Theatre of the Everyday : Gloss : Imagined Theatres

Form	Themes	Histories	Politics	Philosophies	Experiments
	public everyday terror media collectivity surveillance private privacy witnessing power humanity chorus	event local	community capitalism visibility	cultural studies

The “ultimate performance” requires the agora, as it demands a democratic space in which every author is also every other person’s performer. The observer must be observable. The “ultimate performance” – to borrow from Immanuel Kant – is written “from the standpoint of everyone” – not privileging any one author.

We know that the agora still exists – without it, terror would have no force, as there would be no stage for its performance, no grey gestalt for its technicolour spectacle. Terror is a genre, its aesthetic of rupture curated through electronic means of distribution. (Terror’s bathetic cousin – the “flash mob” – is another proof for the agora’s currency, requiring/producing a similar gestalt.)

Though the agora still exists, it is populated very differently from how it was in previous decades. People still negotiate public spaces together – train stations, libraries, parks, markets; as well as privately-owned and controlled shared spaces – shopping malls, sporting grounds. Sometimes we congregate, though more frequently we aggregate, as different causes bring about our temporary proximity. This has not changed so much in decades. What is new is the omnipresence of thousands of screens – large, small, handheld, and cameras – handheld, or hidden overhead. All activity is drenched with media – inputs and outputs. Every public interaction up for instant capture, distribution, and private consumption; and every private moment constantly interrupted by the drip feed of minute-to-minute news updates and the “pings” of social media alerts.

While not an act of political terror, the mass-murder of pedestrians in the centre of Melbourne in January 2017 revealed a trail of surveillance across several media – Facebook “check-ins” the night before, tweets by people observing the perpetrator’s unusual behaviour, his brief “video-bombing” of a live news report earlier in the day, police air wing pursuit – none of which served to arrest this act of mass murder. Like a dispersed Greek chorus, these observers were unable to do anything but report the tragedy as it unfolded.

We are so overwhelmed by information that we are dead to the present. We are forgetting how to “bear witness” and forgetting how to inhabit our own privacy – without which, the concept of “citizenship” loses all power. As Zygmunt Bauman has observed, we have become terrified of privacy. Our identities are constituted through public display, and reward for this display. This is a problem for democracy – a problem for the agora. What is a public space without a citizenry?

The “Ultimate Performance” offers a kind of resistance to this new orthodoxy. It does so by placing value in the interpretive act and placing this act of interpretation in an ethical space. It demands presence – in body/mind. There is no single curator, but a distributed curatorship, to which everyone contributes. No proscenium, no audition, no credit card fees.

The performance ends with an act of writing, not of observations – “this is what I saw” – but of thoughts, “having seen some things, this is where my mind has taken me.” The space in which this occurs is “empty” – in between the temporal and the divine. Of course, it can never be truly empty, every space of being is always already populated, but we can understand this as a productive aspiration, rather than an actuality. Reflection, composition, and inscription occur in a single act – “the participant writes their thoughts” in a particular ethical context – the state of authorship – “next to their name.” This last point is crucial. Through the act of ownership of a piece of writing, a stake is claimed. This is what is meant by “bearing” witness. A gesture is made against solitude – a synthesis between “art” and “citizen” is achieved.

One can only wonder what other life forms will make of “The Book,” as humanity succumbs to what Francis E Dec referred to as “the INEVITABILITY OF GRADUALNESS: extermination!”[1] Perhaps it will appear to these life forms as do the paleolithic cave paintings appear to us today – their meanings, and even the drive behind their creation, fundamentally unknowable.

Bauman, Zygmunt, and David Lyon. Liquid Surveillance: a Conversation. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

NOTES:

[1] http://www.bentoandstarchky.com/dec/containmentpolicy.htm

We are used to producing theatre that is designed to remove us from ourselves. Theatres enable us, the audience, to sit and watch a representational relationship unfold at a safe distance, so that we might catch a fleeting glimpse of something inexorably linked to how we might live, but without uprooting and profoundly altering us. The theatre that takes place within theatre’s buildings and institutions can do little more than provide us with a detached perspective, a fictional distraction that sates us but doesn’t unduly disturb us. This experience of theatre is very unlike the ordeal undergone during a rite of passage by the tribal initiate, whose will is broken and rebuilt in ways that he or she cannot unravel.

My ultimate Performance is continuous and resides in the everyday.

The Performance will take us beyond the boundaries of self-imposed exile within the domain of purpose-built venues and into the streets and buildings and land we inhabit daily, where the entire field of human and biological interaction is to be viewed as a creative event.

To participate in The Performance, the participants need only sign their name into The Book, which will exist online. From this point, the performance begins. The participants now become both audience and performer, at once the observer and observed in a labyrinthine dance of perpetually moving bodies.

The Performance can commence anywhere one chooses, as it offers the contemplation of all experience in all its totality, where ordinary, banal, but sometimes extraordinary occurrences have the potential to reveal a narrative singularity, a point where our conscious awareness breaks down and unexpected possibilities are realised.

The Performance encompasses the peripatetic observation of the multiple, diverse planes of everyday existence, everything which at first sight seems insignificant, mundane, or even abject, volatile or explosive, organised or chaotic, or quiet and inconspicuous; moments in time which do not privilege any particular forms of expression or activity, and can occur with unlimited diversity. Every interaction has its own inimitable use of verbal language, its own temperature and colour, its particular rhythms and cadence, its own form and texture, a physical, emotional, rational, and unconscious expression that is unique to itself. The Performance is interactive and ever-changing; all events and things are recontextualised and reframed before unfurling into an ever-expanding horizon of meanings and unconscious responses.

Random conversations between strangers on a street corner, the obscure gestures people use to greet each other in public places, the way a person might turn away their eyes in embarrassment, or laugh at some obscure recognition, or peer through a shop window, or wait for a friend in a bar: The Performance elicits and intensifies a need for a theatrical exchange to take place, where something hidden reveals itself, or emerges unformed or in an unexpected shape, or is not there at all. It creates the conditions for the unconscious to flow freely through us.

The Performance takes place in the empty space between the plane of the ordinary and the un-nameable utopia.

The Performance ends when the participant writes their thoughts next to their name The Book.

Theatre of the Everyday : Gloss

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