Sunday, December 30, 2012
Friday, December 28, 2012
Education and the State
"Today’s educational institutes teach people to live ‘on automatic’ from an early age, without ever asking the vital questions, they develop in them cruelty and a hatred of alternative ways of thinking. From the earliest age their liberties are forgotten."
Maria Alyokhina, August 2012
---
This statement by Maria Alyokhina, who is better known as one of the members of Pussy Riot, two of whom are imprisoned by the Russian government at the moment, revives ideas of totalitarian state, brainwashing etc. The statement is taken from her closing remarks for the case. What I am particularly interested in here is her choice of the adjectives "cruelty" and also "hatred", and I want to do something quite simple in my analysis which is to examine these two words and whether their emotive use is justified or whether it is, maybe inspired by a particular dramatic context in which the band members are imprisoned, I should also make it known that I have no connection with and am not knowledgable about Russian education system and I am taking this statement only in as much as it insersects with my own interest in anarchism, questions of whether the systems upon which we depend for our existence are facing imminent collapse, I pose this as a genuine question relevant to present context and not as a definite or as an outcome which is inevitable. As usual I am here to learn and I take the position of the student sitting eagerly in front of a blackboard upon which is written both this statement and the questions it raises.
The dialectic opened by the statement is one that positions the Russian state, or if you extend this proposition all states, using education as a means by which the citizen automatically governs themself without any state intervention, recalling nightmare futurist states of the 1950's where the citizen has no control over his or her cogency and is controlled using a formal state apparatus from birth into the accepting, conforming state with no capacity for resistence to this mechanism, which for Maria takes the form of asking vital questions, specifically she states here the the target is alternative ways of thinking. The position of the citizen in this model is one who is not granted the capacity for cognitive distance from their circumstance and is therefore disallowed from all other positions except for one which supports the state and so on.
Of course we can see the construction here, it is all very well to argue this point, but it is to be viewed of course with a degree of suspicion when it is made from the perspective of the romantic heroine who is rebelling against the state and etc. In some sense of course she is going to argue this, that the citizen is brainwashed etc, because if the state were to be functioning validly then her own position of incarceration becomes validated. The very fact that she can make the statement is a degree of self-refute, what I mean is, if she were truly in a state which was brainwashing its citizens from birth not only could she not make the statement but she could also not exist.
And so for her statement about education to be valid here the arguement must also be an allowance for the citizen to rebel or resist this mechanism and to still also be contained within it. This is where education is the only possible tool of containment, we may propose that if the subject does not know freedom, they cannot by definition experience it properly.
But this is different to "hatred" or "cruelty" which are more active terms. When Maria uses these terms she activates the citizen against his or her own freedom, I claim, she turns the citizen against itself. What does this mean for the citizen who is here made an agent of his or her own imprisonment, not trapped by a state mechanism. This is truly, I claim, where we are today. We are not improsoned by any state apparatus or mechanism, but instead we are completely at liberty to imprison ouselves.
But turning to the last statement Maria makes, it is itself a contradictory statement, that "From the earliest age their liberties are forgotten". The implication here is that freedom is forgotten before it is truly learnt, obviously it is a farcical statement, it contains a contradition, which is a good indication that a statement is philosophical and not literal. So what does she mean here? With some slight adjustment, the statement is that we are in fact "taught to forget". And this is the functions of the education system, to teach you to forget.
This is a very nice way of putting it I think, it very much brings to mind Jameson and Baudrillard and what other postmodern theorists have been pointing at for some time. The functioning of the state and its mechanisms here is not a sort of Soviet-era erasure, in other words, "forget this person, he never existed" because in this model it was obviously what you were being told and why, in other words, you are allowed to know differently (althought this must be kept private) but one that from an early age begins to train the citizen in the, if you like, the act of forgetting. When forgetting becomes second nature to the citizen that is when the state has complete control. We can imagine different models for this, where time-spans for forgetting become shorter and shorter and the impact for an event to be forgotten can become larger, to the point where extremely large-scale events can be forgotten within a week and so on.
Returning to the earlier part of Maria's statement, the forgetting citizen is truly running on 'automatic' because in some senses they are capable of nothing else, they have only been trained in the method of forgetting. 'Automatic', as the term is used here, denotes a cognitive latency which renders the citizen incapable of critical distance. Here is where we run into a problem with these words "Cruelty" and "Hatred" again - if this were true, the citizen would be incapable of hatred or cruelty as they are too passive, a citizen who is too well-trained in forgetting is incapable of such an active position. (By the time they have worked up enough energy to hate something they have forgotten about it and so on). But I prefer not to suggest that she has used these words for no reason. I claim instead that this is, ok maybe it's a little poorly formulated but what I think she is suggesting here is not that "we are the alternative and you are not capable of seeing our point of view" but in fact a suggestion of sado-masochism or self-punishment that the citizen is under, neccessary for systematic governance.
Such a system is truly a system of terror precisely because it is no longer a case of a persecuted few who fight against the system but a system of self-inflicted control, where the citizen governs themselves against actions of resistence. We might see this as a logical progression of Focault's panopticon except that now we do not have other people watching us, we watch ourselves and we govern our own movements.
Maria legitimately asks, I claim, is this freedom or not?
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
From 'The Coming Insurrection'
"There will be no social solution to the present situation. (...)There’s no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language."
'The Coming Insurrection' p. 15, full text here http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/
This text was brought to Australia in October by the Berlin Schauspielhaus in their performance of the play An Enemy of the People. Each night 80-90% of Melbourne audience raised their hands in favour of this text, which is regularly referred to as an anarchist text.
I find this idea of anti-social alarming and provokative but also perhaps true. The social is a place of great love and also great terror - it is where we validate each other's existence, whether that existence be, in its real effect, affirmative, or not. Therefore the Social is a place where both the best and the most evil acts can take place. But I find, it is more often a place of ignorance, in that it grants permission to ignore that which is outside of it.
Also this is an interesting statement about language and common experience. I disagree with this fundamentally - I claim there are no common experiences. Therefore I rephrase it to a problem of language itself - that "there is no common language for experience". Our experience will always be subjective and individual, but its how we share those experiences - what forums we create - these are where community can form. For a chance for that community to build, however, a network must first be created. And then it is a question of who owns the network, who has influence over its architecture, what are its objectives (trivial? narcassistic? commercial?) and who governs it.
Finally, the word 'wealth' in that last phrase is worth contemplating. I do not read this as material wealth, such as that generated in Australia by the mining boom. I read it as inclusive of those immaterial things which make up wealth - love, storytelling, community, knowledge. The idea that we cannot share this wealth without a shared language is a conservative statement - of course, someone may love someone without being able to communicate, over long distances etc. Likewise, people can share the same language and not share any of these 'wealths' at all. How do we explain this category?
The answer is simple. I once had a 2 hour conversation with a Polish man who had no English, using only our hands and a note pad. Here, language was present, but it was a language of connection, fuelled by willpower, which overpowered the inability to talk. Community, love, knowledge - these things are themselves languages.
Monday, December 3, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Self-critique
Boal in Paris: "But in these Theatre of the Oppressed workshops there also appeared oppressions which were new to me: 'lonliness', the 'impossibility of communicating with others', 'fear of emptiness'. For someone like me, fleeing explicit dictatorships of a cruel and brutal nature, it was natural that these themes should at first seem superficial and scarcely worthy of attention. It was as if I was always asking, mechanically: 'But where are the cops?' Because I was used to working with concrete, visible oppressions.
Little by little, I changed my opinion. I discovered, for instance, that the percentage of suicides was much higher in countries like Sweden or Finland - where the essential needs of the citizen in matters of housing, health, food and social security are met - than in countries like ours, Third World countries. In Latin America, the major killer is hunger; in Europe, it is drug overdose. But, whatever form it comes in, death is still death. And, thinking about the suffering of a person who chooses to take his or her own life in order to put an end to the fear of emptiness or the pangs of lonliness, I decided to work with these new oppressions and to consider them as such"
(Boal, The Rainbow of Desire, 1995 p7-8)
Little by little, I changed my opinion. I discovered, for instance, that the percentage of suicides was much higher in countries like Sweden or Finland - where the essential needs of the citizen in matters of housing, health, food and social security are met - than in countries like ours, Third World countries. In Latin America, the major killer is hunger; in Europe, it is drug overdose. But, whatever form it comes in, death is still death. And, thinking about the suffering of a person who chooses to take his or her own life in order to put an end to the fear of emptiness or the pangs of lonliness, I decided to work with these new oppressions and to consider them as such"
(Boal, The Rainbow of Desire, 1995 p7-8)
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
Boal Friere Occupy
Augusto Boal is an important figure in theatre who will become increasingly relevant as decentralisation of theatre practice becomes standard. His work centres around the concepts outlined in his 1972 book Theatre of the Oppressed in which he puts forward a criticism of theatre as a predominantly bourgeois activity controlled by powerful interests (by which I do not mean the mafia or some othe secret group which pulls the strings of puppets behind the scenes or whatever. I am referring here to the rule of accepted norms, for example whiteness, chauvenism, upper class power etc) and claims that theatre should be harnessed for other purposes, namely the overthrow of the powerful ('Oppressors') by the powerless ('Oppressed').
Boal bases his theatre work on the theoretical platform of Paolo Friere, whos ideas such as Educational Banking are designed to acheive fluency between power structures and are spelled out in his seminal and often referred to book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed', as well as his life's work which was aimed at mobilising the marginalised elements of South America in order to empower them and, more broadly, to operate against a structure of powerful/powerless that is based on wealth, class, race or other distinctions.
Boal's appropriation of Friere's ideas are half of his work, the other half of his work involves preparing people for what he refers to as an anti-cathartic overthrow of power. In some senses here, Friere is the idealist and Boal the realist. Where Friere's ideas can only exist in paradigm, Boal activates these ideas and in doing so must necessarily extend them into a provokation towards revolutionary action.
But my central problem with Boal is that by opposing the powerful and encouraging the oppressed to act against their oppressors he first of all becomes part of the system (an oppositional or negative that creates the positive) and secondly and more importantly, reinforces the class definitions on which oppression is supposedly based. By saying "You don't need to be oppressed by these people. Rise up and challenge them!" Boal tries to activate his 'spect-actor' to become an aggressive activist with the target of those "in power". The important thing, as always, is what comes after this revolution. You can imagine groups of oppressed overthrowing the system, and then looking around themselves and saying "what now?" and then they make a new system similar to the old one (in some ways this is why Occupy movement was so special, because it did not try to fill in the gap it left with a new system but it was simple attack). In some sense I think these ideas of Friere should remain as just ideas, and in other ways, I think there are different ends to the story which Friere began.
Where Boal unquestionably targets revolution, I think a softer, (more pathetic) but more ethical approach is one that tries to generate humanist art moments of genuine connection. What do I mean by this. Ok - normally you have theatre which says one thing and does a different thing. The typical example is a piece of theatre addressing the topic of Climate Change that in fact emits several tonnes of CO2 into the air from various factors involved in its production, thereby demonstrating the same level of hypocricy as an activist flying to various parts of the world to attend conferences, etc. Leonardo di Caprio was accused of this, Al Gore etc.The opposite is if you were to take the subject of the theatre and feed it back into the means of production, so for example you make a carbon-neutral show about Climate Change, or a protest show about protest. Theatre being an act in practice, these details become important. Yes, here I think Boal encounters a semantic problem. He is asking for one definition, that of oppressor/oppressed to be overthrown, and on the other hand, also asking that they do not themselves become oppressors. This, I claim, is hypocricy.
(From this angle it is also possible to view the collapse of spectator and actor as being one that suggests theatre-makers should 'practice what they preach', and that this is in fact the only way forward for theatre).
So where do we go from here. Having taken down Boal's premise, how might we rebuild it into a frame that suggests different possibilities?
