The collaborative duo from Industry of the Ordinary, Adam Brooks and Mat Wilson, in keeping with their ongoing series of performances involving interaction with melting ice, presented “If you’ve got a blacklist, I want to be on it” (title pulled from the lyrics of Billy Bragg’s 1988 anthem “Waiting for the Great Leap Forward”) with cellist Katinka Kleijn, performers Luci Lei and Jay Wolke, and sound designer Dan Dehaan. The performance, at the Arts Club of Chicago, took place at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, just before lockdown had been imposed.

The work was an exploration of group think, symbology, endurance, and privacy vs. collectivity. Brooks and Wilson, wearing tuxedos, lay prone on the floor of the club’s gallery with heavy blocks of ice sculpted into the shape of a circle with either an X or a cross through it (depending on the orientation) on their backs for 2 hours, testing their bodies and focusing their minds on the accompanying activity. Kleijn performed a deeply inquisitive scripted improvisation with live processing of her amplified sounds. She incorporated waterproof microphones scraped across the blocks of ice on her collaborator’s backs, inviting the audience to don headphones and explore the sounds of the hydrophones themselves.

Between each use, Lei carefully and diligently wiped down the headphones with an antibacterial cloth in deference to the rising pandemic, unaware of the imminent shut-down. As ice melted down the backs of Wilson and Brooks, Wolke, wearing a janitorial uniform, mopped around the bodies of the two prone performers.

Brooks and Wilson habitually expose and examine implied contracts in their work, preferring to avoid any didactic text explaining the performance and leave the attendees to set the tone and level of interaction. Throughout the two hours of “If you’ve got a blacklist…,” those in attendance looked to one another and to their understood conventions of performance to craft a collaborative environment for shared experience.