An Evening of Performance Pieces, 1979

This was a full evening performance event co-produced by Lynn Book with Margo Adams and Katherine Mitchell including over 10 original performance pieces created by the trio involving over 50 art students as performers and crew. The setting was the architecturally significant Memphis Academy Art (Harrover and Mann, 1959), renamed the Memphis College of Art until closing in 2020. Like Black Mountain College, the school, founded in 1936, occupied an historic place in the city, having a conservatory engagement with visual and material arts while attracting faculty and students exploring new media, and a public invested in what happened there. Book was an exuberant experimentalist as a transfer student in 1978, bringing with her a liberal arts education and movement training, and having become enamored of performance art, an emerging form at that time. In Evening of Performance Pieces, Book, along with Adams and Mitchell developed site-specific, as well as proscenium works in discrete spaces throughout the entire building - in a stairway, on an adjacent rooftop and in a courtyard well to be viewed from the top floor outer walkways, etc. The inventive, open architecture of the building itself invited Book, as lead for this event, to bring it to life in new, expansive ways. The general public audience numbering over 250 people traversed from space to space, ending up in the auditorium where they participated in the final work of the evening, Book’s “Advance and Stack II”. The black and white video documentation of excerpts of the entire event is the first video artifact in the Lynn Book Projects Archive. Other digital artifacts included here are structure maps, source materials, a black and white photo contact sheet of a rehearsal and production journal pages.

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