BMW Tate Live: Performance Room – Cally Spooner He's in a Great Place! (A film trailer for And You Were Wonderful, On Stage)

A second chance to watch Cally Spooner’s performance of He’s in a Great Place! (A film trailer for And You Were Wonderful, On Stage) captured live on Thursday 27 February 2014 at Tate Modern

Following her live musical at Tate Britain, And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, the second part of Cally Spooner’s BMW Tate Live commission transforms the musical into an extended trailer for a future film that doesn’t exist yet.

Part promise that something new will arrive, and mostly a sketch as to what this could be, Spooner’s Performance Room production features the gestures of public figures who stumbled at a moment of liveness, a mezzo-soprano narcissist channelling public disappointment via YouTube comments, a lip-synching employee and a gossiping, absent Chorus Line.

The performance endeavours to explore the ‘making technical’ of the live; shifting the musical into a mediated, digital space, and using the web-streamed Performance Room to move between the live and the pre-recorded without clear indication of the status of either.

The performance is followed by a live Q&A for which you are invited to tweet your questions @TateLive #bmwtatelive.

And You Were Wonderful, On Stage is evolving and itinerant, with musical composition by Peter Joslyn devised with Rhiannon Drake, Helen Hart, Jenny Minton, Piya Malik, Rebecca Thorn and Cloe Turpin; costumes by Malene List Thomsen; choreography by Adam Weinert; and a growing cast of performers.

Cally Spooner lives and works in London. Using theory, philosophers, current affairs and pop cultural figures as alibis to help her write, and casts of arguing characters to help her perform, Spooner produces plotless novellas, disjunctive theatre plays, looping monologues and musical arrangements to stage the movement and behaviour of speech. Recent work has explored how high performance economies have affected speaking as a live, undetermined event. Her work includes writing, film, live performance, and broadcasting. Spooner’s productions have been presented at Performa 13, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunsthal Charlottenburg, Copenhagen; KW Institute, Berlin; Wysing Art Centre, UK; Jeu De Paume, Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London. Cally Spooner is a recipient of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Awards for Artists 2013.

Audiences are invited to 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 or curator 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+.

'He’s in a Great Place!' (A film trailer for And You Were Wonderful, On Stage)
Written and directed by Cally Spooner

Opera Singer 
Veronika Benning

Dancers
Sonia Garcia, Lisa Miramond, Zoé Courel

Chorus Line
Rhiannon Drake, Helen Hart, Jenny Minton, Piya Malik, Rebecca Thorn, Chloé Turpin, Sonia Garcia, Lisa Miramond, Zoe Courel; with Amina Abbas-Nazari, Nikki Akinjinmi, Lisa Angharad, Clare Birkett, Rebecca Blake, Mela Boev, Natalie Galpern, Chloe Jane Graham, Helen Hart, Levi Heaton, Heidi Heidelberg, Sue Hope, Jaspreet Kaur, Sarah Kent, Sarah Kershaw, Rachel Middle, Jenny Moore, Rose O’Gallivan, Nicola Singh, Aleksandra Skocz.

Featuring
Laura McLean-Ferris

Original music composition by Peter Joslyn

Devised with Rhiannon Drake, Helen Hart, Jenny Minton, Piya Malik, Rebecca Thorn and Chloé Turpin

Choreography by Adam Weinert

Costumes
Malene List Thomsen

Stage set
Giles Round

Production assistance
Edd Hobbs

With thanks to Fondation d’entreprise Galeries Lafayette, Paris

Kunstverein Munich.

And You Were Wonderful, On Stage was commissioned by and developed in collaboration with: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Performa 13, New York; and Tate Modern, London through an ongoing conversation with Annie Godfrey Larmon.

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

BMW Tate Live is a partnership between BMW and Tate, which focuses on performance, interdisciplinary art and curating digital space.