Silver action performance: what are the conditions necessary to develop a successful learning or artistic project?

This article explores the necessary framework and processes that such involvement requires in terms of time, space, content and method, its impact on participants and collaborators, and the opportunities for learning.1 I have chosen to use these categories or lenses as I found them to be the most helpful and pertinent when considering the challenges and affordances that this particular project was presented with.

On 3 February 2013, a day-long performance piece called Silver Action took place in the new Tanks spaces at Tate Modern, devised by the artist Suzanne Lacy, as part of the BMW Live series. Over the preceding month a group of 4 artist educators ran a series of workshops at Tate Modern with a core group of 250 women who were near to or over the age of 60,  to share their experiences of political activism, whatever form this may have taken.2 The stories that emerged from these workshops formed part of the Silver Action performance itself. This involved the women repeating parts of their stories again, sitting in front of a male stenographer. The typed words were simultaneously projected upon the walls of the Tank, so that the audience could read the women’s stories as they were written.

Lacy describes the project as being:

In my role as Head of Learning Programme and Resources at Tate I was able to take a collaborative overview of the project and support the work of the Community Artist Educator, Michèle Fuirer, from the Public Programmes team, in her role as lead artist educator. I provided the scheduling for the initial series of workshops, which then provided a framework for others to work within. I saw my role as one of supporter and champion of the learning aspect of this project and to ensure that it was fully integrated into the aspirations and preparations for the final performance.

Initial discussions between Lacy, the curator for Live Performance and the Director of Learning, Anna Cutler, had occurred over several years prior to this, as there was a long held desire to bring Lacy’s work to Tate Modern, especially after the acquisition of her work The Crystal Quilt, from which the Silver Action project took its inspiration.4 A commitment between the Curatorial and Learning departments was made to realise this project, in whatever form Lacy saw fit, working in close collaboration and discussion with the Live Art curator. The Director of Learning took a further step to ensure that the project would be realised by committing a percentage of the overall budget from the Learning department, so there was a financial commitment made, as well as the resources of time and expertise.

On the day of the performance the number of those taking part swelled to 400, with new participants arriving on the day needing to be orientated and steered by the team of artist educators. This meant that there were distinct groups of participants: the 250 women who had attended the pre-workshops with the artist educators, the fifty ‘activist’ women who had worked closely and independently with Lacy to create a separate conversation piece around a large kitchen table in the south Tank, the 100 new participants who needed to be swiftly initiated into the process, bloggers who were responding to the performance in the space and then the audience members themselves.

Therefore there were very different qualities of experience afforded to these different participant groups, which created its own tensions and dynamics on the day. The first was with the women who took part in the workshops run by the artist educators. They had had a collective experience, which they shared with the other women who had come to the pre-workshops and who took part in the final performance. The second were the ‘activist’ women, who had extended conversations with the artist and a separate experience from the first group, which was made visible in the performance as they sat separately at a kitchen table and were presented in a different manner to all the other participants. The third were the women whose involvement was just on the morning or afternoon of the performance day itself, who had to very quickly orientate themselves and grasp the context and practicalities of taking part in a live public performance.

There was a group of younger, female bloggers who were placed amongst the performers, ‘this was the artist’s deliberate choice – the choosing of younger women to create a trans-generational aspect to the work …’5 The young women who were chosen to act as commentators gave a further dimension to the live performance, they came with a different lens and life experience to the performers which provided another perspective . Alongside this the audience members brought their own perceptions and responses to the performance.

The pre-workshops with the artists educators afforded the particpants the deepest learning opportunity, as they shared their experiences, learnt from each other, and had the time to understand the full context of the live performance. The women who joined on the day had a much more immediate and immersive experience, which may have been significant to those participants but by its nature would have been a very different learning experience.

At the end of each workshop the women were taken down to the Tanks in order to familiarise them with the spaces where they would later return to perform.6 This allowed these participants a chance to meet with the assistant Live Art curator who was able to give them an idea of how the Tanks would look on the performance day, how they would need to enter the space and the format of each performance.

Lacy attended these workshops but did not lead them. She was there to listen to the women’s stories, as this partly helped her to shape the format of the final work. Whilst suggestions on the content and format of the workshops were made by the artist and by other activist collaborators that Lacy was working with to devise the piece, the final say was given to the lead artist educator to run the sessions in the most appropriate way that she saw fit.  This showed a level of respect and trust that Lacy felt towards the lead artist educator’s practice, something that was noted and felt throughout the process by the artist educators, even when the project was at its most challenging i.e. when there was a tension over the desire for greater numbers of participants over the learning teams’ desire to maintain a quality experience for the participants.  Perhaps it was this mutual respect for differences in practice that allowed for a complex and ambitious project to take place over a very short space of time. Lacy knew that a learning experience is not necessarily the same as making a performance (though of course there are learning opportunities here too). The learning that the artist educators facilitated came from the process that the women were able to experience together in the pre-workshops. Lacy knew that she needed the input and combined experience of the artist educator team, as well as the skills and expertise of the curatorial team, combined with her own vision in order to make the whole process come together cohesively.