My first claim here is that Friere's central platform can be extended to the statement that all people are oppressed, regardless of class, race, or , through their participation in the system. There is no such thing, I contend, as the oppressed and the oppressors, there are only oppressed which is everyone. In this sense I am siding with Beckett, Orwell or perhaps Joyce. The way this plays out in reality is that through understanding one's own oppression one can better understand the oppression of another and is therefore more likely to act to prevent it. It is the mechanism which is here the target, the structure itself, and not the individual on the other side of it. This, I claim, is what also made Occupy a significant movement, the target was not so much the individual but the definitive structure in which the individual is placed. The catch cry of 'We are the 99%' expresses itself using the capitalists own terms, as a percentage figure, a bottom line.
Another consequence of the expression of all being oppressed (or if you like '100% oppressed') can be found through examination of what would be its logical opposition. 'Freedom' which is perhaps the first choice here is clearly an ideal - because all are oppressed, none can be free. The opposite or negative term for oppression becomes, I claim, namely something more relevant to contemporary existence of media-saturation and image culture - escapism or fantasy. I will discuss this more another time.
I might be accused of turning oppression into a romantic struggle here. Ok, I admit it, it seems a more authentic answer than the creation of these powerful, god-like rulers (the wealthy, the ruling class etc) who are of course also human beings and of course also have their own struggles. Ok, maybe their struggles seem stupid when you compare them to the struggles of someone suffering because they cannot find enough food for their child etc. An escalator not working or Pippa Middleton's new book not selling well may seem completely trivial next to the a child in the Gaza Strip that is fearing the next bomb dropping on his head. But I argue that it is precisely here that humanism plays its greatest connecting role. Linking these struggles together, ok I admit it's not popular, it would be much easier to argue the opposite, but it gives one access to the other. This is where authentic moments of connection exist, and where we might share our struggles through theatre.
The example here may seem stupid, but in some ways this is how theatre operates to build effective community. Maybe Pippa Middleton's suffering is the same as a child in the Gaza Strip. The question is - who are you to say? Making qualatitive judgements about these things from the outside is not possible. What is acceptable is not necessarily what is true and so on. The point is not the validation of one struggle or another, but the sharing of that struggle, and that is where learning can occur.
So what does this mean for theatre. It means that any truly revolutionary theate will have the sharing of oppressive struggle at its centre, and will exclude no-one from this as exclusion is the basis of oppression. It has at its target the learned division between human beings, being the basis of oppression it tries to eradicate this. It will not necessarily provide salvation to oppression but seek to identify its mechanisms and operations, believing in human will to itself step in and intervene once the context is fully revealed.
Finally, it will ask participants to imagine themselves in the three positions of oppression: oppressor, oppressed and witness, in order that they may fully experience not only the oppressive structure itself but their role within it.
Boal bases his theatre work on the theoretical platform of Paolo Friere, whos ideas such as Educational Banking are designed to acheive fluency between power structures and are spelled out in his seminal and often referred to book 'Pedagogy of the Oppressed', as well as his life's work which was aimed at mobilising the marginalised elements of South America in order to empower them and, more broadly, to operate against a structure of powerful/powerless that is based on wealth, class, race or other distinctions.
Boal's appropriation of Friere's ideas are half of his work, the other half of his work involves preparing people for what he refers to as an anti-cathartic overthrow of power. In some senses here, Friere is the idealist and Boal the realist. Where Friere's ideas can only exist in paradigm, Boal activates these ideas and in doing so must necessarily extend them into a provokation towards revolutionary action.
But my central problem with Boal is that by opposing the powerful and encouraging the oppressed to act against their oppressors he first of all becomes part of the system (an oppositional or negative that creates the positive) and secondly and more importantly, reinforces the class definitions on which oppression is supposedly based. By saying "You don't need to be oppressed by these people. Rise up and challenge them!" Boal tries to activate his 'spect-actor' to become an aggressive activist with the target of those "in power". The important thing, as always, is what comes after this revolution. You can imagine groups of oppressed overthrowing the system, and then looking around themselves and saying "what now?" and then they make a new system similar to the old one (in some ways this is why Occupy movement was so special, because it did not try to fill in the gap it left with a new system but it was simple attack). In some sense I think these ideas of Friere should remain as just ideas, and in other ways, I think there are different ends to the story which Friere began.
Where Boal unquestionably targets revolution, I think a softer, (more pathetic) but more ethical approach is one that tries to generate humanist art moments of genuine connection. What do I mean by this. Ok - normally you have theatre which says one thing and does a different thing. The typical example is a piece of theatre addressing the topic of Climate Change that in fact emits several tonnes of CO2 into the air from various factors involved in its production, thereby demonstrating the same level of hypocricy as an activist flying to various parts of the world to attend conferences, etc. Leonardo di Caprio was accused of this, Al Gore etc.The opposite is if you were to take the subject of the theatre and feed it back into the means of production, so for example you make a carbon-neutral show about Climate Change, or a protest show about protest. Theatre being an act in practice, these details become important. Yes, here I think Boal encounters a semantic problem. He is asking for one definition, that of oppressor/oppressed to be overthrown, and on the other hand, also asking that they do not themselves become oppressors. This, I claim, is hypocricy.
(From this angle it is also possible to view the collapse of spectator and actor as being one that suggests theatre-makers should 'practice what they preach', and that this is in fact the only way forward for theatre).
So where do we go from here. Having taken down Boal's premise, how might we rebuild it into a frame that suggests different possibilities?
My first claim here is that Friere's central platform can be extended to the statement that all people are oppressed, regardless of class, race, or , through their participation in the system. There is no such thing, I contend, as the oppressed and the oppressors, there are only oppressed which is everyone. In this sense I am siding with Beckett, Orwell or perhaps Joyce. The way this plays out in reality is that through understanding one's own oppression one can better understand the oppression of another and is therefore more likely to act to prevent it. It is the mechanism which is here the target, the structure itself, and not the individual on the other side of it. This, I claim, is what also made Occupy a significant movement, the target was not so much the individual but the definitive structure in which the individual is placed. The catch cry of 'We are the 99%' expresses itself using the capitalists own terms, as a percentage figure, a bottom line.
Another consequence of the expression of all being oppressed (or if you like '100% oppressed') can be found through examination of what would be its logical opposition. 'Freedom' which is perhaps the first choice here is clearly an ideal - because all are oppressed, none can be free. The opposite or negative term for oppression becomes, I claim, namely something more relevant to contemporary existence of media-saturation and image culture - escapism or fantasy. I will discuss this more another time.
