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It’s 1957 and the press release still isn’t written[1] An actress dressed in black overalls stands on a theatrically lit soapbox, one hand pressed to her forehead as she reads from a script Her monologue is abstracted from Hannah Arendt’s seminal text The Human Condition collapsed into manifesto speech, into melodramatic rhetoric visually punctuated by Pantomime style placards The actress’s speech becomes increasingly fraught with anxiety as she frenetically occupies six oratory positions across the stage To act, in its most general sense, means to take initiative, to begin, to set something into motion; yet here this performative promise is deliberately withheld The actress reaches the end of her script drowned out by sound Dissatisfied with her rehearsal, she picks up a broom, silently sweeps the stage floor, and puts on her coat and leaves Accompanied by a live band, the performance is loud and exaggerated, a theatrical staging of the tension between solo performance and collectivity that is ultimately entirely anti-climatic Despite the actress’s best efforts, the performance deliberately fails to arrive First realised at the ICA in March this year this work entitled Footnote 5: A Six Stage Manifesto on Action (2012) forms the fifth live installment of Collapsing in Parts (2012),a long-term project devised by the London-based artist Cally Spooner Since graduating with an MFA from Goldsmiths in 2008, Spooner has been gaining increasing recognition for her unique examination of performance, which she articulates through the twin registers of the textual and the live Her work has been presented across a wide range of platforms including solo exhibitions in London, Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin; alongside readings as part of Serpentine Gallery’s prestigious Memory Marathon; and a Merleau Ponty radio play titled Indirect Language realised in multiple locations including the virtual art centre Resonance FM Spooner’s practice typically develops from personal research Through a process of extensive reading and collecting of images, she creates narratives and scripts that she then develops into live works In these live pieces, which have been variously conceived as performance lectures, plays, and a full-length feature film