When are we supposed to clap?  Cheer Piece imagines a world in which every action, even those inconsequential, requires you to play a cheer for yourself, as emotional and auditory support.  Obligatory cheering, especially a pre-recorded one, turns dystopic quickly, though it is humorous to watch.  Cheer Piece touches upon our current cultural obsession with self-validation and self-care, cheering as gendered, and what actually constitutes a genuine cheer.

I wrote Cheer Piece for myself in 2016, but its current version was written for the PROMPTUS collective in NYC, a post-disciplinary collective of performers and performance-makers committed to curating community-focused happenings.  The piece is structured as a round, open to any number of performers, in any performing medium they choose.  There are thirty-six systems of notated gestures, and each system represents one year. The oldest performer begins the piece, and as they move onto the next system, a year passes–eventually, the next oldest person will enter the performance in canon form.  The performer is also asked to imagine their interpretation of gesture as the age they “become”—transforming (“aging”) performing bodies over the course of the piece and asking the performers to revisit past versions of themselves through the performing process.

Performance History:
2016 Moon Show, Brooklyn — J.Zhu
2019 Arts on Site, NYC — PROMPTUS ( reel / full performance )
2020 Stanford, CA — Stanford New Music Ensemble ( video )
2020 Bodies in Flux, Festival of Original Theatre, Toronto

Photography by Emilie Nelson