I might be accused of turning oppression into a romantic struggle here. Ok, I admit it, it seems a more authentic answer than the creation of these powerful, god-like rulers (the wealthy, the ruling class etc) who are of course also human beings and of course also have their own struggles. Ok, maybe their struggles seem stupid when you compare them to the struggles of someone suffering because they cannot find enough food for their child etc. An escalator not working or Pippa Middleton's new book not selling well may seem completely trivial next to the a child in the Gaza Strip that is fearing the next bomb dropping on his head. But I argue that it is precisely here that humanism plays its greatest connecting role. Linking these struggles together, ok I admit it's not popular, it would be much easier to argue the opposite, but it gives one access to the other. This is where authentic moments of connection exist, and where we might share our struggles through theatre.
The example here may seem stupid, but in some ways this is how theatre operates to build effective community. Maybe Pippa Middleton's suffering is the same as a child in the Gaza Strip. The question is - who are you to say? Making qualatitive judgements about these things from the outside is not possible. What is acceptable is not necessarily what is true and so on. The point is not the validation of one struggle or another, but the sharing of that struggle, and that is where learning can occur.
So what does this mean for theatre. It means that any truly revolutionary theate will have the sharing of oppressive struggle at its centre, and will exclude no-one from this as exclusion is the basis of oppression. It has at its target the learned division between human beings, being the basis of oppression it tries to eradicate this. It will not necessarily provide salvation to oppression but seek to identify its mechanisms and operations, believing in human will to itself step in and intervene once the context is fully revealed.
Finally, it will ask participants to imagine themselves in the three positions of oppression: oppressor, oppressed and witness, in order that they may fully experience not only the oppressive structure itself but their role within it.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Poem
While you sit on your fat arse and make plays, someone is suffering.
Stop making theatre. Go and help them.
Your theatre is pointless.
Quickly.
DO IT. NOW. CLOCK'S TICKING.
GO! NOW!!! BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!
THEY'RE FUCKEN DYING!!!! WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING THERE?!
GO!!!!!
NOW.
Stop making theatre. Go and help them.
Your theatre is pointless.
Quickly.
DO IT. NOW. CLOCK'S TICKING.
GO! NOW!!! BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!!
THEY'RE FUCKEN DYING!!!! WHAT ARE YOU STILL DOING THERE?!
GO!!!!!
NOW.
Three Objectives Emerged Sunday Workshop Report #1
Workshop report
Sunday October 28 2012
The workshop was great and I want to thank the participants.
Three objectives emerged.
Talking builds a dependence on... talking. Talking is a rug I will have to slowly pull out over the next few weeks as I continue the workshops. Ideally there is no talking, so I have to get to a point where there is no talking. I think this just means gradually reducing the talking over time. Its kind of that simple. So that's Objective #1.
The "prompts" I give are going to be very important to guide the workshop, and I think alot of my time is going to be dedicated to nutting these out. They also need to have the flexibility to adapt. Ideally, the prompts are all you need - it's obvious from the prompts what you're supposed to be doing, and they follow a logical sequence that builds on the history of the workshop towards a single destination. So designing these prompts into a logical sequence is probably Objective #2.
Objective #3 is about the end destination and what it is. I think yesterdays workshop got us to a point which was meditative because it explored a point after having made it - I showed the participants the answer, and they tried to execute it. In reality this works the other way around. So it's hard to take much from the workshop that feeds this endpoint. What brought me closer to this, if anything, was writing the series of questions that I posed to the participants before the workshop. They are in the images below.
Sunday October 28 2012
The workshop was great and I want to thank the participants.
Three objectives emerged.
Talking builds a dependence on... talking. Talking is a rug I will have to slowly pull out over the next few weeks as I continue the workshops. Ideally there is no talking, so I have to get to a point where there is no talking. I think this just means gradually reducing the talking over time. Its kind of that simple. So that's Objective #1.
The "prompts" I give are going to be very important to guide the workshop, and I think alot of my time is going to be dedicated to nutting these out. They also need to have the flexibility to adapt. Ideally, the prompts are all you need - it's obvious from the prompts what you're supposed to be doing, and they follow a logical sequence that builds on the history of the workshop towards a single destination. So designing these prompts into a logical sequence is probably Objective #2.
Objective #3 is about the end destination and what it is. I think yesterdays workshop got us to a point which was meditative because it explored a point after having made it - I showed the participants the answer, and they tried to execute it. In reality this works the other way around. So it's hard to take much from the workshop that feeds this endpoint. What brought me closer to this, if anything, was writing the series of questions that I posed to the participants before the workshop. They are in the images below.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Flights I didn't take to Europe
Melbourne to Tangier-Boukhalef in March from $940 Melbourne to Bastia in November from $938 Melbourne to Venezia in March from $918 Melbourne to Milan in January from $911 Melbourne to Lissabon in February from $926 Melbourne to Wien in February from $951 Melbourne to Porto in March from $922 Melbourne to Belfast in March from $927 Melbourne to Ajaccio in March from $933 Melbourne to Charles de Gaulle in March from $879 Melbourne to Liverpool in February from $927 Melbourne to Madrid in March from $925 Melbourne to Marrakech in March from $938 Melbourne to Munich in January from $798 Melbourne to Luton in March from $923 Melbourne to Nice in February from $929 Melbourne to Heathrow in October from $723 Melbourne to Krakow in March from $925 Melbourne to Casablanca in February from $938 Melbourne to Biarritz in March from $928
Sunday, October 7, 2012
Two Silences
In the introduction to the first volume of his Complete Plays, Pinter wrote, "There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed. This speech is speaking of a language locked beneath it. That is its continual reference. The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don't hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its place. When true silence falls we are still left with echo but are nearer nakedness. One way of looking at speech is to say that it is a constant stratagem to cover nakedness." Harold Pinter
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Global Warming as the Major oppressive force of the 21st Century
Recently I been doing some work about Global Warming, and all the evidence I collected creates a situation where people choose dumb, and science points to increased warming.
Logical consequence is collapse of human race, with increasingly horrible stuff happening before then.
This creates amazing situation for the artist of the 21st century. Other artists philosophers and other thinkers have talked about the end of existence, but now maybe it is actually happening. And also we are effectively living in the time those artists all dreamed of, and its realization of an artistic project spanning 250 years or perhaps longer.
It goes without saying that this is not a desirable situation, and the artist has a role in illustrating the situation so it can be somehow managed. However the artist is up against significant opposition, as there are interests in the world aimed at encouraging people to ignore the impending calamity and switch onto other things, like their material wealth or small family dramas or their power bills or etc.
There are significant opportunities in this situation however. B/c Global warming is global and therefore effects everyone, it can also be a force for realising global unity. The Copenhagen conference might have been a huge failure but it also brought world leaders together for conversations about real stuff, rather than focusing on their domestic countries agendas and seeing global warming as merely a small section of that.
or whatever
so yeah, chance for a global convo.
Also, everyone on earth will understand these ideas. People will have different engagement with them and different opinions. But everyone will understand them.
So while Global Warming brings us into a new age of austerity and limitation, it also means we can finally talk to one another rather than focusing on the finite and absurd targets of never-ending economic growth and incredible material wealth.
It is a perfect metaphor for the connection through oppression I was speaking about in my last post.
Logical consequence is collapse of human race, with increasingly horrible stuff happening before then.
This creates amazing situation for the artist of the 21st century. Other artists philosophers and other thinkers have talked about the end of existence, but now maybe it is actually happening. And also we are effectively living in the time those artists all dreamed of, and its realization of an artistic project spanning 250 years or perhaps longer.
It goes without saying that this is not a desirable situation, and the artist has a role in illustrating the situation so it can be somehow managed. However the artist is up against significant opposition, as there are interests in the world aimed at encouraging people to ignore the impending calamity and switch onto other things, like their material wealth or small family dramas or their power bills or etc.
There are significant opportunities in this situation however. B/c Global warming is global and therefore effects everyone, it can also be a force for realising global unity. The Copenhagen conference might have been a huge failure but it also brought world leaders together for conversations about real stuff, rather than focusing on their domestic countries agendas and seeing global warming as merely a small section of that.
or whatever
so yeah, chance for a global convo.
Also, everyone on earth will understand these ideas. People will have different engagement with them and different opinions. But everyone will understand them.
So while Global Warming brings us into a new age of austerity and limitation, it also means we can finally talk to one another rather than focusing on the finite and absurd targets of never-ending economic growth and incredible material wealth.
It is a perfect metaphor for the connection through oppression I was speaking about in my last post.
Oppression probably doesn't come from nowhere
Recently been reading some stuff about oppression.
Nutshell is that since Marx wrote about oppression, there has been an idea of oppression being breated by the upper class to keep the lower class powerless.
Don't think this is true.
Reality is wealthy people are also oppressed. Reality is that poor people can become oppressors. Reality is that oppression has nothin to do with wealth, or class. Everyone, everywhere are oppressed. Our oppression is becoming universal.
Someone is oppressed. They get pissed off about this, but rather than build a peaceful or beautiful resistence to this, they pass it on to someone else, and it becomes a cycle of oppression that gets fed around, and results in people ownin each other.
That's a real idea. That actually happens. I've never seen a class, but I've seen someone get hit and then go hit someone else, and I've seen a country go to war b/c they got a history of being persecuted.
I call it 'Political Transference'.
What we can do is build peaceful means by which people can connect with each other through their oppression and create a humanist moment. Through sharing our oppression, we can better understand our oppressors. This is a beautiful objective and a beautiful target, it is not a divisive one like what Marx is. It doesn't aim at revolution. It aims at love.
Nutshell is that since Marx wrote about oppression, there has been an idea of oppression being breated by the upper class to keep the lower class powerless.
Don't think this is true.
Reality is wealthy people are also oppressed. Reality is that poor people can become oppressors. Reality is that oppression has nothin to do with wealth, or class. Everyone, everywhere are oppressed. Our oppression is becoming universal.
Someone is oppressed. They get pissed off about this, but rather than build a peaceful or beautiful resistence to this, they pass it on to someone else, and it becomes a cycle of oppression that gets fed around, and results in people ownin each other.
That's a real idea. That actually happens. I've never seen a class, but I've seen someone get hit and then go hit someone else, and I've seen a country go to war b/c they got a history of being persecuted.
I call it 'Political Transference'.
What we can do is build peaceful means by which people can connect with each other through their oppression and create a humanist moment. Through sharing our oppression, we can better understand our oppressors. This is a beautiful objective and a beautiful target, it is not a divisive one like what Marx is. It doesn't aim at revolution. It aims at love.
"Freedom of Speech"
Recently there have been two current events that have caught my attention.
1. Followers of the religon Islam have been rioting in response to the publication of a trailer for the film "The Innocence of Muslims"
2. Almost simultaneously, The Al-Furqan Islamic Information Centre of Springvale South, about 45km from my house, and the busineesses and homes surrounding and connected with it, were raided by Victorian Police after they discovered (and evicted) an Aussie Spy working for the government. The police raid found that 'one of the members was collecting a magazine that "touts the Sydney Opera House as a potential terrorist target" and appears to have caused significant disruption to the community, with reports of heavily armed police raiding homes occupied by only women and children.
This directly relates to my project, though I do not yet know exactly how. Reading through the press release on the Al-Furquan website, one finds in stark terms the contrast between "Freedom of Speech" both as a universal democratic idea, and as a propoganda tool to reinforce Western Power, and might understand how it can be both at the same time. The irony of freely protesting a video for being offensive to your religon and this being defended with Free Speech is a situation where political context fails to rationally describe the personal.
In the west we think of Freedom of Speech as being a politically neutral idea. It isn't. It is an ideal which has a reality much different to its definition. "Free speech" in Western Countries is in fact very limited - its just that it isn't directly enforced by the government but by social, economic or cultural forces. Likewise, it excludes certain groups, especially other countries seen as unfriendly, or not in national interest, which are freely demonised.
The West has systems of control, its just that they are not initiated by the government, but by the people.
---
I went to visit the Al-Furqan Information Centre last Saturday. There were police in the area, they had sectioned off a bit of the main road near the centre and were sitting around chatting.
Reaching the actual centre itself, I found nothing there. I approached the door, and heard someone vacuuming and a child talking. I elected not to knock, thinking of the intrusion the people here had already suffered, and not wanting to intrude on what was to me at that time a mundane domestic space. I walked around a little, looking mighty conspicuous in my bright yellow leather postie jacket. I tried to take a photo but my phone was out of batteries.
And I left.
Why did I go?
---
Al-Furqan Press Release is available here.
Media reports on the raids, which are quite selective in their reporting and present details which stand in contrast to the Al-Furqan media release, are available here, here and here. The text messages referred to in the articles, which refer to meet-ups between the ASIO spy and the agency and make for extremly curious reading, are available here.
The Innocence of Muslims is a fairly distasteful and rudderless peice of provocation and I have chosen not to link to it. If you choose to find it, a warning, it contains material offensive to followers of Islam.
1. Followers of the religon Islam have been rioting in response to the publication of a trailer for the film "The Innocence of Muslims"
2. Almost simultaneously, The Al-Furqan Islamic Information Centre of Springvale South, about 45km from my house, and the busineesses and homes surrounding and connected with it, were raided by Victorian Police after they discovered (and evicted) an Aussie Spy working for the government. The police raid found that 'one of the members was collecting a magazine that "touts the Sydney Opera House as a potential terrorist target" and appears to have caused significant disruption to the community, with reports of heavily armed police raiding homes occupied by only women and children.
This directly relates to my project, though I do not yet know exactly how. Reading through the press release on the Al-Furquan website, one finds in stark terms the contrast between "Freedom of Speech" both as a universal democratic idea, and as a propoganda tool to reinforce Western Power, and might understand how it can be both at the same time. The irony of freely protesting a video for being offensive to your religon and this being defended with Free Speech is a situation where political context fails to rationally describe the personal.
In the west we think of Freedom of Speech as being a politically neutral idea. It isn't. It is an ideal which has a reality much different to its definition. "Free speech" in Western Countries is in fact very limited - its just that it isn't directly enforced by the government but by social, economic or cultural forces. Likewise, it excludes certain groups, especially other countries seen as unfriendly, or not in national interest, which are freely demonised.
The West has systems of control, its just that they are not initiated by the government, but by the people.
---
I went to visit the Al-Furqan Information Centre last Saturday. There were police in the area, they had sectioned off a bit of the main road near the centre and were sitting around chatting.
Reaching the actual centre itself, I found nothing there. I approached the door, and heard someone vacuuming and a child talking. I elected not to knock, thinking of the intrusion the people here had already suffered, and not wanting to intrude on what was to me at that time a mundane domestic space. I walked around a little, looking mighty conspicuous in my bright yellow leather postie jacket. I tried to take a photo but my phone was out of batteries.
And I left.
Why did I go?
---
Al-Furqan Press Release is available here.
Media reports on the raids, which are quite selective in their reporting and present details which stand in contrast to the Al-Furqan media release, are available here, here and here. The text messages referred to in the articles, which refer to meet-ups between the ASIO spy and the agency and make for extremly curious reading, are available here.
The Innocence of Muslims is a fairly distasteful and rudderless peice of provocation and I have chosen not to link to it. If you choose to find it, a warning, it contains material offensive to followers of Islam.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
How hard is it to use non-disposable cups?
Q: I am a theatre artist. How should I tackle Global Warming?
A: Let's start with the following idea. People hate global warming b/c it involves telling them to stop doing stuff. Stop consuming, stop travelling, stopusing disposable cups, stop having fun.
Fuck that.
So if you make a work about global warming (by which I mean "on the issue of global warming") you will be faced with two options, either getting it "right", and forecasting a slow slide into impending disaster of our own creation (or more likely going halfway towards this point, b/c it's scary), or getting it "wrong", and clouding this idea or suggesting it is false, like Richard Bean did with The Heretic.
Q: Um, bad choices.
What are some other choices?
A: Well, of course, we could bury it in an allegory like the modernists did. But does that really work any more? Ionesco's Rhinosceros? Durrenmatt's The Visit? What text even these classics, can carry the tragedy of a political gridlock and national self-interest upheld by years of individualism and carefree consumption? What has adequate irony? Hamlet? ...Wicked?
No, I put it to you that it cannot be done. So we must take the other option, we must make a work that is not "about" global warming at all.
Let me for a moment re-examine the declaration from that great political mastermind Karl Rove, as relayed to journalist Ron Suskind:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Ah, so it's the ACTION that creates the reality, according to Rove. All this discussion, as lovely and peaceful as it may be does not displace the power of action to create reality.
So as Hamlet says:
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action
Thus it is not words themselves but the happy co-existence of word and action which generate impact.
Q: But how do I put action into a subject that, surely it must be engaged with, but it seems so... dialogue heavy?
A: Perhaps the solution doesn't look like theatre at all. Or perhaps it is a matter of not "What is it to be about?", for that question is solved with the idea that anything which is not about global warming is irrelevant (or worse - a lie), but instead those other questions that make up the theatre which are seldom addressed... and here they are:
how
where
using what materials
using how much
when
why not something else
at what cost?
how can you justify that??
shouldn't you just give up?
wouldn't that money have been better off spent in schools, hospitals, or on more police on the streets?
And I put it to you that this should be our New Theatre. It will be tremendously unpopular. But it will acheieve something.
Q: Thank you. I'm sure it will be a wild ride.
A: Let's start with the following idea. People hate global warming b/c it involves telling them to stop doing stuff. Stop consuming, stop travelling, stopusing disposable cups, stop having fun.
Fuck that.
So if you make a work about global warming (by which I mean "on the issue of global warming") you will be faced with two options, either getting it "right", and forecasting a slow slide into impending disaster of our own creation (or more likely going halfway towards this point, b/c it's scary), or getting it "wrong", and clouding this idea or suggesting it is false, like Richard Bean did with The Heretic.
Q: Um, bad choices.
What are some other choices?
