Naked as a Jaybird

2011

I participated in Oreet Ashery’s ‘Naked as a Jaybird‘ Weekend Workshop at Artsadmin which was marketed as follows:

This experiential workshop will focus on intimate encounters with our sensorial awareness and perceived thresholds, leading to shared creations of performative moments, cuts and collages. As a group and in pairs, as ourselves and in characters, we will experiment with physical contact and collective actions, intimacy and boundaries, through drawing, devising and performing whilst considering relevant cultural and political backdrops. The weekend will provide room to begin to unpack performance’s ethos of liberation.

The starting point is Oreet Ashery’s wide interest in the ethos of performance as a marker of risk-taking and liberation from the restraints and values of the state, religion, homogeneity, artistic conventions and so forth. Looking back at three disparate counterculture groups from the 1960s-70s; Naked as a Jaybird (California), Collective Actions (Moscow) and Scratch Orchestra (London), aspects of DIY nakedness, actions and experimental sound, will be considered in relation to the persistent ability of dissent to fail and to reinvent itself. With rightwing policies sweeping across Europe, this is an interesting and necessary time to revaluate performative modes of dissent.