ABOUT

9 Beginnings: Bristol was commissioned in 2012 as part of Performing Documents, a major collaborative venture with The University of Bristol and Arnolfini Gallery in the United Kingdom. Performing Documents is a year-long project investigating creative approaches to archives, and Every house has a door was asked to create a new performance work in response to the Live Art Archives housed in Bristol. The Live Art Archives include the Record of Live Art Practice, the National Review of Live Art Archive, the Digital Performance Archive, the Arts Council England Live Art and Performance Archive, and the original tapes from the queerupnorth Video Archive, among other holdings. With an award from the MacArthur Foundation International Connections Fund, Every house has a door was able to expand 9 beginnings to include a second section based on material in Chicago archives from the Randolph Street Gallery (RSG) Archives, held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

9 Beginnings: Bristol restages the beginnings of nine historical performances by nine different artists or companies found in the archive, and reimagines them as a new composition. Director Lin Hixson and dramaturg Matthew Goulish travelled to Bristol for a month-long residency in August 2012, and developed the first iteration of this work together with Selma Banich (Croatia) and Sebastián Calderón Bentin (Panama) and three UK-based participants.

9 Beginnings: Chicago explores the archive of Randolph Street Gallery (RSG), a seminal artist-run exhibition and performance space in Chicago from 1979-1998, and supported the work of hundreds of artists in Chicago and internationally. Taking a similar approach and selecting the beginnings of nine separate pieces from the RSG archive and knitting them into one. In January 2014, after a residency at the Richard and Mary L. Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry at the University of Chicago, a final presentation of the Bristol and Chicago performances were performed together.