A: Well, of course, we could bury it in an allegory like the modernists did. But does that really work any more? Ionesco's Rhinosceros? Durrenmatt's The Visit? What text even these classics, can carry the tragedy of a political gridlock and national self-interest upheld by years of individualism and carefree consumption? What has adequate irony? Hamlet? ...Wicked?
No, I put it to you that it cannot be done. So we must take the other option, we must make a work that is not "about" global warming at all.
Let me for a moment re-examine the declaration from that great political mastermind Karl Rove, as relayed to journalist Ron Suskind:
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
Ah, so it's the ACTION that creates the reality, according to Rove. All this discussion, as lovely and peaceful as it may be does not displace the power of action to create reality.
So as Hamlet says:
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion
be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the
word to the action
Thus it is not words themselves but the happy co-existence of word and action which generate impact.
Q: But how do I put action into a subject that, surely it must be engaged with, but it seems so... dialogue heavy?
A: Perhaps the solution doesn't look like theatre at all. Or perhaps it is a matter of not "What is it to be about?", for that question is solved with the idea that anything which is not about global warming is irrelevant (or worse - a lie), but instead those other questions that make up the theatre which are seldom addressed... and here they are:
how
where
using what materials
using how much
when
why not something else
at what cost?
how can you justify that??
shouldn't you just give up?
wouldn't that money have been better off spent in schools, hospitals, or on more police on the streets?
And I put it to you that this should be our New Theatre. It will be tremendously unpopular. But it will acheieve something.
Q: Thank you. I'm sure it will be a wild ride.
Thursday, August 23, 2012
Fight with travellers (about Slow Travel)
About a month ago I had a fight with some people on a forum about my idea to travel overland instead of flying.
Click here to read it. (quite long)
I started the conversation with some gusto, but that was soon lost because they forced me to look up statistics endlessly in order to support the idea that flying was bad for the environment. I broke free of these shakles in comment #89, where I shake off the heavy blanket of rationality for the bliss of poetry. The conversation then descends somewhat into a three-way talk about idelogy.
Click here to read it. (quite long)
I started the conversation with some gusto, but that was soon lost because they forced me to look up statistics endlessly in order to support the idea that flying was bad for the environment. I broke free of these shakles in comment #89, where I shake off the heavy blanket of rationality for the bliss of poetry. The conversation then descends somewhat into a three-way talk about idelogy.
Wednesday, August 22, 2012
Possible program note (together with possible title)
People Spoke
A silent play about freedom of speech
This play will travel to the following countries:
Australia-Indonesia-Malaysia-
JUSTIFICATION:
Theatre is a great unifier. We see theatre and we come together. Sharing space, time, event. The moment of theatre is a sublime moment between human beings in a room. Often this truth is awkwardly avoided, but it is the source of theatre’s political power.
Theatre is also oppressive. We go to the theatre and we cannot talk, we are forced to sit and listen and watch, our only means of resistence is laughter, or an early exit.
But oppression, as I hope to show, is also a great unifier.
In a first world country like Australia, the country where I am a citizen my passport says, we think of ourselves as privileged. We live our existence freely we think. But Australians are not privelaged. We are oppressed. We are not different from other people.
Your boss is oppressed. Your teacher is oppressed. Your wife is oppressed. Your dog is oppressed. Your political representative is oppressed. Your ____ is oppressed.
People everywhere are trapped in a prison from which there is No Exit.
This thought spurred the theatre I present today, together with the knowledge that the countries I mention above cannot understand each other except through certain tools, like mime, music or ‘story’ (whatever the fuck story means). They also will not understand any cultural reference, or specific local references. But how much of theatre is based on this? On “exclusivity”? On making us feel validated for our choices?
So I approached this play with the idea that I would attempt to make moments which illustrate the individual in oppressed state, without the use of any language or cultural referent. Sort of like what Le Page was trying to do with Lipsynch. A universal play could be viewed with equal power by people in Bangladesh and Indonesia, for example, and that would therefore link them.
Each individual who views this play is part of it b/c your reflections and discussions will shape others and we can have a good convo. I come from a starting point of impending failure so you don’t have to feel like your perception is wrong b/c mine is more wrong.
So. What do you think?
Thx,
Rp.
Monday, August 20, 2012
From Julian Ass.
from Julian Assange on the balcony of the Equadorian embassy
""There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response"
""There is unity in the oppression. There must be absolute unity and determination in the response"
Saturday, August 18, 2012
In fact, the Americans are also oppressed
I have been thinking about this question "what is oppression" for some time now in an applied way, so it is time to make some statements about it as I think this will make up the bulk of the work.
My starting point, a bold claim I will work back from, is the following: we are all oppressed. The statement is controversial because it is in many ways against the trend of Australian and indeed all societies with wealth, which think of themselves as at liberty. However, this is not a truth, as we inherently know. It is a convenient lie. We believe we are free because to believe otherwise is to dissent, and therefore not to share in the wealth.
To those with wealth, the oppressed are likely to feature as citizens of a nation state with a recognizably branded dictator (Iran, former Iraq, North Korea), countries with a social or cultural system that violates European-American concepts of human rights (China), or poor countries (India).
But one day I sat down and I looked at those people in my own life who I found oppressive, and I made an active attempt to try to understand them, and I came up with the following statement:
oppressive action is caused by oppression
What it means is that the individual makes an oppressive action because they themselves are the victim of some kind of oppression. This exists in both psychological accounts of domestic violence or behavioural malfunction. Like much psychology, it's an insight rather than exact science. But this does not reduce its power as a premise because:
understanding the oppressive conditions of the oppressor allows for a humanist moment
Likewise our disconnection to citizens of countries we feel are oppressed is caused by our inability to think of ourselves as oppressed. It is also how we fall back on common ideas of citizens of counties rather than conduction our own investigations or admitting we don't know.
This is the cause of many horrible things in the world, but especially, I think, it is the central cause of war. Just as an oppressive regeime is used to justify military action, likewise the inability to recognise the conditions of our own oppression is a direct cause of inhuman action towards others.
how does this play out in the theatre?
