Give-Away Performance
performance score
Give-Away Performance project invites others to bring Lorraine O’Grady’s ideas into action through two performance scores, Xenosphere and Stress Test, written in 2010. A performance score is a set of written instructions that provides a starting point for an action, leaving room for the participant’s interpretation. Each score proposes an encounter whose form and meaning emerge through the participant’s response.
Stress Test asks participants to confront an unsettling obstacle and engage with a person they would ordinarily avoid or fear. Xenosphere invites an actual or imagined interaction with an “Other”—animal, vegetable, or mineral—documented through sound, images, or text. Its title, coined by O’Grady from Greek words meaning “foreign, strange” and “globe, ball,” is left open for collaborators to define.
By giving away the scores, O’Grady opens the work to other people’s bodies, experiences, and imaginations. Each realization is shaped by the person performing it and the circumstances in which it takes place. Both scores ask participants to send documentation to O’Grady’s archive.