Performance
Samples
Dead Men Don’t Bite
From Buried Treasure Island
SFSU Poetry Center, 2015
David Buuck sings his pirate song, “Dead Men Don’t Bite,” from his work “Buried Treasure Island: a detour of the future,” featured in Site Cite City (Futurepoem, 2015), at The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, October 22, 2015. The full program includes a series of projected images narrated by Buuck, as part of his reading, along with a reading by Tonya Foster, followed by the two poets conversing and responding to questions from the audience.
So Much Depends
Floor, 2013
Christian Hawkey invited a number of writers worldwide to participate in an experiment based on Georges Perec’s An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (trans. Marc Lowenthal, Wakefield Press, 2010, original French publication 1975). Over three days in October 1974, Perec sat in Place Saint-Supice, recording ‘everything’ he saw, in an attempt to capture what he called the “infraordinary” — “what happens when nothing happens.” So, over the same three days in October, less than a week before the one-year anniversary of Occupy Oakland, I made four visits to Oscar Grant Plaza, the location of the Occupy Oakland camps, General Assemblies, and many related actions.
We Are All Sound
Small Press Traffic, 2012
Small Press Traffic hosted readings by CA Conrad, David Buuck, and Eileen Myles at ATA. The readings were followed by a Q&A.
Review by Thom Donovan of New York version
Crystal Nexus
2011
Performance series with the prompt (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals by CAConrad
Preparing to Have an Emotion
2011
Jenkins Johnson Gallery, NY
At Bath House
Improvised performance at Jenkins Johnson Gallery’s T_XT_RT show, NY, 2 June 11. video by Tom Comitta
Converted Storefront
Oakland, 2010
Full text: ON: Contemporary Practice, 2011
I’ve been working on a review of cris cheek’s part: short life housing for Jacket, and given its overlays and cross-fades of performance texts, site-specific writing, audio transcriptions, re-edits and such, thought to investigate the possibilities of a performance-review, as a way of engaging the texts and practices and questions while putting myself in a (perhaps) similarly contingent space of site/time-based writing. About 3 hours before the event at Ariel Goldberg‘s Converted Storefront I recorded an improvised text while walking outside the building, folding in quotes from cheek’s book. I then played the (slightly mangled) recording during the event that night, transcribing as fast as I could onto overhead projector transparencies, followed by a (disordered) reading of the resulting compressed text.
Live transcription and reading of improvised talk
The News from Zimbabwe
Small Press Traffic Poets Theater Fest, 2009
Background: In 2007, Anthony Tongani and Silvanos Mudzvova were arrested while performing their satirical play “The Final Push.” They were taken to the Harare Central Police Station, locked up, and forced to re-enact their play again and again (over 48 hours) for the police and Central Intelligence Organization officers, who walked in and out, interrupting & arguing over what punishment the performers should get (for treason &/or inciting a riot). (The CIO are the secret-service – the notorious ZANU-PF ‘enforcers’…)
For our versioning, we attempted to re-stage a condensed version of these events.
The Jhoke
Oakland Art Gallery, 2008
I was asked to read at the Artifact Series at the Oakland Art Gallery in downtown Oakland by Melissa Benham & Brent Cunningham, on the 5th anniversary of “Shock and Awe”. I tied a length of rope between a lamppost and a bike rack outside the gallery (on the ‘plaza’ or alleyway), stringing the rope through and around my belt. Thus tethered to the line, I set the egg-timer to 18 minutes and began a series of ‘jokes,’ each improvised aloud while crawling the length of the line, carrying a plank of wood on my back on which I transcribed whatever I was saying/reading, which meant speaking/composing at the pace set by how fast I could handwrite on the table on my back while crawling.
The Treatment
Gallery Soto, Boston, 2007
I gave myself the task of writing for 12 hours straight, foregrounding the writing body in the space of the public gallery. I would only produce writing in the moment, coming out of the conditions in the space & duration of the event (i.e. no writing ‘about’ something else, or working on ‘projects’ or thinking of something & then writing it down, no pausing or breaks, etc). Materials were: notebook, pencils & charcoal, spray paint, tape, post-its, string, tickets, a digital recorder, water, one apple.
David Buuck 