It was clear from the beginning that the No Wave Performance Task Force is a name that can frame any feminist, activist performance that women construct with the intention of investigating new modes by which we can challenge structures that the devalue and demean the human component (performers) in our human-based fields (performance). Women have therefore started claiming it and exploring it as a platform. Ivy Castellanos, director of the IV Soldiers Gallery in Brooklyn, began a series of performance events called "Transformation," and defined the entire series as an exploration of the No Wave Performance Task Force. Every woman who performed became a part of the task force, if even only for the length of the performance. And through that way of framing the events, Ivy Castellanos transformed our arts events into experiences through which we could, in the very moment of performance, begin to shape our practices as a form of proactive feminism that, as described by Task Force member Esther Neff, is constructive and empowering rather than deconstructive and reactionary.

One of the most essential elements of the task force in inclusivity. That inclusivity isn't perfect, we don't know how to make it perfect. But the task force is here, as well, as an offering to women in performance to find common meeting grounds. Simply: We begin by engaging with one another, within this simple, as-of-yet amorphous framework of the taskforce itself, compiling our experiences and what we learn into that frame, and then discovering how our engagement then translates into our own practices, our own works, our own disciplines, our own ways of living as artists. The No Wave Performance Task Force is a shared space for women. It isn't about furthering the career of any particular artist, but it does exist as a way of doing so as a necessary grounds for mutual support. In the duality of cooperation and competition that exists in the artworld, The No Wave Performance Task Force exists as an element of the cooperation part of things.

So join us.

From the original Call to Action from Lindsey Drury:

Why does the No Wave Performance Task Force Exist?

1. We are working in a field that seems to exist outside the normal societal expectations of labor and compensation. If we do not begin to take action and imagine what might be appropriate parameters, we will fail to give ourselves any guidelines. Without self-induced guidelines, we leave it up to others to define our worth for us, which has historically meant that our worth reduces and our resources reflect that.

2. We work in a field in which the profiling of race, gender, hotness, age, you name it, is not only encouraged, it is considered an important part of our work, and provides numerous frames by which curators argue the social value of our work. Performance is therefore, for better or for worse, an incredibly discriminatory field. The identities we display, and those sussed out from us in interviews and reviews, determine how desirable we are to directors, curators, granting organizations, and audiences. In some way, we have to address this, and we have to figure out how to support (and how to challenge) one another within this context of production.

3. As we vie for institutional resources, we pit ourselves in competition with one another. What are the repercussions of this? On what basis do we cooperate? What are our ethical obligations to one another as we face a situation in which there are not enough resources for all of us, or even most of us, or really, even, some of us? In an economy that so values rarities, struggle, and exclusivity, how might inclusivity also operate?

This document will behave as a living document, and will be, from its inception, open to the continued discourses around ethics in performance processes. Though the task force will root the Bill of Rights in feminist standpoints, the document will be free to explode multi-directionally from there.

The task force is for women, women-kind, women-identified, partially female-identified, people who have vaginas, people who is some way, somehow, in some part of themselves, identify as female. We're not going to split hairs about it, but what we are looking for is people who feel they can share in female-hood in some way rather than empathize with female-hood. Call us matriarchs, whatever, the ethical demands of the performance field probably shouldn't be placed in the hands of its men. Let the Bill of Rights begin with a spectrum of women.

Why is this happening?

There is an immense diversity of ways in which all of you go about addressing ethics, and in most cases it stems directly from personal experiences. We've all had different struggles, but I do believe we're all grappling with interconnected systems of injustice, and that therefore though our activism is decentralized by the diversity of struggles we face, we can be united on the basis of a few simple principals. I believe that finding common ground will help us contextualize ourselves in relationship to each other.