A few weeks ago, my friend and colleague Tania El Khoury was giving feedback to a student of ours at Bard College about a performance that she was creating for a class project. “Maybe there should be more wishful thinking in your piece,” said Tania. I frowned. Normally we use “wishful thinking” to mean something undesirable, an unrealistic or impractical pipe dream, a naive scheme divorced from reality. Wasn’t Tania misusing the phrase? And then I started thinking more about the words, and something in me lit up. In that teaching moment, Tania, a superb artist with a knack for transforming the commonplace, shifted my understanding of the phrase from negative to positive. Wishful thinking. Wish-full thinking. It contains a wish, a hope, a possibility, a thought experiment, a fantasy, a “what if…”, the potential of the performance to enact change – political or social change, maybe, or a change in the energy of the room, or a psychological change, momentary or lasting, in the spectator.
Then it occurred to me that there’s something ancient and correct about the relationship between this “wishful thinking” and theatre – the “happy idea” of Old Comedy, perhaps, or the inverting spirit of carnival, or the wonder when an inanimate puppet is suddenly imbued with life. And then I thought, isn’t all theatre actually wishful thinking? Don’t we gather together precisely to participate in collective acts of wishful thinking, imagining new social codes, new ways of being and relating, new worlds, or old ones seen afresh? In fact, what could be a finer use of our time as artists, curators, audiences, or students than engaging in wishful thinking?
And yet there are so many forces that mitigate against wishful thinking. Lack of funding, lack of time, lack of courage, lack of patience, fear of failure, fear of experimentation, fear of allowing rehearsals to be rehearsals, fear of judgement, fear of change, fear of being called out, fear of other people…. All this is so quickly overwhelming, and drives us away from wishful thinking towards the safe, the systematized, the institutional, the already known. If I had to write a manifesto for an imagined theatre or an art school, it might just be: “more wishful thinking!”
So for those of us who run theatres, festivals, or art centers, we might ask ourselves (perhaps once a year), “How can we create the conditions for wishful thinking to flourish?” For those of us who teach, we might see it as part of our job, as Tania did, to inspire wishful thinking in our students. For those of us who are artists, maybe we can cultivate our own practices of wishful thinking.
Perhaps we should create Institutes for Wishful Thinking. Perhaps we already have.