The Public against Capital

A dialogue with my frequent collaborator Sonja Hornung, written in response to a ticketed conversation about on the topic "Art in the Public Sphere" at HAU, Berlin, has been published over at ArtSlant, and is available here.

This is an increasingly urgent conversation, as capital becomes more coercive and invisible in its strategies, and is being fought with protest and dialogue - I fear, sometimes, to little effect.

#1000thLIVE, or The Ethics of the Invisible Hand

Last night I was privy to parts of Forced Entertainment’s 14-year old piece And on the Thousandth Night... via livestream from Lisbon, Portugal.

I want to say something that I feel was overlooked – it was not an exercise in storytelling, but in forgetting. Forget that there is anything but this stage, these people, princesses and so on. Forget that you have to think. Forget that there is anything but the theatre.

The work is a line of people wearing crowns and telling stories. Someone can interrupt at any point and say “Stop!” and then continue their own story. It hurts to point out that this monumental work is really just a theatre game. It’s played in rehearsal rooms everywhere - just not for 6 hours. The difference: every now and again an invisible hand intervened and curated specific moments and stories that were, as if by magic, allowed more air time than what was afforded others. These moments were inevitably shocking, sometimes violent, and interrupted the flow of English banter and piss-taking that characterised the rest of the dialogue. So one moment we were in an enchanted forest where no-one could move for about 20 minutes of re-starting, and then suddenly, we were a plane dropping a long, slow bomb.

The strength of the work relies almost entirely on getting these curated moments to drop in a way that was meaningful, and not forgotten by the time the browser is refreshed. At its worst, the effect is like reading media – you get the fluffy kittens and bunny rabbits, and then a flash of hyper-authentic catastrophe sometimes on the same page, sometimes the same header. At its best, it operated as a metaphor for such – for the violence of contemporary narration.

Theatre should not talk about Climate Change

My article about theatre and climate change has been published over at A Younger Theatre and can be viewed here.

Written in a haze of desperate rehearsal, it's not my best work, but I still think the point is worth making. Dialogue is only helpful if it is helpful. Silence - protest - must be an option.

"Hiatus"

Stating the obvious - I am on a break from criticism again.

I am producing this work. It has been trouble, but will be worth it I'm sure.

Meanwhile, Theatre Garmyder of Ukraine appears to be still on course to be shut down on March 16, despite the uncertain political future at the moment. I will announce this to the audience after the performance in London on Tuesday.

In the meantime I once again express solidarity for these artists, who are sadly being punished for fulfilling their social function.

When the government closes your theatre

In September 2013, I visited Festival of the Wandering Hanger in Lutsk, Ukraine. The theatre is now being shut down.

What I saw there changed me as a theatre artist. For the first time, I was present at a festival that did not seem to be just there for the benefit of profit-raising and CV building. I saw something very simple, but that seems to be kind of lost now - an authentic collective energy around art.

What stunned me the most was that this festival seemed to have the full support of the local council - to the extent that they had co-operated with the organisers, local amateur theatre group GaRmYdEr, to stage the visiting plays in various locations in the city. So Garmyder took theatre to a local hardware superstore, the underground ruins of a church within the walls of Lutsk Castle, and an abandoned ex-Soviet nightclub.

Like the rest of Ukraine, Garmyder have been busy lately. On the 21st of November 2013, the Euromaidan Protests began. The protests began in response to President Viktor Yanukovych suddenly withdrawing from Free Trade discussions between Ukraine and the EU. This looked rightly suspicious to many Ukrainians, as just two months earlier Russia had responded with extreme rhetoric to the advancement of Ukraine's participation in the talks, and the history of Ukraine is one littered with exploitation at the hands of its big neighbour to the East and, more recently, European invitations which carry optimism and hope.

Garmyder acted as artists should in that scenario. They produced a two-night performance 'AU!, said to millions' in response to November 30's early morning police raid, which took as its source material the social media messages of the protestors, just eleven days after the protests began.

Two months later, the response from the local government of Lutsk was to call in the head of Garmyder, Ruslana Porytska, and tell her that her position was no longer tenable as of March 16th, 2014. When asked about the future of the theatre, the council gave the response that the theatre could not continue and would be forced out of its current home in the House of Culture. When asked the reason for this, she was told that the theatre had failed to tour to local towns of the surrounding region.

To the many volunteers, workers, and artists at Garmyder, it is very clear that this is not the reason.

On Hiatus

I'm putting theaterstuck on short hiatus while I undertake a project in Kosovo next week. More publication should follow shortly.

Meanwhile, an acknowledgement from me about the Ukrainian protests is necessary. My performances in the theme of 'protest' in the Wandering Hanger festival in Lutsk seem strangely pertinent now. Together with the performances I wrote about and the subsequent workshops in Kiev, these reinforced for me the willing and spirited nature of Ukrainian people, especially younger people but only reflected in the nuggety faces of the babushkas, clear and constantly manifested.

It would be nice for prosperous Western countries if events in Ukraine were driven by a kind of EU worship - but the reality is, this is a response to the scary prospect of Russian rule, which has once again raised its head.

Ukraine does not need Russia or the EU for support - but it certainly needs them to stop their conflicts, which damage countries like Ukraine, Belarus and Georgia.

The Ukrainian people deserve better than to be used as pawns for jostling regional political influence.

I wish those protesting a productive resistance.

Schwarz Tragen (Wearing Black)

Visibility suggests that we can solve societal problems by exposing and publicising them. The concept is from sociology, touted by media theorists such as John Thompson, and is maybe the most widely-employed (and ironically under-discussed) tactic for problem-solving of perceived social issues in the first world. It holds a privileged place over and above, for example, direct political action, which is perceived as confrontational, aggressive, and potentially destructive. This is mainly to do with its ability to initiate change without widespread disruption. Visibility maintains the social order whilst suggesting a slight adjustment - not enough to overthrow government, but nevertheless enough to generate tiny instability necessary for change. The approach is that the system is capable of self-correcting through a mechanism involving public and private dialogues and the 'fourth estate', the media, which is responsible for selecting, through the editing process, dialogues that will advance society. This idea has been in place since the mid 20th century with Habermas’ ‘Public Sphere’ and his demarcation of a shift from a “representational” culture to one of Öffentlichkeit, but also predates him with much theory related to media systems, most of which discuss the nature of visibility in some form or another. Exposure is, after all, a key role of the media.

Its adoption as a key method of problem-solving today is problematic. If one were cynical, one might suggest that merely making a problem visible today, in an environment of 'crisis proliferation', is not enough to cause any kind of meaningful change. With this proliferation occurring hand-in-hand with an overwhelming explosion of image culture - lives exposed on Facebook, invasions of privacy by the NSA among many others, and an endless stream of well-meaning causes flooding your life... visibility becomes rather a means, this imaginary cynic would suggest, to give the appearance of progress without ever having to undergo any actual authentic transformation on the part of the individual. In street-level terms, just because I walk past a beggar every day, doesn't necessarily mean, when my attention is finally drawn to their existence, that I will act on it, either personally or at a ballot box. The main point about visibility seems to be that it is totally not working. See all those images of melting ice in the newspaper? Not exactly compelling anyone to act, are they?