BMW Tate Live: Performance Room – Nicoline van Harskamp English Forecast

A second chance to watch Nicoline van Harskamp’s performance of English Forecast captured live Thursday, 19 September, 2013 at Tate Modern

• We advise that you watch the performance full screen and wear headphones.
• The actors will say words and sentences.
• Occasionally they will pause and you are invited to repeat their last words.
• The length of the pause will be indicated by a timeline on the screen.

Join in and record yourself as you take part in the performance.

Share your photo or video on Twitter, Vine or Instagram using #BMWTateLive and prepare your questions for the Q&A after the performance.

Following the event, the artist invites you to send in your audio or video recording of English Forecast via the free service wetransfer to english.forecast@gmail.com. She will incorporate selected entries in the continuation of her work on the topic of international English, of which she will keep you informed individually.

Nicoline van Harskamp explores the variation and future of spoken English in English Forecast.

This performance examines the fact that English is one of the world’s most commonly used cross-border languages. More people speak English as a non-native language than speak it as a first language. Through a myriad of dialects and new forms of communication, daily language, sentence formation and pronunciation are changing and the language has the potential to become unrecognisable as we know it now.

For English Forecast, Nicoline van Harskamp has researched what the possible future sound and nature of spoken English might be. A team of actors, with different mother tongues, will perform this language, and online audiences are invited to participate by repeating what they hear. Their task involves use of the full range of consonants and vowels of the International Phonetic Alphabet – a notation system for the totality of sounds that can be made by speech.

Van Harskamp’s interest in the future of the English language can also be seen in her works, New Latin and European English Exercise. For New Latin, performed at the 4th Bucharest Biennial, van Harskamp recited in Romanian, a script that she wrote following interviews with Romanians about their use of spoken English. European English Exercise follows the format of a Linguaphone course with performers repeating taped sounds.

Nicoline van Harskamp lives and works in Amsterdam where she is a head lecturer at the Sandberg Fine Arts Institute. Her previous projects include Yours in Solidarity which addressed the very recent history of anarchism through a correspondence archive, and was presented in different stages of completion in Mexico City, Frankfurt, Genk, London, Shanghai, Zagreb and Brussels. Nicoline van Harskamp has staged her live pieces at Witte de With, Rotterdam; New Museum, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arnolfini, Bristol; Serralves Foundation, Porto; and Kaaitheater, Brussels. In 2009 she won the Dutch national prize for contemporary art, Prix de Rome.

Enter the online BMW Tate Live Performance Room via www.youtube.com/user/tate/tatelive at 20:00 in the UK and exactly the same moment across time zones on the specified dates:
15.00 on the East Coast of America
21.00 in mainland Europe
23.00 in Russia.

During the performance you are encouraged to chat with other viewers from around the world via Twitter, Facebook and Google+ and to ask the artist, curator and guest linguist, Sonia Moran Panero, questions which will be answered at the end of the performance during the live Q&A. You can access the latest updates @TateLive using #BMWTateLive, Tate Facebook or Tate Google+.

English Forecast performed by
Ariane Barnes
Walles Hamonde
Sakuntala Ramanee
Chris Rochester

Made with the kind input and the voices of visitors and staff members of Tate Modern; Jennifer Jenkins, University of Southampton (Center for Global Englishes); Barbara Seidlhofer, University of Vienna (V.O.I.C.E.); Katherine Brisley Sedon and James Corcoran, University of Toronto; Adnan Mahmutovic, Stockholm University; Marinel Gerritsen, Radboud University Nijmegen; Rumiko Hagiwara, Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Mikhail Karikis, Igor Sevcuk, Roi Alter, Angela Serino, Yosuke Amemiya, Alissa Shnaider, Christina Li and Styrmir Gudmondsson.

Special thanks to Philip Shaw, Stockholm University, the IASPIS program Stockholm, Joanna Przedlacka, Victor Martens, Tamara Kuselman, Sefer Memisoglu, Rakesh Parangath, Annika Schwarzlose, Georgi Milev, Dylan Glyn Jones, Gabriel Omran, Amelie Onzon, Diego Tonus and Nadya Goldberg.

BMW Tate Live is curated by Catherine Wood, Curator, Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate and Capucine Perrot, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern.