To download the free PDF, click here.

For more information, please visit the MCA website to learn about the manual and past virtual events.

A Letter from the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago:

Dear Participant,

Thank you for joining this Last Audience. Conceived in 2018 by artist and choreographer Yanira Castro alongside members of her interdisciplinary collaborative group, a canary torsi, this project was originally constructed as a live, interactive performance and was composed of a series of unique scores that were enacted with and by each participating audience.

The endeavor you are about to engage in is a reinvention of that work, written as manuals for the creation of your own at-home theater. Each manual is titled after a theme that draws on such topics as language, classical and contemporary notions of judgement, reckonings, and remembrance, and includes adaptations of the scores that were previously conducted live.

In addition to the manuals, two other essential items are included in the link above. The first is a poster that contains a more detailed introduction to the project. Notably, the poster includes an indispensable letter from Yanira, written to you, the participant, as an entrance into her thinking on the work. It also includes an “About the Manuals” section, written by the MCA’s Associate Curator for Performance and Public Practice Tara Aisha Willis. This text will guide you through the form and function of the books themselves. We encourage you to read the poster in its entirety before immersing yourself in the manual.

The second item is a recipe card. When performed live, Last Audience begins with a preshow meal, prepared by Yanira herself. Because we cannot gather and share in this food together, Yanira has provided the recipe for Arroz con gandules, a dish that is not only part of her Puerto Rican upbringing, but embodies many of the themes that are pertinent to this work: care, ritual, belonging, conflict.

Last Audience: a performance manual was made during the pandemic and the social and political upheavals of 2020. We hope that by bringing this experience to you, we’re able to transcend the literal and metaphorical boundaries of our moment and build a new kind of performance together—as collaborators, artists, and coconspirators—and in doing so rejoin in the intimacy, belonging, and ecstatic joy of community. Once you are finished with any of the scores, we invite you to “Archive Your Performance” on this site in the Archive menu or by using #LastAudience on social media. Instructions on how to do so are included on the last page of each manual.

Let’s assemble.