About the Book

“This generously kaleidoscopic offering invites readers to think through the labor of laundry via an impressive array of modes in an interactive collage of perspectives, histories, and bodies.”—Christopher Harris, filmmaker

Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry is a collection of writings and images from a performance and film set within a neighborhood laundromat, a microcosm of service work within our urban reality. With a focus on the people who are paid to wash and fold, Hand Book explores the convergence of dirt, stains, money, identity, and desire. Informed by both theory and history, filmmaker-poet Lynne Sachs and playwright Lizzie Olesker construct a model for making a site-specific work incorporating both live performance and film. From conversations with workers in laundromats around New York City, they develop a play that magnifies forms of manual labor that often go unrecognized. The core of Hand Book is Sachs and Olesker’s hybrid play-script which grew out of documentary material they collected in New York City over several years. Within this theatrical construct, the actors themselves navigate the dynamic between their laundry worker characters and who they are in their own lives. Images also engage with text to create an evocative graphic experience. Turning a page becomes an interactive, quasi-cinematic encounter, calling to mind the intimacy of touching other people’s clothes, almost like a second skin, the textural care for things kept close to the body.

Hand Book includes essays, interviews, memoirs, and poetry that look at the relationship between art and social engagement. Observation, historical research, and fiction intersect, creating a patchwork of “what is” with a speculative, imagined “what was.” Historian and author Tera Hunter speaks to the importance of The Washing Society, a group of 3,000 Black women laundry workers who organized in Atlanta in 1881 for better pay and working conditions. Feminist historian Silvia Federici engages in a conversation about the meaning of reproductive labor and its relationship to laundry. Two leaders of a grassroots organization share their experience of immigration and activism. A dancer creates a gestural map of her choreography. An actor deconstructs the charged significance of her Civil War-era costume.

Ultimately, Hand Book: A Manual on Performance, Process, and the Labor of Laundry presents an illuminating dialogue between the documentary arts, feminism, film, immigration, labor history, and theater. Throughout, a playwright and filmmaker contemplate how art-making can alter our understanding of the social structures of city life.

“The best of art manifests an ordinary devotion to experiences that become extraordinary given enough care and attention, or an extraordinary devotion to conveying the genuine depth of what passes for the ordinary. Here it is both, at once.” —Paul Chan, artist and publisher

Sachs and Olesker’s short documentary film The Washing Society will be available via QR code upon release of the book.

About the Authors

Lizzie Olesker has been making theater and performance in New York City for several decades, reflecting on the politics and poetry of everyday experience. Her plays and solo performances exploring domestic work, personal memory, and quotidian gestures have been developed and presented in NYC at The Public, Cherry Lane Theatre, Clubbed Thumb, Dixon Place, New Georges, and the Ohio Theater. As an actor, she’s worked with The Talking Band, appearing at La Mama and on an international tour. Published in The Brooklyn Rail and by Ice Floe Press, Olesker received support from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Dramatists Guild. Olesker teaches at The New School and New York University where she’s active with her adjunct faculty union.

Lynne Sachs is a filmmaker and poet. Her early works on celluloid took a feminist approach to images and writing—a commitment which has grounded her ever since. With each project, Sachs investigates the connections between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself. Embracing archives, found images, letters, and journals, her work pursues a critical journey through reality and memory. In films such as The House of Science, Which Way Is East, Your Day Is My Night, and Film About a Father Who, Sachs uses hybrid form and collaboration, incorporating documentary, performance, and collage. Many of her films explore the relationship between personal observations and collective historical experience. She often addresses the challenge of translation—from one language to another or from spoken work to image. These tensions are investigated in five essay films that took her to sites affected by war, where she looked at the space between a community’s memory and her own perceptions. Retrospectives of Sachs’s films have been presented at festivals in Argentina, China, Costa Rica, Cuba, Germany, Ireland, South Korea, the UK, and at NYC’s Museum of the Moving Image. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her collection Year by Year Poems. Sachs received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Arts and lives in Brooklyn.

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