In performance studies, the history of score-based work is usually traced back to Fluxus, the loose community of artists in the 1960s and 1970s that was inspired by Dadaism, notions of anti-art, conceptualism, and compositional indeterminacy.
Coined by George Maciunas in 1962, Fluxus (to flow) came to be associated with artists as varied as Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, and John Cage. Fluxus’s event scores were instructions for performances that often had a playful or absurd tone, seeking to draw attention to the mundane and the banal, the momentary and the performative, in an effort to oppose the market-driven concert and art gallery/museum system.
Quite possibly the earliest event score to achieve notoriety was Philip Corner’s Piano Activities, originally performed in the Wiesbaden Fluxfests of 1962 and filmed for German television. It was a series of instructions for manipulating a grand piano, and in the 1962 performance, Maciunas, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Ben Patterson, Wolf Vostell, and Emmett Williams chose to interpret the score so as to dismantle a grand piano they had bought for the event. The artists involved in the Fluxfests later exaggerated the scandal Piano Activities caused—a report in the Allgemeine Zeitung even called the event a “lighthearted success” (according to Schmidt quoted in Piano Activities 2 February 2017)—
earning it a place in the canons of experimental music and performance art.
Performance scores emerge from the same historical roots and around the same time as happenings, performative events that sought to involve the audi-ence as participants in an ephemeral artwork that also questioned the capitalist economy of art and what could be understood as an art object. Allan Kaprow coined the term ‘happening’ in 1958 to describe temporal, staged environments combining visual and performance arts—unlike an event score, a happening could have a script it followed but it left no script or object behind, emphasising the qualities of art that could not be placed in a museum or sold in the market place.
In principle, a happening left nothing behind, although some photographs and short films by participants do exist. In contrast, Fluxus artists sought to devalue the art objects they created by mass-producing them and thus contesting their uniqueness and value. In some cases, as with Ben Vautier’s Total Art Matchbox (1966), they included in the score instructions for destroying the object and the score.
Scores therefore invite reiteration and repetition-with-difference; happen-ings tend to uniqueness and ephemerality. In music and dance, the word ‘score’
refers to any composition or copy of a written notation of a composition—a set of instructions by which a work of art can be reproduced. This broader sense of the term creates a degree of confusion especially in dance, where notation is a specialist practice very few dance professionals care to learn: dances are gen-erally transmitted through instruction in the studio either by the choreographic author or a stand-in for whom the author has bestowed authority, not via scores.1 The slippage between the understanding of score as notation (as in music) and score as a set of instructions (as in event scores) creates another kind of fruitful uncertainty:2 what qualifies as score-based work in dance or performance art?
Is any notation, drawing, or set of instructions a score? What of tasks and task-based work? Is a task simply a very simple score for the performer to follow?
A Score or a Score?
In general, a score can encompass everything from the notation of the soundtrack of a Hollywood film to an artist’s sketches for a future installation, from a collec-tive production onstage to a set of instructions for anyone to try out alone—as long as the purported end result is durational and deemed ‘art’ in some sense.
Even many flash mobs can be thought of as score-based, following a set of instruc-tions. In all these cases, the scores are always-already entangled with the notion of an author figure, an artist whose name is associated through a particular score to any performance of that score (Foucault 2001). In performing art, where the
work exists only at the moment of performance, the score thus acts similar to notation and can even come to signify the work in absentia, such as when past performances are exhibited in museums (e.g. Van Assche & Wallis 2016, 17-19, 40-41) or artists’ sites (Untitled (Locus), 1975 2017) or as books (as with Hay 2010;
Junttila & Kela 2012). Scores are compositions that extend temporally to before (plans for performance) and after (the possibility of re-performance).
In the more narrow sense of event scores in the Fluxus tradition, a score would be specifically a set of instructions meant to be creatively reinterpreted, a loose structure of composition for a time-based piece, or, as Pablo Helguera (2016) puts it, “a conceptual scaffolding that provides focus and direction to a given performative work.” The keyword here is ‘loose’: what distinguishes such score-based work from notation is the degree of interpretation by the perform-er. Although a score rests on the idea that a work of (performance) art can be repeatable (although never in exactly the same way), what distinguishes a score in the performance art sense from a musical or dance notation is that a score describes indeterminate actions. Whereas a notation in music or dance aims at ensuring a composition is performed alike to previous performances, a score encourages interpretation and improvisation by the performer. In comparison to Piano Activities, for example, a musical score like Cage’s 4’33” (1952) is a very precise notation of an exact duration of orchestral silence, four minutes and 33 seconds of it, which, in performance, means that “The conductor directs the performers to refrain from playing their instruments” (Basualdo 2016).
In dance, score-based work also traces itself to Fluxus through key American figures in the group. John Cage’s long-time partner, Merce Cunningham, explored indeterminacy in choreographic composition already in the 1950s, using dice, the I Ching, or flipping coins to determine the sequence of choreographed phrases or movements for the dancers. His first choreography using the chance method, as he called it, was performed in the 1952 Festival of Creative Arts at Brandeis University, and 1953 saw the performances of Suite By Chance.3 For Cunningham, the chance method allowed movements to exist by themselves, separating danc-ers’ movements from their traditional reliance on music and beat as well as the direction in which the audience sits. Cunningham’s chance method built on danc-ers’ improvisation and felicitous coincidence at the moment of performance, and Cunningham was very interested in different kinds of scores.4 However, his scores come closer to notation and in practice, he choreographed phrases requiring expert training (virtuosity) in the dance technique of the Cunningham company.
However, Cunningham was also important to the group developing score-based works in dance in the 1960s, the so-called Judson Dance Theater, a group of artists working at the Judson Memorial Church in New York, 1962-1964, a movement that Sally Banes (1987) later called ‘postmodern dance’. ‘Postmodern’
alludes not to postmodernism but rather a break with the tradition of American modern dance. From a European perspective, ‘postmodern dance’ is thus mis-leading as a concept (see e.g. Burt 2006, 5-13; Pouillaude 2009, esp. 367-368) and for the purposes of this essay, it rests on formalist ideology that obscures the important connections between the emerging performance art, experimental music, installations, happenings, dance, and choreography.