ANNE YONCHA

Vice Versa: rock-paper-scissors

Green Space Studio, Long Island City NY, May 2025

An interdisciplinary performance conceived, rehearsed, and performed over 48 hours. Organized by Vice Versa Collective, featuring collaborators Daniel Townsend, Brendan Sweeney, Elena Collins, Valerie Green, Sarah Albee, + Bri Barton

rock-paper-scissors combined live music, graphic notation, performance painting, movement, textile, and projection to explore themes of play, zero-sum gaming, + geography and settlement patterns of Long Island City. Photos from the performance and rehearsal process are below:

Anne’s RPS verbs:

Verbs vocalized and performed linking rock-paper-scissors to geology to rock, human settlement patterns to paper, and sudden shifts and rifts to scissors (Thinking of Richard Serra’s verbs: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/152793):

RockPaperScissors
Layer
Impact
Crush
Weight
Compress
Deposit
Erode
Underneath
Shift
Sand
Slide
Slip
Fault
Converge
Pack
Sustain
Build up
Hide
Accumulate
Aggregate
Metamorphose
Ground
Archive
Metabolize
Migrate		Subsume
Cover
Flex
Ply
Interweave
Connect
Paper over, cover up
Veneer
Liminal
Skin
Costume
Hide
Contact
Crumple
Fold
Flatten
Tangle
Mesh
Warp
Wrap
Plane
Coat
Obscure
Bend (collapse of distance)
Sheet
Roll		Slice
Separate
Reveal
Rupture
Break
Cut
Sever
Open
Shock
Oppose
Insert
Hybridize
Jump
Copy
Integration / manipulation
Variation, novelty
Transfer
Conjugate
Collage
Combine
Detach
Pludk
Resurrect
Salvage
Rewind
Revive
Fundamental change
Mutate
Shuttle
Interrupt
Swap orientation
Synthesize
Gather
Can have a center and edge
Can make an impression
Subsurface
Alchemy
Combo of precious and dirt
 
“to believe in something that’s not always visible” – painter Candida Alvarez		Margins
Two sided
Partial view point
Across layers and lines
Planar
Both plastic and brittle
Cartesian and warped
Gridded and wrapped
Surface for translation, transcription
Substrate for creation of illusion, sharing of information

Place to collect, organize
Has a center and an edge
Can take an impression		Impact
Directionality
Schism
Rift
Sudden action
Dichotomy
The following ideas from New Geologic Epoch book:
 
Richard Brown:
Kinetic and stable; Locked, overt energy in matter; Overt, free energy of the sun; Slow
 
Gypson commons:
Cells, tissues, soils, shadow places
 
Kellie Bornhoft:
Overlapping pockets, bleeding edges
 
Vogel:
Mountain sheds its skin
“once-giant self”
 
Dispersion and reunion
Rock as reactionary,
Rock as moving with agency
 
K Yusoff:
Human as “strata to come”; Waiting materialism; Agency of land
 
Monika Tobel: Mineral ancestry
 
Sue Spaid: Rocks as life enhancing and considered inert; Rocks respond to and generate energy; Like cell division, rocks break into bits and mineral growth enlarges over time; Feedback between living and nonliving		“Compose and comprehend anew” (from Synthetic)

Undermine distinctions

Trouble categories

Queer

Lack of totality
Plurality
“constant fragment”,

Commingling
“yank out of time”
 
“overwhelming human desire to make categories while making things that override those categories” – Kent Redford
 
 
 
Cut to reassemble
Cut to paste
Cut to graft
Donor and recipient
Discontinuity
Admixture
Messiness
Promiscuous
Heterogeneity
Noise, variety
Construction and destruction
 
 
Emily Budd: outmoded world, nonhistorical past, impossible progression, failed immortality

The game:

Simultaneity

Sudden reveal

Choice

Competition

Dialogue, need 2, cohabiting

Only 2, limited dialogue, limited toolkit

Redundancy

Negotiation of territories

Cooperation

Uncertainty, randomness, arbitrariness? But human psychology is not random

Arbitration

Infinite loops

Behaviors that occur more often than chance would dictate

“your hand begins in the form of rock and it is easiest to keep it that way”

Player bias against streaks

Human readability and poker faces

“a game of player unpredictability”

signals vs noise, reading each other

Further reading: