The combination of instruction, performativity and chance.

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A parallel to previous methods of documenting and compositing everyday scenes, 27 Happenings depict recordings of individuals dancing within separate window frames. Through observing people in their households over a period of 2 months, Choo embarked on this piece of work by reaching out to her neighbours through sending letters. The artist’s subjects are invited to respond to her request through engaging and participating in a dance over a specified duration. 

 

Reflecting upon the act of participation being complex and multilayered, Choo observes her 
subjects’ responses ranging from “passive” to “active” participation and records them from 
across the street. A perpetually open project, the piece takes place in the inter-spaces 
between interpretation and negotiation, performance and chance.

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Considering the subject’s relation to language. 

Language precedes the self and exceeds its control,
So language is a major interference apparatus.
Scattering lines of poetry is invoked 
- for this arrangement encourages an infinity of possible readings. 

Resembling both Acconci’s and Calle’s process of 
documenting strangers, Choo’s piece presents an openness 
to chance events and also includes a slight element of risk. 
It is a performance piece that involves her subject’s 
participation; hence, adding a dimension of indeterminacy.

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Events as raw materials

An effort to to conceive and present an event as a ‘happening’, participants received instructions to 
perform/dance at given intervals. The instructions allow participants to engage in a dance in alternation of 
varying lengths within a duration of 30 minutes. 

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Dance

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because of its ephemerality, corporeality, precariousness, scoring, and performativity, emphasizes on an immediate presence -a visibility and vulnerability of the body enduring the performance of a ritual.

Each dance is a series of on-the-spot decisions, a personal agency of both performer and artist. Dance always establishes a contract, or promise, between its choreographic planning and its actualization in movement. 
it reveals an essential performativity in its aesthetic project,
a central concern for both art and critical thought in our time.

There is value to the degree of interference in human intentional activity offered by the unconscious, by language, 
by the apparatus of the camera or computer, by the instruction performed ‘blind’. 
We desire to see what will happen.