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R for Roskilde, Shoes of Your Choice etc.
by Alison Knowles
Alison Knowles’ performance took place in the Viking Ship Hall of the Viking Ship Museum located on the edge of the waterfront. The close proximity to the ocean prompted Knowles to pipe the sound of the ocean into the performance space using a bucket and a microphone. The steady rhythm of the ocean became a backdrop to Alison Knowles’ reading from her work Natural Assemblages and the True Crow while her daughter Hannah Higgins was hanging objects on a frame and making a found art shadow show.
Alison Knowles also performed Bean Snow for Alison Knowles by Anne Tardos, A Bean Phonemicon for Alison Knowles by Jackson Mac Low, Gamelan Things by Philip Corner, and her own work Onion Skin Song.
R for Roskilde
In the performance, eight performers stand in a line before the audience. Each performer holding behind his/her back an object beginning with the letters in the word Roskilde. The objects are then shown to the audience and spoken about in the language of the country of the performance in the order of the letters in the word. In the case of Roskilde the word was spoken in Danish.
Shoes of Your Choice
The score invites a member of the audience to come forward to the microphone and describe a pair of shoes, the one he/she is wearing or another pair. He/she is encouraged to tell where he/she got them, the size, colour, why he/she likes them etc.
Alison Knowles read a text by Ann Nöel describing her shoes in detail, how she felt about them and where she bought them. Valborg Nørby (Gallery Sct. Agnes), Ben Vautier and Jackson Mac Low performed the score and described their shoes to the audience.
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Alison Knowles: The California Sandals
Recording of performance by Alison Knowles. Festival of Fantastics. The Viking Ship Hall. Roskilde 1985. Poem from More by Alison Knowles, published by Unpublished Edition, New York 1970
1985
“… Part of Alison Knowle´s performance (in the cafeteria of a museum of Viking ship) consisted of sitting on the floor investigating the sounds that can be made with beans and chik-peas in a hand.made paper drum.”
- Henry Martin, “Festival of Fantastics” in “EAR Magazin of New Music”, p. 16. New York, November/December 1985
1985
About Alison doing my piece (Gamelan Things, ed.): I feel so wonderful about that, and not just because for a composer to sit back in the audience and have somebody else perform his work is the ultimate success; it’s not that, it’s that Alison, who I’ve known for many many years and for whom I’ve been a performer and whose work has certain similarities to mine, can say, I’ve learned something new from you, and I’m using the same materials and the same objects, and yet your structure made me do something a little bit differently from what I would. So she is delighted by doing that, and I’m delighted that in a situation where it would be more normal to be doing her own pieces she’s decided something I’ve done can help her enrich her work and I think that’s wonderful.
- Philip Corner in interview with Birgit Brunsted, 1985
1985
”Both Geoffrey Hendricks and Alison Knowles […] have found a place where simplicity starts, as though automatically, to shape itself into ritual. Knowles piped the sound of the adjacent sea into her performance space in the cafeteria of Roskilde’s museum of Viking ships, and the atmosphere slowly shifted into something dreamlink as she projected slides of found objects, read a history of the shoes she was wearing and sat on the floor to make subtle and startling noises with a few handfuls of beans, an exquisite handmade paper drum and a few windup toys. What she communicates is her own crystalline intensity.”
- Henry Martin, Art News / September 1985
1985
Knowles is an expert in ‘bønner’ - in Danish, bønner (beans) can mean green beans or prayers: you plant and you harvest.
Preben Hygum, “The returning of Fluxus,” Information May 28th 1985
1985
A large part of Alison Knowles “performance” was about shoes. One by one the artists would enter the stage and tell about the shoes or sandals they were wearing, where they were bought and why, whether they were comfortable and whether they were shined and so on.”
– “The absolute concentration.” Roskilde Tidende, May 30th 1985.
1985
9PM ALISON KNOWLES - with Hannah Higgins
Alison’s performance was in complete contrast - a quiet, meditational, almost ritualistic succession of events: the sound of the waves brought in from outside, images of found objects projected on the wall behind the dais, the texts she read about shoes, (the one I wrote in 1972), the scattering of beans and sounds made by toys and a paper drum, the slow-motion movements performed together with Hannah and the songs they sang at the end. I wonder whether Alison’s ideas weren’t too obtuse for a foreign audience to grasp, the texts too long and the delivery too low key.
- Ann Noël in her diary, May 1985
1986
“Our senses are too dull and we forget to see, hear, taste and smell things as they are. This is what I am trying to change through my art.”
-Alison Knowles in: Birgitte Søndergaard “Fluxus/venner moedes og mindes,” Roskilde Tidende May 30th 1986.
April 7th, 2009
My “r” was, as you can imagine, “Rød grød med fløde”
I practiced all day saying it.
The audience knew as soon as i held up the box of cream, and laughed.
I had practiced it all day. They said that no non-dane could ever pronounce it, but i think i got through it reasonably creditably—-for a foreigner.