Quaranzines: Self-Producing Meets Self-Publishing
By Sarah Chien
After the cancellations came the Zooms, and after the Zooms, the dance films. I browsed exquisite corps videos while baking bread, and, scrolled past Instagram live conversations while I gardened. There was a lot of talk about new platforms, but each of these virtual stages left me with a feeling that something was missing. Pre-pandemic, my work was usually self-produced in intimate spaces with a DIY aesthetic. I produced rooftop performance parties at my apartment and was starting to tour a solo show on the fringe circuit where I served the audience homemade cookies. Stemming from my love of craft, intimate audience connections and DIY aesthetics, the “new performance platform” that has most excited me is the zine.
I started writing my zine, How to Build a Dance Floor, out of a mix of practicality and grief. I wanted to empower other artists to build dance floors like the one I had built on my roof, and I needed a way to share that space while public events were closed. I could have simply created a Google doc. Instead I found myself swept into the multimedia potential of the craft: learning to sketch realistic images of carpentry tools, expanding upon my graphic design skills to lay out pages, and mining my archive of rooftop photoshoots to create a small book!
Zines themselves are nothing new - there’s a long tradition of zine-making in activist, punk and feminist circles. But I was interested to observe the rise of “quaranzines,” created by performers who, like me, were confronting the restrictions of the pandemic by turning from stage to page. As I dove deeper into self-publishing, I began reaching out to other performers to understand how creating zines has become a part of their practice.
For collective Sydnie L. Mosley Dances, zine-making was about crafting community care. “As a collective, we decided we did not want to create virtual performances. With this in mind, we discussed the importance of caring for ourselves and being cared for in community during a pandemic. Creating homemade care packages, finalized in the form of a zine, felt like our best way of doing this.” Their zine, rich with recipes, poems and collaged images that stimulate the five senses, “was snail-mailed to supporters, handed to neighbors, gifted to grandmas especially elders in their community.” Cumulatively the 8-member collective made forty zines, each one-of-a-kind.
Some artists are using their zines as an element of a larger work. SLM’s distinctly handmade zines live on a multimedia webpage that includes a podcast and a virtual altar. When artist Rebecca Fitton presented re______ in September, she mailed audience members a zine package that they “unboxed” together at the end of a virtual performance event. We leafed through its ten pages and shared reactions with each other in the Zoom chat. Said Fitton, who does not plan to publish the zine outside of its 120 copy run, “The zine was a crucial aspect of the live performance, one cannot exist without the other!”
Audience members reading the zine together. Fitton is pictured hosting the event in the second square on the top row.
Zines also offer a new space for collaboration. Both Fitton and Brooklyn independent theater, Triskelion Arts, also used their zines to highlight the work of other artists, curating contributors almost like a mixed-bill. Says Hannah Wendel of Triskelion, “...the flexibility of the Zine allowed artists to create a little nook where they could continue to tell their stories and creatively connect in this new digital world.” Triskelion’s zine is completely digital, and they’ve produced five editions, bringing in guest curators much like they would for the festivals that they produced pre-pandemic.
Circus performer Peter Mercury writes that he was drawn to zine making “as a reaction to the swift internet-ification of everything in 2020. I realized the work I do as a live performer does not translate easily to a digital, quarantined world.” Mercury took inspiration from zines he found in witch shops and created Bug Out Bag Companion Guide: An Optimistic and Slightly Mystical Guide to Surviving the Apocalypse. Of the artists I spoke to, Mercury’s is perhaps the closest to the original concept of zine in terms of production: pages are formed by physically cutting and glueing, then photocopied and stapled by hand. Despite the manual production, Mercury’s zine has already reached more than 300 people, and they are planning to continue as a quarterly publication.
Images of Mercury X Zine’s first edition
Dance artist and Franklin Method educator Shannon Murphy is using her forthcoming zine The Efforts of Moving Through Together to document her own and her collaborators’ artistic practices. Murphy has committed to six volumes distributed ever other month throughout 2021 with each issue exploring metaphors of digestive organs. “I’ve been thinking of my zines as asynchronous performances,” says Murphy. “They contain images, and links to video, songs and stories via QR codes. So if you’d like you can read with a soundtrack, listen to conversations we had about practice, or take the ideas and let them expand off the pages into a movement practice. For me it’s getting used to the idea that I won’t know when these zines get activated. In performances I feel a much more immediate call and response...The zine is created and sent off… and I trust that there will be an exchange here too, but just with a really long interval. “
After 8 months, I’m awaiting the printer’s delivery of my own zine, which at fifty pages perfect-bound, has really become a book inspired by the style of zine. But the openness of the form is one of the reasons many of us have turned to zine-making. The works chronicled here are sold and gifted, single run or a series, photo-copied or professionally printed, laid out with InDesign and Photoshop or with paper and glue. I’m reminded of Fringe shows: how each artist would roll up to tech with a suitcase full of strange items and transform a raw space into their own world. At a Fringe Festival, audiences consume all types of performance in one night. Personally I’m looking forward to reading, listening and learning from more zines created by performers as well as poets, illustrators, authors, and activists. Mail me your next “show!”
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Sarah Chien is a Brooklyn-based dance artist who creates improvised works with collaborators from dance, music, circus and theatre. She is also a member of ∞therside collective.
Instagram: @dancepostcard
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A handful of zine resources I’ve enjoyed:
About Zines
- https://zines.barnard.edu
- https://westportlibrary.libguides.com/zines
- https://new.booklyn.org/programs/booklyn-education-manual/
Printers
- Fireball printing (Philadelphia): artist-run indie print shop, pretty affordable. Min 25 copy run, which makes it easy to do a low risk project!
- Radix (Brooklyn): union shop, produces very professional quality work, especially beautiful poetry chapbooks with letterpress covers.
- https://www.printingcenterusa.com: very affordable printshop in Montana that ships nationwide, recommended by a friend.
- Blurb.com (tech biz): does print-on-demand, which means you can upload your book, and then they print and send when someone orders a copy. Higher per unit cost, but less upfront risk.
If you need an editor, may I recommend Lily Kind, who edited mine and whose own incredible zine, How to Make Dance in America, inspired mine!
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Terrific!
Posted by: Lynn & Joe | 04/06/2021 at 08:50 AM