Performance and Civic Engagement

The title of this section announces its central tension: the potentially contradictory strains of political and community theatre which historically have pursued different trajectories.

This chapter is an exploration of some of the contradictions and paradoxes in the relation between performance and domination. In particular it offers a consideration of some ways in which applied theatre succumbs to the dominant despite its rhetoric of resistance and how it might be co-opted into the service of social and political transformation. The chapter will follow Paulo Freire’s dialectical method of ‘denouncing’ and ‘announcing’ in order to pursue its own utopia of performance strategies that might take us beyond the neoliberal impasse. The conceptual framework for these explorations is the classical Marxist analysis of dialectical materialism, revisited in order to supply a critique of current practices of domination. The core of the chapter will invite a reconsideration of Augusto Boal’s binary of ‘oppressed’ and ‘oppressor’ in order that an adaptation of Forum Theatre can be used to invite office-holders, traditionally where the oppressors are located, to examine their relationship to the bankrupt system they serve. To assist this process the chapter will argue that facilitators of theatre workshops need to reinvent the ancient arts of the fool so that their working space becomes a place where truth can be told to power without resort to the unreal separation of self from other. Instead, a dialogical relationship between self and other is proposed as a means of taking us beyond the bourgeois binaries of good and bad people into an analysis of our own roles within the systems we purport to excoriate. While the chapter will constitute a plea for applied theatre to apply itself to those who have made the world and who might be in a position to change it, it recognises simultaneously the requirement incumbent upon each one of us to enter into a dialectical relationship with our foolish other.

This chapter will introduce The Study Room in Exile—a collaborative practice between the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (The Institute) and the Live Art Development Agency (LADA). The Study Room in Exile is a radical resource centre, performance venue and Live Art library situated in the family home of The Institute in Liverpool, UK. The chapter draws out practical ways for realising cultural agency within domestic and international neoliberal contexts and, in doing so, poses a tentative answer to the question ‘what’s to be done—at home and abroad—given the overwhelming neoliberal consensus which actively and explicitly undermines any ability to generate cultural and political agency and effect radical social change?’ Šimić provides a domestic perspective on the Study Room in Exile via a project titled The Women of Europe and Anderson speaks about the digital audio project The Study Room in Exile at Green Park, Athens, Greece a project organised in collaboration with Greek anarchist-activists and artists, both of which took place simultaneously in June 2016.

Roland Muldoon, born 1941 in Weybridge Surrey, left school at 15 worked as city clerk to building labourer took a technical course Bristol Old Vic school and became stage director at Unity Theatre where he also made his acting debut, joined Management Committee and was expelled 1964. With Claire Burnley (later Muldoon), Red Saunders and Ray Levine he formed one of the first political underground theatre groups: CAST, Cartoon Archetypical Slogan Theatre, as a socialist collective celebrated for its fast moving direct style, “combined like Jazz”. The plays usually featured an anti-hero Muggins a working class ‘clown’. CAST played in halls, pubs and colleges but rarely in theatres. CAST split in 1971 with Claire & Roland Muldoon reforming the group and receiving an annual Arts Council grant in 1976 enabling the group to tour Britain for ten years. The one-man play ‘Confessions of a Socialist’ won a Village Voice OBIE New York. CAST lost its ACGB grant in 1985. The group received support from the GLC for its New Variety project and staged a circuit: eight one night venues in the capital helping to give birth to the live comedy boom. In 1986 the group took over the Hackney Empire and ran it for twenty years. Nowadays, CAST as New-Variety-Lives presents comedy shows and the annual New Acts of the Year Final at the Bloomsbury Theatre (25 January 2015).

This section, Applying Digital Agency, explores how technology has been used within performances of civic engagement through cyberformance, soundwalks and social media.

Artistic practices of walking may provide performative and interventional strategies for dialogic and interdependent ways of being in a world and age of unprecedented transborder migration. These strategies may offer new engagements with, orientations to and representations of transnational place amidst the contradictory claims, desires, memories that coexist in the aftermath of conflict and the negotiation of difference. This chapter considers a series of walking art works that explore the experiences and identity and place-making practices implicated in transnational mobility. These works offer strategies of interaction, negotiation and exchange to map and orientate to the experiences, provisional processes and places of transnational displacement, movement and mobility, particularly that of forced migration. Altogether, they suggest strategies of a civic engagement that may potentially generate longer-lasting transformations of space. The chapter draws upon Rosi Braidotti’s nomadic theory to articulate the ethics and aesthetics for walking art practices operating within public spaces marked by transnational mobility.

