No Collective (You Nakai, Kay Festa, Ai Chinen, Jay Barnacle, Earle Lipski, et al.) makes performances that explore the physical and metaphysical infrastructures of performance.
Since its inception circa 2008, members of No Collective have varied both in quantity (from none to sixty) and quality (from reluctant novices to devoted professionals) according to circumstances and demands.
The various forms of our output have included music(ians), dance(rs), theatre, haunted houses, nursery rhymes, and video. We have also released several publications including Concertos (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011), a play-script which describes and prescribes the process of preparation, execution, and documentation of a music concert in three-acts; or Sonnet for ‘Concertos No.4’ (National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, 2013), a score of a nursery rhyme whose lyrics are the necessary instructions for making a musical concert.
No Collective has been featured in Leonardo Music Journal (vol.24, 2014) for doing interesting things with technology. A brief self-portrayal of our activities forms part of an interview with You Nakai published in Perspectives of New Music (Winter, 2013). Detailed study of our performances have appeared in TDR (MIT Press), Brooklyn Rail, and Performing Arts Journal (MIT Press), among other outlets.
Curatorial projects include the first concerts of the Argentinian composer Ellen C. Covito in New York, Tokyo, and Berlin.
No Collective also runs the publishing project Already Not Yet which has released Ellen C. Covito: Works After Weather (2014), Museum of Unheard (of) Things (2015), Are We Here Yet? (2016), Matters of Act (A) (2016), and How Kids Explore the World (2021), among other literary oddities.