“I really didn’t want it to be about the screen,” Yanira Castro said about adapting a work for the pandemic. Instead, she made scores to try at home.
About 50 people sat in front of their computers on a recent afternoon, banging on pots and pans with kitchen utensils. In a departure from common Zoom etiquette, everyone was unmuted and making as much noise as possible. What began as an attempt to find a synchronized beat quickly unraveled into clanging, joyful chaos. This group activity, based on a choreographic score called “Thunderous Clash,” was an online introduction to a largely offline project, Yanira Castro’s “Last Audience: A Performance Manual.” Before participants left the Zoom event, they received a PDF of the score — basically a set of written instructions — so that they could try it in full on their own. (The complete “Thunderous Clash,” inspired by the form of pot-banging protest known as a cacerolazo, Spanish for casserole, calls for running and shouting with a large group of people, “for a good long time.”) “Last Audience: A Performance Manual” is an effort to maintain the liveness of performance by handing over the instructions for a work’s creation. The manual, to be released in November by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, contains 28 scores from Ms. Castro’s 2019 work “Last Audience,” adapted so that anyone can try them at home. The scores involve everyday movement and household items — no dance training or elaborate materials required. Ms. Castro,49, a choreographer whose work often blurs the line between performers and spectators, had planned to bring “Last Audience” to MCA Chicago this fall. But as the coronavirus pandemic escalated in the spring, the museum began to rethink its fall programming without in-person gatherings. Rather than canceling or rescheduling the engagement, Tara Aisha Willis, a curator of performance at the museum, invited Ms. Castro to reimagine “Last Audience” in an another format. While many choreographers were adapting to digital spaces, making dance films and Zoom dances, Ms. Castro felt herself pulled in a different direction. “I’ve found watching dance to be really hard online,” she said in a phone interview. “There are times when it has made me cry, because I just want to be there.” For her project, she wanted people to have an experience “really rooted in their bodies.” “I really didn’t want it to be about the screen,” she said.