Lacy did not feel it was important for the participants to make direct connections between The Crystal Quilt and the Silver Action project, as they were different in nature, though with some clear similarities. Lacy commented:

The Crystal Quilt was a culmination of a three -year project, whereas the team working on Silver Action had three months in which to prepare a performance. But the projects were similar in their desire to involve and represent a wide and diverse group of older women, in order to put their political activism to the foreground of their life experience. The Crystal Quilt was put on display again for the Tate Modern performance so that the audience could see an earlier example of the artist’s work and to make their own connections to what they were seeing live in the Tanks. It was a question that came up in our planning meetings, of the importance of making the context for the work and the performance explicit i.e. why the work was taking place at Tate Modern and how the women’s words would become a piece of performance art in this context. This context came about with the shaping by the artist of the whole audience experience in the Tanks, from the way she asked the women to enter the room, to the arrangement of different groups of tables, to the aesthetic of having the words projected large on to the walls.

With more time the context in which we were working could have been explored further with the participants in the workshops, by drawing upon other examples of performance art in the Tate collection and beyond. For example as part of the ‘Art in Action’ festival there had been performances by artists such as Tania Brugera, Eddie Peake and Ei Arakawa, which could have provided an opportunity for discussion about the work that the women in the workshops were involved in, in order to see live art from others artists perspectives.8 This would have enabled our protagonists to see themselves as part of a wider live art context.

But the nature of our project was that the women were sharing their own life experiences with each other and the artist, so the importance was not about the wider context of performance art, but instead a form of peer-led learning, as the material and content that they were exploring was coming from themselves, so they were creating their own context and content.

For Lacy:

I now want to consider the importance and use of space in the performance. By space I am referring to the physical location within which Silver Action took place. Periods of tension were caused by and then resolved, through the consideration of the final space where the performance would take place. The educators resisted the demand being placed upon them initially to enlist a higher number of participants than they thought they could work with in the time available, in order to ensure that the participants would have a high quality learning experience.

In pre-production it was proposed that the final piece would be shown in the Turbine Hall, a very large and challenging performance space in terms of its scale and visibility. This exposed a potential difference in approach and values between the artist and the educators; from the artistic perspective there was an aesthetic consideration whereas from Learning’s perspective it was more important that less people took part, but that they had a more profound and genuine learning experience. The concern from Learning was that the drive for high participant numbers would compromise this ethos.

In part this issue was resolved by the final location being moved to the southern Tank space, which immediately imposed a capped and reduced number of performers and audience members due to fire regulations, which independently made the decision for us. With a reduced target number of participants it was felt that the desire to provide quality as well as quantity was now achievable and that the workshops could provide for the best dynamic and learning experience for the participants. Therefore the process of having to make this decision allowed us to created a workable frame for the project and resolved one area of potential tension in the collaboration, which would possibly have been a difficult one to resolve otherwise, as there was a strong feeling from the learning team that if we were to be involved we should not compromise on the quality of the experience for the participants. The decision to move the performance to the Tanks was welcomed by all, and as we were to take the last available weekend when they would be open to the general public (before needing to be closed again to allow for the continuation of the building works for the new building), it also possibly added to the excitement around the event.

The methodology used in this project was founded in collaboration with the participants themselves, where their performances become ‘almost “life-like”, in the words of Allan Kaprow, in that real people are doing real things – they are performing themselves’.10 This is the method that Lacy chooses to work with so she is not ‘authoring’ the piece, more shaping and designing the work from the participants. It allows for other voices to come through, whilst the audience is still very aware of the hand of the artist in the performance, even though she is not seen. Shaping the Live Art performance had its difficulties due to its scale and form, partly of her own making and partly from the institution’s making. These expectations included needing to know what form the final performance would take, where it would be located, the need to realise her vision within a finite budget and the constrictions that a public venue imposes. As Learning practitioners we shared some of these concerns, but not all since we weren’t responsible for the finer details of the final performance. Lacy had to keep in mind at all times what the final piece would look like and how an audience member would see, hear and experience it. The artist educators in contrast were able to focus solely on the experience of those women who would take part in their workshops, and it was this concern which remained uppermost in their minds throughout the whole project, even on the day of the performance itself and beyond it. 

Both the participants and the artist thought that the ‘action’ part of ‘Silver Action’ was the conversation between the women  – the primary audience for the event in Suzanne Lacy’s words is ‘the participants – the women themselves’, and therefore they were closely aligned in their motivations and focus at this point.11

Lacy made clear from the outset how important she viewed the Learning department’s role and input for the project as a whole. She wanted the artist educators to devise the best methods to make the women feel at ease with each other and the project itself, and to find the best ways of drawing out and recording their individual histories and stories. The lead artist educator sent out a proposal for the format and outcome of the workshop process. Each participant would come to Tate Modern before the performance to experience either a morning or afternoon session in the East Room. This would enable the women to meet each other, ask questions, share their experiences and work through a series of tasks devised and led by the artist educators in order to equip them with the confidence necessary to take part in a public performance and be able to share their life stories. Lacy observed, ‘The women inserted their histories in a timeline… their first moment of revelation, their first moment that prompted them to activism.’ 12

