A Feminist Chorus.
A Feminist Chorus uses spoken word performance, sound works and text-based score to explore the historical value and contemporary potential of collective action, based on research into feminist organisations in the 1960s and 1970s. Through a site-sensitive model of social engagement, diverse participants groups were invited to select and perform texts from formal and informal archival sources, including: Glasgow Women’s Library for the Glasgow International Festival; Electra for Wysing Arts Centre and other venues. See Portfolio Booklet for documentation of research dimensions.
- Submitting institution
-
The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qq8q6
- Type
- I - Performance
- Venue(s)
- Glasgow Women’s Library (with additional sound works at 5 Blythswood Square, home of the Glasgow Society of Lady Artists, 1895 –1965) and Glasgow School of Art, during Glasgow International Festival, April 2014. Further details in portfolio.
- Open access status
- Out of scope for open access requirements
- Month of first performance
- -
- Year of first performance
-
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- Yes
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- Due to COVID closure, A Feminist Chorus: A Tender Map, Grand Union, Birmingham, was postponed from September 2020 to March 2021 - see evidence included in portfolio. In this iteration the research objects and ephemera in the Grand Union space form an archival chorus, realised as a text-based memory map painted on the walls and windows of the gallery and outdoor billboards, along with a collective sound work which extends on methods developed in the other research-based performances. A printed score ensures that A Tender Map renders an alternative archive of Grand Union and the creative endeavours that define it.
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Feminist Chorus seeks to develop an embodied and performative methodology for “translating” the work of consciousness-raising groups of the 1960s and 1970s into a form resonant today - as a model of collective authorship and scholarship outside the singularity of traditional academic methodologies. Publications, posters and cards provide a legacy for the performance event, by gathering together the selected texts of participants, as both testimony to their participation and a ‘score’ for future reading performances. A Feminist Chorus has taken form in response to context: it has been performed in a garden, cinema, gallery, library and telephone booth by feminist reading groups, art students, library users, film scholars and film-makers. It has generated visual scores, song books, sound works and films. An edited anthology of commissioned essays, Women Artists, Feminism and the Moving Image, developed alongside the project, underlines collective models of scholarly research.
Realising the potential of collective sound to address site-specific histories, the research formulates new models of archival research through choral dissemination, addressing ethical questions of authorship and participant agency, and inscribing feminism’s collective methodologies into social participatory art practice.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
