Reflections on our residency at Unit/Pitt

What was your relationship with your audience?  And with the space? How did the space change your relationship with the audience? 
 
	The duet we had been working on prior to our residency, which we were continuing to develop at Unit/Pitt, was very much composed for a proscenium performance space, highlighting a stage for spectacle and the separation between performer and audience. It was very exciting for us to then take these ideas into the wholly different context of a gallery space. 
 	We shared profound anxieties about the exclusivity and cultural whiteness of the so-called public space of the gallery and we were hyper-aware of our being situated in a rapidly changing Chinatown. The social, political, and economic context of where we were sat at the forefront of our research during the residency. We then chose to develop our duet by subverting it, tossing it out and exploring its antithesis. 
 	Traditional gallery and museum exhibits often draw attention to the perimeter of a space, with art works and didactics up on blank white walls. We thought: what alternative ways could this space be engaged? This then compelled us to invite audiences to sit in a circle in the centre of the room with complimentary tea and baked goods. Rather than stage a performance, we sought to design a space of invitation and choice where audiences would share authorship of an experience with us. 
 
What was one issue that came up during the series that you hadn’t thought of previously, or that you don’t currently have a resolution for? 
 
	The title of the work, “Our Gestures are No Longer Ours”, is a quote from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. Debord posits that the capitalist society consumes all our gestures and then reflects them back to us so that “our” gestures are merely cheap copies of an original that is no longer even possible to locate. This idea of an absent original became significant for us as we worked towards the arguably impossible objective of situating our work outside the system (i.e. the capitalist, market-driven system) and seeking out genuine gestures of our own.  
 	It was significant to us that Unit/Pitt provided space to work without requiring us to present a product. The absence of the imperative to produce felt like it freed us from the typical exchange economy setup (where space is given in return for a performance/showing/etc.). We loved the idea of this freedom but felt that involving others in what we were exploring was also just as important. So we decided to have a showing — contextualizing it as a “sharing” in our attempts to facilitate a space for genuine gestures — but still found ourselves faced with a recurring conundrum, which Debord had already problematized: the very attempt to thwart the system or exist outside the system only serves to reinforce the system.  
 	Realizing the futility of our efforts, we came to invest in what we decided to call the politics of trying — the vital act of seeking to defy or subvert a dominant paradigm, regardless of the odds.
 
Was there anything that made you uncomfortable? 
 
	As previously mentioned, we were highly conscious of where we were and what it meant to bring our practice into a privileged white space in Chinatown. The large windows that make up the front wall of the gallery heightened this for us, and ironically (and uncomfortably) played into our prior research into spectacle that fuelled our original work on the duet. We felt that the windows suggested a display case, a kind of voyeurism and division between those inside the gallery and those outside.  
 	Though we intended to utilize the residency to develop our duet Our Gestures Are No Longer Ours we were uncomfortable with the idea of arriving into this contested space only to do what we always do and/or dance another dance made for another context.  What does it mean to be “in residence”? It seemed to us that there would be something irresponsible, and in fact, colonial, about implanting our Western-centric practice into the gallery, rather than allowing the space and its surroundings to inform our inquiries, so that became a key starting point for us. 
 
What was the most memorable conversation that you had?  
 
	We concluded our residency with a “sharing” that invited individuals or groups to sit down and converse with us. So, that is to say that conversation itself, as a gesture, was meaningful to our work.  
 	We agree that one of the most invigorating conversations we had, with a handful of guests, was about J.D Salinger’s classic, Catcher in the Rye.  While some of us praised the novel, a debate arose about the contemporary relevance of a book that is yet another narrative of “the privileged white male”.  Given our discomforts with the social, economic, cultural, and political clashes in the area, this discussion was particularly poignant.