Yellow – re performed  
Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival Mary's Abbey Dublin 
30 September, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 October 2010. Performance times:   6pm -10pm 
Visitors are free to come in and out the the performance
Helen Carey, Curator's essay on Yellow-Reperformed
Performance schedule: 30th September - Amanda Coogan, 1st October - Deirdre Roycroft, 2nd October - Anna-Maire Healy, 3rd October - Anna Berndtson, 4th October - Olwen Fouere, 5th October - Victoria Mc Cormack

Picture
A woman dressed in a large yellow dress, continuously washing her enormous skirt in a bucket of soap water over 4 hours, to the intermittent strains of a piano composition by Franz Schubert, examining the frail and yet indomitable nature of human spirit; survival and rebirth.  

Amanda Coogan is a practitioner of live performance at the most innovative and dynamic point in the Visual Arts in Ireland, and is a practitioner who pushes the boundaries of Performance Art internationally. It is against this backdrop that Coogan's durational performance Yellow will be produced, in series interpreted by 6 women, who will each explore the piece individually. 

Taking place in the atmospheric Mary’s Abbey Dublin, each artist will perform the work, over consecutive days including: Olwen Fouere, Deirdre Roycroft, Victoria McCormack, Ann Marie Healy, Herma Wittstock, and Amanda Coogan. The project is curated by Helen Carey.

This powerful live performance exhibition draws all the power of the past right into the visceral present for the audience, creating a collective experience of endurance. The live exhibition is on the boarder between performance art and theatre , this project is an attempt to find a ‘script’ and an interpretation of Coogan’s seminal work. A non-text based piece of work steeped in the image and its visual arts heritage, this work sits in the boundaries between performance in Visual Arts and Experimental Theatre.  Contemporary performance in the Visual Arts is currently at a place of change. This project will explore the immediacy of the creative relationship between creator/artist and performer, uncovering what happens when a piece of live performance as it is remade by different artists, not a re-casting, not a re-choreographing, but a re-making and a re-performing.
The presence of the artist as live performer has been seen as central to the dynamism and magnetism of much of the performance work from the visual arts. Coming straight from the lineage of Joseph Beuys , Marina Abramovic and Alastair Mac Lennan, the focus of this experiment is to uncover the boundaries of presence in live performance. Yellow-reperformed tests the notion of that very re performance, critically engaging with contemporary performance in the Visual arts. Performance Art is a notoriously slippery term; the schism with theatre practice is becoming less relevant with many practitioners crossing freely between the disciplines. the artists chosen to re perform Yellow come from both Visual art and Theatre traditions; Olwen Fouere and Deirdre Roycroft both work within the theatre but engage and are identified strongly with its experimental side. Anna Marie Healy and Victoria Mc Cormack are emerging visual artists specialising in live performance practice and Anna Berndston is a performance practionner who trained both in experimental theatre and live perofrmance in the visual arts. Anna and Amanda studied together at post graduate level with the self styled 'grandmother of performance art' Marina Abramovic.

Please see Aishlinn White's experiential essay on Yellow Live