The lead artist educators’ aims for these sessions were to ‘orient, rehearse, learn’ . 13 The workshops ‘created the type of intimacy and intensity which is often present in a live, gallery-based workshop – but more so - since the single focus on the topic of women’s ageing and history of activism brought the highly personal into the realm of the highly political or politicised’ .14 In a more traditional Community Learning programme participants:

can be encouraged to become performative in the course of a discussion/learning situation; but they are not performers. Having a voice, having a say, expressing a view is not always a performance unless the situation has been constructed to make that voice evidently perform…

If the interactive framework is set up with a prior intention, then the type of learning will be significantly different. All of the artists involved in delivering the workshops had a sense of difference in what they/we designed for Silver Action. The workshops made no direct reference to a collection or artwork in a museological sense. (But they did refer to The Crystal Quilt – another work by Suzanne Lacy and a ‘previous incarnation’ of Silver Action)’.15

I think that this reflects back to Lacy’s reference to Kaprow, that the women are being encourage to‘perform themselves’, to find their own voice.

Finally I will consider the lens of time through which to view the creative process. In this context time is referring to the period from the active phase of the project from pre-production to the final performance itself.

There were factors that worked against the project, perhaps the most significant being time, and not having enough of it. Lacy had spent 3 years working with the women who made The Crystal Quilt in America, thus making it a very different project for both the participants and artist. For Silver Action the short time frame meant that the live art assistant curator was put under great pressure by having to recruit women in a very short space of time. However I don’t think that we would have found a significantly different group of women if learning had undertaken this role or if we had used different methods. Even though all our workshops were full it was a fraught process that could have failed, as there was no guarantee that the radio programme that had initially advertised the project on BBC R4 Woman’s Hour in July 2012 or the subsequent adverts that had asked women to contact Tate who were interested in taking part, would have attracted sufficient numbers of women to make the project viable, so we at times faced our own fears of not having enough participants, or having too many and not being able to cope and maintain a quality experience for participants. The artist educator team would have liked to have worked with all of the women who took part in the performance beforehand, but a decision was made that other women who heard about the project and wanted to take part on the day could do so, without having been part of the pre-performance workshops. This did mean that there were different levels of preparation for those involved.  But on many of our learning programmes we are not afforded the luxury of time to be able to get to know our participants, and we work with lots of people for just a few hours.

However I think that those participants who were able to take part in the workshops would have had a greater chance of experiencing a ‘deep learning’ experience as they went through its four key characteristics:16

1. A well-structured knowledge base with a focus on concepts, integration of knowledge, and a cumulative experience.
2. An appropriate motivational level, with an emphasis on intrinsic motivation and a sense of “ownership” of the material.
3. Learner activity associated with active, not passive, learning.
4. Interaction with others.17

The process that made this project a successful learning/artistic project were firstly having senior management imbedded and commited from the outset. Without this the project would not have been financially viable or have had the involvement and support of the Learning team. Secondly that everybody who was involved was allowed to play their own role and were clear about what their responsibilities were. Whilst Lacy was open to suggestions about how the final staging could work, it was clear what her role was in the process, i.e. to have final responsibility for shaping the aesthetic quality of the performance. This afforded Learning and Curatorial colleagues the opportunity to work equally with the artist, though in different ways i.e. the artist educators were responsible for the pre-workshops and setting up the conditions for the women to perform on the day; whereas the Live Art curators were responsible for the recruitment of the women and then the staging and all performance aspects of the work. Thirdly not only was there clarity of roles, but there was a respect for their difference and what qualities and experience each person was bringing to the piece. Whilst it was not an easy process, I think that this respect was important, acknowledged and afforded a lot of trust.  Finally, we did manage to recruit 250 women in a relatively short space of time, so that all of our workshop sessions were full and lively. I think this is a sign of success as it showed that women genuinely wanted to take part in a project which they viewed as being important and relevant to their lives, enough to be prepared to publicly share very personal and intimate aspects of their histories.

The experience for the women themselves, although varied, was overwhelmingly positive, to the point that some of them were compelled to continue this conversation beyond the final performance and found a space to do so outside of Tate at the Southbank Centre a few months later on World Women’s Day, where Lacy was an invited as a panel speaker, and at Sussex University and the British Library’s ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project’. So the conversation was able to continue and find new audiences.

Following on from this the Community Learning team has created an offer for adults (for both men and women) at Tate Britain in a new strand of programming called ‘Soapbox’ as evidence of the legacy and sustained offer that Fuirer was keen to achieve early on in the process. Here people get to discuss issues that matter to them, inspired by a work from the collection, in a public and partly performative manner. Fuirer thought it was important to sustain an offer to our older audience, where we can hear their views and let them have some agency in the gallery. The team have acknowledged that this programme is in part inspired by the experience of working on the Silver Action project.

Fiona Kingsman is Head of Learning Programme and Resources, Tate