Wishful Thinking : Gloss : Imagined Theatres

Are you all right?

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 15 h
Hi, are you all right? I really wish so.

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 15 h
I’m fine… Thinking about the present and the curatorial work of fostering an aesthetic experience. I want curatorship to be accompaniment: one body side by side, bodies together that produce a shared present.

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 15 h
I just think that since the pandemic our idea about what we call time has changed, right? I think that in our practice there has been an excess of future in the logics of creation, mobility, programming, leaving us minimal opportunities to develop a practice that is in dialogue with our present. I would ask you then, what do you think it means to be together now?

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 14 h
I think generally, in order to be together, we link closeness and bodily proximity. The touch. In a context of distancing and sanitary protocols, it seems to me that the effect of energetic connection, of incorporations and exchanges produced by dance, choreography and live arts, is an alternative that can build other ways of being/making body, despite the distances.

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 14 h
I also believe that we have to rethink ideas about space-time. What will be our approaches for collective experiences in public space? Is it a matter of expanding into space? Will the biological function of “sweating” be thought of as an ethical decision when “sweating” together? I want us to exercise curatorship from a place of care, but also from the possibility of challenging certain imposed care ethics.

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 14 h
That is why it seems to me that the imposition of sanitary protocols has the possibility of transforming into choreography of affection and care—a different form of curating. In order to center care, this form of curatorship would have to regain its critical and experimental practice, which would enable it to practice this care remedy the condition of the “new normal.”. How can we transform distancing into a constellation of presences, into a flow of energy or into a new way of caressing each other?

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 14 h
Yes, but then I think it is urgently necessary to incorporate our relationship to virtuality into this discussion about care and the critical and disruptive power of curatorship. On the one hand, the image overload experienced in these days; on the other, in a logic of being present during this pandemic, art became a palliative and a crutch of entertainment. I would like us to be less reactive and driven to produce and more able to think of a transversal curatorship which incorporates other agents, not only from the performing arts field.

Silverio Orduña @Silveri_O · 14 h
I would also like to incorporate all the knowledge that we have accumulated in our bodies, all bodies, and place it in the place it deserves. To review the collection of bodily knowledge that we have developed and appreciate the enormous meaning of walking, moving, free flowing, wherever we want.

Mariana Arteaga @marianaarteaga · 14 h
Walking together. That will be my first proposal.

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.

Wishful Thinking : Gloss

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Wishful Thinking : Gloss

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