Of course by choosing not to do something, they were already playing the game.
What is at stake when participation defines the work? Is this simply an experiment in herd mentality?
Noemie has chosen to describe this piece as “a dance installation,” and by situating it in the space of an art gallery, frames this choreographic experiment within a visual art context. It seems clear to me then that there is a desire for a connection of viewership from both a dance and a more formal art perspective. It is also no coincidence that Noemie comes to the White Box (a gallery space) to experiment with audience participation, given that she defines herself as “site-specific” choreographer. The term “site-specific,” as Nick Kaye argues in his book Site-Specific Art: Performance, Place and Documentation, is directly linked to the incursion of performance into visual art and architecture. The fact that the meaning of the artwork resided in the viewer’s reception of it, gave the spectator a new role in defining what an art object was. The encounter with the object became more important than the object itself. Noemie describes The White Box project as “minimalist dance,” referring to the minimal framework necessary for the piece to take place in terms of props, costumes, lighting, sound, etc. But the word minimalist is also a clear reference to the Minimalism taking place in art practice of the 60s, which coincides with the emergence of site-specificity. As art critic Douglas Crimp recounts in On the Museum's Ruins (1993 essay) "the condition of reception," is what came to be known as site-specificity. Minimalism was an attack on the autonomy of the artwork— on the prestige of both the artwork and the artist in favor of the spectator’s perception, or awareness, of the minimal object. In Michael Fried’s famous attack on Minimalism as the end of art, at least from the modernist perspective, titled Art and Objecthood (1976), he argued how "the experience of literalist (minimal) art is of an object in a situation- one that, virtually by definition, includes the beholder.” It was exactly what Fried predicted and abhorred, the intrusion of performance into the autonomous work of art, that is at play in site-specific practice, which began with minimalism, and which Noemie formally engages with in The White Box Project.
The White Box Project is ultimately a piece about site-specificity, about the conditions of reception in a given context, engaged in formal structures of viewing, interaction, and participation.
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