This chapter considers the potential political power of applied agency to be discovered in the soundwalk—simple interactive digital audio performance. It will also examine what we mean by ‘digital’ in performance, and the kinds of agency enabled by properly defined ‘interactivity’, as well as the manner by which political power/agency might be drawn from this work. Sounding out the City therefore presents a taxonomy of interaction as drawn from a background of game design, before considering what the implicit political problems of urban living in the digital age are, before considering the political agency possible through interactive art. Of particular interest is the manner that such art works can represent the city to the urban subject, and invite them to engage with the political and social constructions of contemporary, urban digital technoculture. The chapter closes with a case study: Subtlemobs made by the international arts collective Circumstance. Keywords: Soundwalks, sound art, the city, art, theatre, performance, pervasive, interactive, immersion, immersive, interaction.

This chapter approaches the work of the Berlin-based Centre for Political Beauty [Zentrum Politische Schönheit] (CPB) with respect to the notion of ‘activist citizenship’. It considers one of the CPB’s political artworks—The Dead Are Coming [Die Toten Kommen]—which took place in June 2015, in terms of the politics of public mourning and contextualises it against a deeper genealogy of the performative use of digging as a form of protest in Berlin connected to the active remembrance of Germany’s negative twentieth-century past. In turn, the chapter argues that The Dead Are Coming not only represented an ‘act of citizenship’ but also a form of ‘activist remembrance’‚ which involved processes of mediatised performative commemoration. This emergent genre of commemoration is then introduced in more detail, before some of its digital gestural remains are mapped in order to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the artwork.

Written from a practice-based perspective, Internet, Theatre and the Public Voice focuses on the use of the internet in contemporary theatre-making for facilitating civic engagement and conflictual participation in current discussions and debates. This is important because it allows individuals and the community to be presented and represented as part of the actual performance. The chapter explores the use of the internet as a space and a tool for reclaiming public ownership of national institutions, looking at the pirate version of the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) and the case of National Theatre Wales. The chapter offers an analysis of audience engagement in the Etheatre Project and Collaborators (2014a, b) cyberformance to provide a range of techniques and considerations that can be applied by both artists and community-based practitioners for the socio-political engagement and the public participation of their local communities and global audiences. Keywords: cyberformance, digital, ERT, Etheatre, internet, National Theatre Wales, online, participation, performance, theatre.

BeAnotherLab is an interdisciplinary multinational group dedicated to understanding, communicating and expanding subjective experience; focusing on understanding the relationship between identity and empathy from an embodied perspective.

This section contextualises how location relates to local power structures, systems and infrastructures and brings these nuances to the fore in our understanding of performance and civic engagement.

The purpose of this chapter is to gain a better understanding of the transformative power of walking as aesthetic, participatory and political performance practice in the context of hostage taking and through the lens of notions of space, landscape, representation and participation performance. It uses a walking action that was led in 2007 by the father of Colombian soldier Pablo E. Moncayo who had been held hostage by rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia for over a decade. I argue that by successfully engaging the public with the issue of hostage taking, the walk does produce a framework that guides the future behaviors of the antagonists (the captors and the government). The chapter contributes to broader debates on the connections between political power, space, civic engagement and performance.

Contemporary European theatre builds on many traditions, yet two seem particularly at odds: wandering theatre troupes and publicly funded municipal theatre institutions. While the Italian commedia dell’arte, the French théâtre de la foire or the German Wandertruppen frequently appear as marginalised, itinerant phenomena in theatre histories, the public city, state or national theatres of these three countries embody aristocratic patronage, bourgeois audiences and artistic continuity. This contrast has not always and everywhere been as crass, however. While nineteenth-century Germany did indeed see the gradual erosion of wandering troupes, a few well-known European theatre artists of the twentieth century have kept up a tradition that brings together civic engagement, public patronage and transnational theatre. This chapter introduces a committed cosmopolitan theatre maker, a self-styled ‘bastard-child’ of different critical, nomadic, European traditions and his theatre’s international practice: Roberto Ciulli and the Theater an der Ruhr in the German post-industrial Ruhr valley.

Nurlan Asanbekov was the director of Kyrgyz State Theatre and trained at the Russian Theatre Academy of Arts in Moscow. Asanbekov founded Sakhna Theatre in 2002. The artists work and experiment with traditional material, creating contemporary experimental versions of the great Kyrgyz epics. They study the oral folk traditions of their nomadic culture in order to help them revive these epics through ritual theatre. The universal theme of man’s relationship with nature is at the heart of their productions. The epic stories are accompanied by traditional songs and instruments, further preserving this 1000 year old culture. To date they have created three productions: “Kerez” (The Testament) which won the main prize in Bishkek’s “Art-Ordo” International Theatre Festival, “Kurmanbek” and “Maktym-Dastan,” which were created with support from the Swiss Agency for Development.