Christophe Wavelet proposes to lead a research workshop based on the work Continuous Project Altered Daily (1970) by American choreographer, writer and film-maker Yvonne Rainer, one of the leading figures in the legendary Judson Church group. This research workshop is addressed to a group of artists (dancers, performers and/or visual artists).

Yvonne Rainer started to work on this project in 1969 and premiered it at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City on March 31, 1970. Structured by a series of choreographic materials and operations — some of them transcribed in the Labanotation system that same year by dancer and performer Barbara Katz —, they come together with a list of “Roles and meta-muscular affections“, so as to define the range of performative modes to be explored by the performers. Their number, as well as the duration of the piece and the various locations where it can happen (from theaters to exhibition spaces, to public gardens, churches and gymnasiums, etc) is not prescribed by its author.

A milestone in the history of experimental and discursive artistic practices, Continuous Project Altered Daily allows for a series of collective experiments and investigations, as well as to question the specificities of historical, cultural and social contexts. The critical potential of its operations calls both its performers and its spectators attention on a series of strategies that allow to counter the logics of commodification that nowadays too often weighs on the public experience of art.

By questioning the very sterilization of collective forms of experience in present days, as well as the general tendency of a self isolation that weighs on everyone’s life, it allows to invent ways of being together by means of a cooperation of intelligences. It generates situations where the equality of everyone — performers, as well as spectators — can be verified, and give way to the invention of an unpredictable common. It reassesses alteration as a motor allowing for identification and reverberates this very fact: if art can be passed down (transmitted), it is first of all because it is itself an operator of the collective without which no passing down or no transmission could ever be achieved.

The workshop process implies the daily practice of the choreographic materials and an analytical examination of the operations that caracterize Rainer’s piece. This dynamics allows to explore and question a new notions such as that of experience, gesture, interpretation, translation, citation, appropriation, discursivity, genealogy, and analysis, as well as those of heterogeneity, alterity, subjectivization, pleasure, trust and the intolerable.