A series of questions by Silvia Bottiroli and Low Kee Hong

Why and what has led us to where we are now? Our world is in a state of crisis — a crisis of our generation, of our time, and of our own doing. In our day-to-day, we have to face the many oppressions brought about by these many crises — within ourselves, in our domestic situation, our national condition, international geopolitical and global ecological malaise. We are dealing with a broken world that seems almost beyond repair. What then does the future hold? Is there a future to behold?

In the last two years, we have lived through, and are still reeling from, many difficult moments in many cities around the world. Right now, we are confronting a reality that we thought unimaginable, that is shocking to us, that has required us to rethink and abandon the many assumptions we have about the structures and institutions that have such deep implications to our everyday lives. And so, where do we go from here?

For the arts and for theatre, it is not time to continue working as usual, in ways that have definitely proven their unsustainability. However, it is also not time to give up, but instead to rethink, reshape, find, or invent other forms and ways to continue. How can we then rehearse practices of life, of collaboration, of work, and of art that can operate despite the current state of things? How can we exercise to exist and produce meanings, regardless of all contingencies and limitations? How can we keep insisting?

What if the theatre is just a space of rehearsal, a space to rehearse a world to come? What if we do not have an image yet of what that world will look like? What if we can only rehearse it together, across and beyond our differences? What does the specific apparatus of the theatre have to offer to us in this rehearsal?

What if we define values, principles, and methodologies, resisting the pressure to define outcomes? What if we focus on what drives us and on how we want to live and work together, but leave the imagination open to the concrete shapes our collaboration can take? Shall we end up producing different art forms and curatorial concepts than those we are already producing? And different with respect to what exactly? What could be the value of this difference?

And how can we make time, when there is no time? How can we make focus, within furious circumstances? What words do we need?

How can we propose a new lexicon, re-appropriate and re-signify existing words, translate them into numerous languages, invite others to jump in the process, use and misuse these words, make other sentences with them?

If we take co-creation and co-authorship seriously, as constitutive components of how we live and work, what does the horizon of our making become? What if, in other words, it is not about us, not about our project, but rather about the conditions it provides for something and for some other things to happen? What if, all we aim to produce are feedback loops?

But also, what if we could collectively float above the current storm?