Directors Lisa Flanagan and Brian Moore discuss the performance project "Institutionally Aggravated" with WHIV-LP 102.3FM founder MarkAlain Dery on the program NOLA Matters. The ensemble-devised performance imagines an exchange between Bayard Rustin and Brendan Behan, two historic civil rights advocates from opposite sides of the Atlantic with opposing ideologies and methods and for achieving equality, self-determination and freedom. It was performed by Xavier University of Louisiana's Performance Studies Laboratory March 8-10, 2018.

WHIV Interview Institutionally Aggravated

Organology is the second in a series of site-specific projects that invites participants to visit a place and follow a list of performance instructions. While following a printed guide and listening to music composed from fieldwork research, participants in two locations (New Orleans and New York) will take a simultaneous, performative walk designed from research into the history of a nineteenth century pipe organ constructed by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. The walk draws on observations, gestures and errors made by researchers while searching for a pipe organ that no longer exists.

Organology re-imagines Georges Perec’s 1974 experiment with the “infraordinary” at Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris in conversation with serialism, a twelve-note technique for composing music: “How should we take account of the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infraordinary, the background noise, the habitual?”

First presented at the Patti Pace Performance Festival, hosted by Xavier University of Louisiana's Performance Studies Lab, at the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans and in New York.

Music composition: Liz Page and Jade Perdue
Performance concept & text: Ross Louis
Performance guide design: Julie Morel

Organology

The Performance Studies Lab creates student and faculty work that treats performance as an experiment. Our work draws from literature, cultural ritual, rites of passage, political action, civic engagement, and visual culture. The Lab was launched in 2013 by an interdisciplinary group of scholar-artists to produce performances, host festivals, and collaborate with local, national, and international artists.

Xavier Performance Studies Lab