Works and Practices: Being Public
Hetty Blades. 2019
This is an extract from Blades, H. 2019. ‘Projects, Precarity, and the Ontology of Dance Works.’ Paper. Dance Research Journal. April 2019.
UK-based Hamish MacPherson’s choreographic ventures manifest through entities of many different forms. His activities include workshops, exhibitions, and games, which are either played during live events or via his website. His site includes the following description:
I am a London-based artist who uses ideas and methods from choreography and dance to think about politics. I make workshops, non-digital games, performances, writings, images and other things in artistic, academic and community contexts. My works tends to be clusters of many smaller things rather than working up to something like a big show. (MacPherson n.d.a)
An example of one of his games is A dance history game (2015), which can be accessed via his website (MacPherson 2015). This game invites the player to select a continent from a choice of six by rolling a dice. For example, rolling a five allocates the player to Asia. Players are then instructed to roll a ten-sided dice to determine a century, decade, and year in the period between 100 CE and 1999 CE. The next instruction is to “[w]rite a history of dance centred on the year and place selected. It is recommended that you pick a specific country within the continent. Follow what was happening then and there backwards and forwards in time” (MacPherson 2015). Players are allowed to use the Internet and are encouraged to share their histories via an online communal notebook. When I interviewed MacPherson, however, the notebook was still empty, leading him to describe it as a work without an audience (MacPherson 2018). He describes A dance history game as a way to semi-randomly construct a dance history that is not centered around Anglo-American, twentieth-century perspectives and suggests it might be a statement—although he is not sure for whom—or perhaps a comment for himself about how dance history follows a particular tradition. He describes it as a “sketch of a work” (MacPherson 2018), thus giving rise to my construction of the notion of work-sketches.
In some ways this game appears to be both resistant and public, aligning with Pouillaude’s characterization of a work. However, the game has a curious form of publicness, as it is freely available online and offered for a public audience, yet requires playing to come into being in physical form. It is an “object given in the form of otherness and displayed to a multiplicity point of view” (Pouillaude 2017, 54), yet does not fully align with Pouillaude’s account, which suggests that a third object (the work) emerges through the perspectives of its receivers. A game un-enacted has arguably not been fully received and therefore has perhaps not emerged as a work in Pouillaude’s terms. However, as MacPherson points out, this form of making is common in various art practices, in which art exists as an idea or proposition to be discussed, rather than necessarily experienced firsthand. MacPherson further explains that he intends this game to be a work, whether or not it is manifested by players (MacPherson, e-mail exchange with the author, August 2, 2018). So, while Pouillaude’s characterization of the work does not neatly align with MacPherson’s game, the game is complete in the eyes of the artist who made it, highlighting a disjuncture between views in theory and practice about what the work is.
Other games by MacPherson have a different form of liveness and are enacted in more conventionally performative contexts. For example, he makes live-action role-plays or LARPs, during which participants take on particular characters. An example is Let’s Play PMQs, which is played by a group of people in a shared space, facilitated by MacPherson and the work’s co-authors, Sarah Jury and Rosalie Schweiker. The participants take on roles assigned to them before the event, and they enact an imaginary future scenario after the UK’s exit from the European Union. MacPherson describes how he sees a connection between games and choreography, both of which are underpinned by scores or rules (MacPherson n.d.b). MacPherson also produces physical games and other objects that can be bought via his website.
MacPherson’s website is organized in a way that gives equal status to “smaller things” such as A dance history game and more conventionally performative outputs, such as the LARPs (MacPherson 2018a). Each output is illustrated by an image on the homepage, all of which have equal amounts of space. The nonhierarchical presentation suggests that there is no reason to distinguish between the ontological status of each output. MacPherson describes how he is influenced by Manuel DeLanda’s discussion of “flat ontology” (MacPherson, e-mail exchange with the author, August 2, 2018)