Cally Spooner - And You Were Wonderful, On Stage

Amsterdam, December 24, 2015 - The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam presents And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2013 – 2015), an immersive five-channel film installation by British artist Cally Spooner. In this work, a musical for six continuously rolling cameras, a black box soundstage and its inhabitants, are recorded in a single take. The mechanics of the shoot (cameras, microphones, mixing boards, chromakey screens and crew) remain as present as the performers they capture. Cast and crew become a constant-motion human backdrop, pragmatically recomposing scene-changes through lighting cues, voice, body movement, or continuous shifts of filmic apparatus and props. The semblance of a post-production edit arrives through the organisation and orchestration of bodies on set. 

In the installation, filmic composition becomes a by-product of a process; where these several well-rehearsed units of performers produce a forty-six minute non-stop motion, which sometimes creates coherency,  and at other times does not. The six camera feeds are presented on five screens, with  their chronology and technical mishaps left untouched, in an installation that has more in common with a live choreographic event, than cinema.

This work has its origins in a commission by the Stedelijk Museum Public Program. Cally Spooner developed And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, a peripatetic musical, over the course of two years. The piece was delivered by a chorus line of women, gossiping about celebrities, athletes and politicians who have outsourced their performances to a technology, with examples including Beyoncé’s lip-syncing scandal during the presidential inauguration, Lance Armstrong’s Oprah-mediated apology for his use of doping, and speechwriter Jon Favreau’s departure from the White House in pursuit of a career as a Hollywood scriptwriter. The chorus’ libretto was based on meeting notes from an advertising agency, on how to extract personally disclosed stories and aspirations from employees and repackage them to better reflect the voice of their corporation as a tv-commercials.  

After a public rehearsal at KW Berlin, And You Were Wonderful, On Stage was then developed as a co-production with Performa 13 in New York and Tate Modern, London. In 2014, the Stedelijk Museum permanently committed itself to this work by acquiring it when Spooner was developing the performance  into a five-channel installation during her residency at Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC), New York, after  a year-long period of public events and temporary exhibitions to develop the film’s composite parts and characters. Now, in 2016, the museum will show the completed work in its entirety for the first time. 

Curator: Britte Sloothaak

Credits
And You Were Wonderful, On Stage is written, devised and directed by Cally Spooner. Musical composition is by Peter Josyln. Choreography by Adam Weinert, stage-sets by Giles Round and devising with Rhiannon Drake, Helen Hart, Piya Malik, Jenny Minton, Rebecca Thorn and Chloé Turpin, produced by Edd Hobbs. 

The peripatetic musical was originally commissioned and curated by Hendrik Folkerts and Annie Godfrey Larmon for the Stedelijk Museum in 2013, subsequently developed further with Charles Aubin, Laura McClean Ferris and Roselee Goldberg for Performa 13, Catherine Wood and Capucine Perot for Tate Modern, London.

The 5 channel film installation was co-commissioned by Hendrik Folkerts for the Stedelijk Museum, and Victoria Brooks at​ the the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) in 2015.