The Reading Score invites ten readers to enact a dance of sitting, laying, and standing as prompted by their encounter with the word “being” in the essay Being Singular Plural by Jean-Luc Nancy. The dancers/readers’ shifting postures create a choreography of relationality and withness—two ideas explored in Nancy’s essay as central to what he calls our “being-in-common.” The changing positions, and the entirely personal pace at which they occur, literalizes the readers’ plurality, and enacts their common multiplicity. The readers’ shifting postures also function an analog signal of the invisible labor of reading and comprehension. The score takes as long as the readers/dancers need to complete Being Singular Plural in the hopes of exposing the singular labor of each reader in their encounter with "being."

2012