Sophie Seita on Performative Books

At BOMB, Sophie Seita writes about Mariana Valencia's ALBUM and other volumes which approach, engage, and observe performances held on the page. "How do we translate performance onto the page? Words can explain, embellish, and distract, and they can transform matter into something else altogether," Seita writes. More: 

Among the recent renaissance of performance publications, the most impactful ones remind us that we can, and indeed must, read performance. Whether in a live context or as a poetic reinvention for the page, words are more than mere explanations and stagehands of the body, the event, the spectacle. Words force us to be nuanced.

Mariana Valencia’s ALBUM was published by Brooklyn-based Wendy’s Subway as part of their Documents series, which “highlights the work of performance- and dance-makers in printed form.” Based on the dance artist’s performances between 2014 and 2018, the book contains Valencia’s scripts along with annotations, song lyrics, doodles, and photographs. Valencia’s marginalia and typographic play—poetic footnotes, a monkey emoji, a cosmogram—create a spatial, even choreographic, experiment as we read. We follow Valencia as she ponders history-making, literary prizes, the value of rice, and vampires, and cheekily encounters the clichéd “lesbian dilemma”: Do I want you, or do I want to be you?

Performance documentation pulls on what’s familiar or different, and what’s intimate or public. Toward the end of ALBUM, there’s a stop-motion-like sequence of black-and-white photographs of Valencia, with the notation: “THIS IS WHAT I LOOK LIKE WHEN I DANCE FOR MYSELF IN FRONT OF YOU.”

Read on at BOMB.