Oratory Services was a series of performances convened by Linus Bonduelle for Rib, Rotterdam, October-December 2020 as part of the programme Site & Situation.
Happening every Saturday at 4pm, the Oratory Services introduced new unamplified sounds into the neighbourhood of Rib, merging with the pre-existing ones such as the continuous bouncing of a ball against the fences of the basketball court or the sound of illegal firecrackers, sounds of home renovation. Each week the artists played in the playground with sonological as well as social phonetics of everyday human and animal utterances – and found their source in their body’s that called out. If anyone was actually listening remains to be seen, nevertheless the OS was open to inevitable feedback of its everyday crowd.
Each week, one of the participating artists would produce a score for action in the nieghbourhood, based on the previous week's performance. Participating artists were Tisa Neža Herlec, Ash Kilmartin, Bergur Thomas Anderson and Emmeli Person.
For my turn, 7 November 2020, I wrote a long list of 6-syllable lines, partly responding to the previous performance, to be sung on the playground in a manner that would be easily copied or added to. Breugel's painting 'Children's Games' (1560) was a reference. The question was whether kids on the playground would join in. They did.
Documentation of Linus performing the script is by Lili Huston-Herterich.