Cally Spooner presents the first BMW Tate Live commission of 2014. Entitled And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, the work will be a two-part commission beginning at Tate Britain on 21 January 2014. Staged on the new staircase of Tate Britain's rotunda, Spooner presents a live production of And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, a musical for an a-cappella Chorus Line. The production draws on the genre of Broadway to articulate a loss of live delivery of language, in contemporary life. Teetering between moments of comedy and tragedy, the production is structured as a series of prologues and overtures, calls and responses, expressed by the players of the chorus line, who ruminate on fallen heroes and dashed dreams. Narratives from current affairs, starring prominent figures who have stumbled at a moment of liveness, speech or authenticity appear episodically; Beyoncé's lip-synching at Obama's inauguration, or Lance Armstrong's doping scandal, become dramatic public moments of standardisation or mechanisation. As the production continues, their voices become infected by an emerging corporate and PR language, increasingly concerned by 'high performance' and algorithmic speak, reaching toward sameness, automation, and the self, before the musical reaches its climactic finale. For her second commission, this performance will be transformed, with new characters, material and online status, performed live to camera, on Thursday 27 February at 20.00 as part of the ongoing series BMW Tate Live: Performance Room. 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.--Tate website.

In five metacritical discussions, Spooner addresses the concept of "performance" as ingrained throughout society This volume collects the five essays on "performance" by British artist and writer Cally Spooner (born 1983), originally published in Moussemagazine. In each chapter, Spooner resists a doctrine of "performance" that creates a society stratified by how we act: whether economically, socially or digitally.