The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra 

first concert                                                     

Quick quick quick, click, click,  click it, quickly, tickly, click toc, tic toc, tick tick ticks and other symptoms of neurosis, ticks and other parasites, sucking our creative nerve, tick tick, tic toc, ticking, tickling that creative nerve of ours. Hours of nervous creativity. Every hour, all hours, all our potentialities. Every hour, all hours, all our potential social capital.

The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra is a performance that scrutinises how disengagement can be used as artistic resistance and laziness as a political strategy, navigating between disorganised junk, schizophrenic intensities and sleepy stones. It is a reaction to the accelerating over-production and over-festivalisation of performing arts and the precarious role of the artist today. The exhaustion of the possible makes us indifferent and fatigued, an exhaustion that leaves us seated, unable to move.

Franco Berardi describes how, in the semio-capitalist world, the main commodity becomes attention, and how, in order to keep up with the acceleration of information, the main task becomes to make things quick and easy. This performance investigates what happens if we do not try to make things easy, but instead allow for frictions and delays. What happens if we stretch time, when we embrace the interference, the obstacle that forces us to stop and wait, or intentionally slow things down and obstruct the flow of information?

“This work, an ambitious interdisciplinary performance project, is hysterical in both ways. It’s funny and sometimes offers relief, and it holds the epic affect of extreme emotion. The text is sense and non-sense. In the beginning they make us wonder who we, the audience, are, and what is our role to be? These questions of labor and affect, of the relationship between performer and audience, and the codes that dominate these relational aspects of work, these are the terms at play. And they have consequences. I think about Lee Lozano and her life long commitment to dropping out. Her works “General Strike”, “Drop Out”, “Decide to Boycott Women”, all engage a similar quest to ‘disengage’ as Steirnborg and Wadhia call it.  Lozano, like Steirnborg and Wadhia are engaged in a deep theoretical debate, it’s a real question. Is it possible to drop out instead of becoming political activists?”

Emily Roysdon / Artist and Professor

The Disengaged Free Jazz Orchestra (First Concert) premiered at Marabouparken, Stockholm in 2013. It has since been shown at Inkonst, Malmö, Konstfack and DOCH, Stockholm, Kiasma, Helsinki, Trip Space, London

Link to full documentation >>>>

kiasma dürer's rhinozeros documentation                         

Business as unusual - performance art event, part of the festival /theatre.now at Kiasma, Helsinki, oct 14 >>>>

trip space durational improvizzation             

Trip Space Projects: Limen: a durational exhibition of performance >>>>