Anyone can do it (2006)
For six unprepaired playersNo reason to (2006)
Calefax & guests, Muziekgebouw aan 't IJ
Photos: Eric van Nieuwland
'Anyone can do it' is a simple, amusing, appearingly complex, intellectual, exclusive and indispensable performance-piece inspired by the Fluxus Manifest (1965) by Georges Maciunas:
"Fluxmanifesto on fluxamusement – vaudeville – art? To establish artist's nonprofessional, nonparasitic, nonelite status in society, he must demonstrate own dispensability, he must demonstrate selfsufficiency of the audience, he must demonstrate that anything can substitute art and anyone can do it. Therefore this substitute art-amusement must be simple, amusing, concerned with insignificances, have no commodity or institutional value. It must be unlimited, obtainable by all and eventually produced by all. The artist doing art meanwhile, to justify his income, must demonstrate that only he can do art, art therefore must appear to be complex, intellectual, exclusive, indispensable, inspired. To raise its commodity value it is made to be rare, limited in quantity and therefore accessible not to the masses but to the social elite."
Software: Apple Keynote
Duration: ± 12 minutes
First performance: 28 oktober 2006 in the LandesMuseum in Münster, Germany by the Dutch Vocal Laboratory and KlangZeit-Ensemble
Made for: Festival KlangZeit (DE) and Festival November Music (NL)
Commissioned by: Fonds voor de Scheppende Toonkunst
Review: "The pinnacle of playing with silence, elaborate constructions and theatrical drama was Mayke Nas' 'Anyone Can Do It'. A hilarious and surrealistic stage play in which selected concert goers are presented with a whole series of crazy instructions: from buckling the knees to a jubilant dance."
(Mark van de Voort, Brabants Dagblad, 20 september 2011)
"Even the artmovement Fluxus that has been counted dead for 40 years, with its happening-like concerts, proved itself amazingly vibrant: the Dutch artist Mayke Nas had six persons react to instructions from two monitors on stage during the first performance of "Anyone can do it". They drummed their fingers, stamped their feet. The rythms that came into existence this way lived by the spontaneity of the protagonists."
(Heiko Ostendorf in Die TagesZeitung, 30 oktober 2006)