Nobody’s Business is an open-source platform for the sharing of artistic practices in the Performing Arts. Nobody’s Business exists to create space for lateral exchange, outside of the economies of workshops (wherein the information is generally unidirectional) and creations (which are usually supported via single authors and pieces). Nobody’s Business is a format in which professional artists can meet on equal grounds to share our practical tools and knowledge, to inspire and feed each other, to foster the proliferation of information and thereby support each others work and the general advancement of the field. Diversity is a criterion in our gatherings, in order to create a catalytic environment wherein frictions between different ways of working and thinking can support the discovery of new forms and expansion of each participant’s own artistic horizons. In contemporary art, where the “new” is in demand, we seek confrontation with what each of us does not already know, in order to bring all participants farther. As in an academic or scientific conference, we recognize that the advancement of knowledge is necessarily supported by thinking together, rather than alone. In order to foster continuity and community within our freelance, volatile, individually organized and precarious conditions, we seek sustainable and sustained sharing of practice and knowledge by regular doing-together.
Nobody’s Business is “Nobody’s,” as a deliberate negation of the individualism that contemporary neoliberal and hyper-capitalist economic realities impose upon our lives. We want to affirm that the performing arts, movement, speech, dance, action, are all things that belong to Nobody, but rather are activated by and pass through each of us. We choose to sign the event anonymously as “Nobody’s” in order to emphasize the non-ownership of ideas, knowledge, or practice, but we do not intend to erase history. To the contrary, we are interested in elucidating and mapping the movement of information within the field. Citation and documentation is therefore an important aspect of the knowledge-sharing in this project, for us to begin to trace and accredit the genealogy of sources and influences within contemporary performing arts. Emphasizing the necessity of shared time and space, Nobody’s Business is about presence, but also supports the sharing of knowledge with those absent via an online database of practices shared in each meeting (coming soon!!!).
Nobody’s Business also reaches beyond the walls of the studio by considering each meeting a “publication” (as the act of making public) within its own medium (performance), with an open-studio policy wherein the public is invited to attend the practice sessions as observers. We do this to underline non-exclusivity and extend the reach of our knowledge-sharing practice: the open-studio policy of Nobody’s Business allows that the practices and ideas are adapted by other disciplines, from the potential of visitors watching and transposing practices into their own media. The public viewership of the sessions also acknowledges that performance implies an audience, so performance practices are in some way already performances. Furthermore, the open-studio policy can serve audience development by inviting a public to witness the discourse and process of how we work, move, and think together.
Nobody’s Business has carried out week-long sessions of Nobody’s Dance and Nobody’s Indiscipline (for the sharing of practices across disciplines) in Stockholm, Brussels, Berlin, Copenhagen, Milan, Minneapolis, Santarcangelo, and Oslo. In the future we are also interested in organizing sessions within other disciplines, such as Nobody’s Theater, Nobody’s Text, Nobody’s Performance, Nobody’s Music, and more.
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