PLEASE NOTE: this performance is fully booked, but If I Can't Dance warmly invites you to join the public conversation with Emily Roysdon on Sunday 16 February at 5pm.

If I Can’t Dance proudly presents the second chapter of By Any Other Name, a new performance project by Emily Roysdon, presented in collaboration with the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. The piece is an international two-year commission in which Roysdon undertakes the development of a vocabulary around the term ‘to discompose’.

The opening chapter, held in November 2013 at the Playground Festival (STUK/Museum M, Leuven) began the series by re-structuring the space and orientation of the audience. Laying down and sandwiched between a floor-composition and a suspended screen, the audience received the piece’s movement, text, and tableau in an experience of horizontal performativity. Within this arrangement of repose, Roysdon read the opening pages to Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Room of One’s Own’ focusing on thinking as trespassing, Eleanor Bauer danced a lateral threshold, Jesper Stromback Eklund quoted descriptions of Jack Smith’s queer theatre, and Babi Badalov’s visual poems built a palimpsest of inherited and learned languages. Unfolding in sequence, these elements created a space in which Roysdon asked (literally) “what is time if not activism?”

For the Stedelijk Museum this discomposed theatricality will be extended. A new chapter will be added as a prologue to pre-empt ‘the stage’, developed in collaboration with students of the If I Can’t Dance workshop of the Dutch Art Institute/MFA ArtEZ. Within ‘the stage’, the Stedelijk Museum auditorium, a lighting design by Katinka Marac will sculpt a dramaturgy of darkness that is punctuated by artist interventions and texts.

The participating students of the Dutch Art Institute are Jan Adriaans, Maria Barlasov, Coco Duivenvoorde, Bryony Gillard, Monique Hendriksen,  Bonbon Juan, Alireza Keymanesh, Constanza Puente, Kaste Seskeviciute, Celia Shomal, and Aarti Sunder.

Two sessions of thirty participants will be held at 5pm and 8pm on 13 February. Reservation is essential: reservations@stedelijk.nl

The new work of Emily Roysdon is commissioned by If I Can’t Dance within the frame of Edition V – Appropriation and Dedication, with commissioning partners the Playground Festival Leuven (STUK/Museum M), the TBA festival of the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The work is also supported by Corpus, European Network For Performance Art, funded through the Culture Program of the European Union.