DIY Ballroom/Live

DIY Ballroom / Live (2007-2008) was one of four projects commissioned by Cornerhouse, Manchester and BBC Big Screens for the first Bigger Picture National Touring Programme (alongside artists Juneau Projects, Esther Johnson, and Perry Bard). Conceived in two parts as both a video/audio work and related live participatory events, the project addressed the outdoor public siting of moving image work, the potential for altering social space and relations in the blurring of boundaries between spectatorship and participation, and the idea of ‘engineered spontaneity’; it also engaged social networking to test the widespread appeal of ballroom as an international language and amateur passion, bringing the global in relation to the local. The video/audio component comprised entirely of digital amateur footage of amateur ballroom dancers sourced online. At two events, the screenings coincided with the analogue ad hoc offline gatherings of amateur dancers on the street, during which the pre-edited video/audio work alternated with a camera feed of the live action. The project develops and expands on previous work engaging ideas around cultural dance, amateurism, migration, aspiration, the local and the international, as well as questions of the formation, duration, animation, and performance of archives, emphasising the unlimited, immaterial, and comparatively ‘accelerated’ archive of informal, amateur footage accruing on the web. Launched with Urban Screens 2007 in Manchester (the first edition took place in Amsterdam in 2005, with subsequent festivals in Melbourne, 2008, and Toronto, 2010), the work was presented at a conference and related screening programme (10 – 14 October 2007), going on to tour to BBC Big Screens in Norwich (_enter, Aurora Festival, 10 November 2007), Leeds (17 November 2007), and Site Gallery, Sheffield (18 March 2008).
A new version of DIY Ballroom/Live, combining the original video edit with documentary footage of the live events, is currently featured in SITE Sante Fe's MARCH 2012, an online exhibition in turn presented as part of Time-Lapse (18 February to 20 May 2012). In 1969, Seth Siegelaub, pioneering supporter of conceptual art, organized March 1969 a.k.a One Month, an exhibition that existed only in catalogue form. Siegelaub invited thirty-one artists to contribute a work; one for each day of the month. Time-Lapse curators Irene Hofmann and Janet Dees have conceived of a project that is an homage to Siegelaub’s ground-breaking ‘exhibition,’ updated for today’s virtual, technological world. March 2012 will be hosted on the homepage of SITE’s website. Each day during March one work by a different artist will be featured. The participating artists are an international and intergenerational group currently working with conceptual, time-based and media-oriented practices.
Artists include: Axle Contemporary, Daniel Bejar, Martin John Callanan, Beth Coleman + Howard Goldkrand, Ron Cooper, Matthew Cusick, Faith Denham, Brent Green, Hillerbrand + Magsamen, Jennie C. Jones, Tellervo Kalleinen + Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen, susan pui san lok, Conor McGarrigle, Linda Montano, neuroTransmitter, Huong Ngo (in collaboration with George Monteleone and Or Zubalsky), Paul Notzold, Geof Oppenheimer, Ben Patterson, Dawit L. Petros, Adrian Piper, Liliana Porter, Postcommodity, Mark Tribe, Claudia X. Valdes, and Donald Woodman. A cumulative archive will be on view in SITE’s galleries during March; in April and May an archive of all 31 works will be on view.

DIY Ballroom/Live is documented on two DVD publications, produced and disseminated by Cornerhouse and Urban Screens.