"We are all oppressed" locates all persons as sharing in this 'victim' status as a means of collectively overcoming this oppression, and places the primary task of the artist as an educator of the operations of power. The intent is not to patronise or to sentimentalise but to encourage good humanist action among all people with myriad claims to status, wealth or activeness. Narrative itself being an oppressive force which provides false understanding and validation, I prefer to think of the creation of moments which reveal the failure of the individual's power, in an ordinary setting.
This is not about being "natural", as we commonly say in the theatre, it is hyper-constructed to reveal the operations of power making slaves of all people.
My starting point, a bold claim I will work back from, is the following: we are all oppressed. The statement is controversial because it is in many ways against the trend of Australian and indeed all societies with wealth, which think of themselves as at liberty. However, this is not a truth, as we inherently know. It is a convenient lie. We believe we are free because to believe otherwise is to dissent, and therefore not to share in the wealth.
To those with wealth, the oppressed are likely to feature as citizens of a nation state with a recognizably branded dictator (Iran, former Iraq, North Korea), countries with a social or cultural system that violates European-American concepts of human rights (China), or poor countries (India).
But one day I sat down and I looked at those people in my own life who I found oppressive, and I made an active attempt to try to understand them, and I came up with the following statement:
oppressive action is caused by oppression
What it means is that the individual makes an oppressive action because they themselves are the victim of some kind of oppression. This exists in both psychological accounts of domestic violence or behavioural malfunction. Like much psychology, it's an insight rather than exact science. But this does not reduce its power as a premise because:
understanding the oppressive conditions of the oppressor allows for a humanist moment
Likewise our disconnection to citizens of countries we feel are oppressed is caused by our inability to think of ourselves as oppressed. It is also how we fall back on common ideas of citizens of counties rather than conduction our own investigations or admitting we don't know.
This is the cause of many horrible things in the world, but especially, I think, it is the central cause of war. Just as an oppressive regeime is used to justify military action, likewise the inability to recognise the conditions of our own oppression is a direct cause of inhuman action towards others.
how does this play out in the theatre?
"We are all oppressed" locates all persons as sharing in this 'victim' status as a means of collectively overcoming this oppression, and places the primary task of the artist as an educator of the operations of power. The intent is not to patronise or to sentimentalise but to encourage good humanist action among all people with myriad claims to status, wealth or activeness. Narrative itself being an oppressive force which provides false understanding and validation, I prefer to think of the creation of moments which reveal the failure of the individual's power, in an ordinary setting.
This is not about being "natural", as we commonly say in the theatre, it is hyper-constructed to reveal the operations of power making slaves of all people.
Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Go into the other
I said in the last post that we need to make something comprehensible for a whole bunch of different people with completely different ideas about stuff.
Let's think through the first problem that arises when the question is asked: "How do we make theatre that is 4 every1?"
B/c theatre is only for a few people, usually they are of a certain category which gets defined by the theatre and the world it exists in. This is how it works, it divides people up and then talks only to certain people and excludes the other people. The tools for this division are usually:
1) Language (includes all form of language, including gesture, sceneography, cultural reference, technology)
2) Physical location
3) Price
Physical location is solved b/c I am going to everywhere to perform the show.
Price is solved because I perform for free or for small fee or in exchange for conveniently given niceties which are no skin off anyone's nose like a place to sleep or a little food or transport.
So there is just this third one of Language which is potentially unsolvable. Because although every theatre thing which is good has transcended language somehow, I have never seen a really "pure" bit of theatre which did not rely at least a little bit on exclusion of the "other". I don't think it exists, even though it has been a project for theatre for a long time.
I don't want to exclude the "other" I want to go to the other place and let's make theatre there, let's make theatre about it.
So it seems the first and maybe only real problem of this theatre can be summarised in the following:
"How do we make theatre that leaps over language?
A few possible solutions arise. The most obvious one is this:
1) We can be limited to language that's universally understood, like certain English words, or phisical gestures, or abstract forms like music or images, Jung or would call them "archetypes".
But there are a couple of other interesting options.
2) We attempt a performance without language
3) We can build a new language together with each audience
4) We can "not perform" (or "un-perform" or "refuse to perform")
5) We can make something that is incomprehensible to everyone
This runs against the usual authorship thing that's done by theatremakers which is:
"I am the master"
"Here is my show. It's great"
"Now I will teach you"
And in some ways this is the an attack on that colonial idea.
Let's think through the first problem that arises when the question is asked: "How do we make theatre that is 4 every1?"
B/c theatre is only for a few people, usually they are of a certain category which gets defined by the theatre and the world it exists in. This is how it works, it divides people up and then talks only to certain people and excludes the other people. The tools for this division are usually:
1) Language (includes all form of language, including gesture, sceneography, cultural reference, technology)
2) Physical location
3) Price
Physical location is solved b/c I am going to everywhere to perform the show.
Price is solved because I perform for free or for small fee or in exchange for conveniently given niceties which are no skin off anyone's nose like a place to sleep or a little food or transport.
So there is just this third one of Language which is potentially unsolvable. Because although every theatre thing which is good has transcended language somehow, I have never seen a really "pure" bit of theatre which did not rely at least a little bit on exclusion of the "other". I don't think it exists, even though it has been a project for theatre for a long time.
I don't want to exclude the "other" I want to go to the other place and let's make theatre there, let's make theatre about it.
So it seems the first and maybe only real problem of this theatre can be summarised in the following:
"How do we make theatre that leaps over language?
A few possible solutions arise. The most obvious one is this:
1) We can be limited to language that's universally understood, like certain English words, or phisical gestures, or abstract forms like music or images, Jung or would call them "archetypes".
But there are a couple of other interesting options.
2) We attempt a performance without language
3) We can build a new language together with each audience
4) We can "not perform" (or "un-perform" or "refuse to perform")
5) We can make something that is incomprehensible to everyone
This runs against the usual authorship thing that's done by theatremakers which is:
"I am the master"
"Here is my show. It's great"
"Now I will teach you"
And in some ways this is the an attack on that colonial idea.
Two lists, one is of countries and the other is of universals
First post is a statement of intent.
Opportunity is to create a theatre show for the following countries:
1. Australia
2. Indonesia
3. Singapore
4. Malaysia
5. Thailand
6. Myanmar
7. India
8. Pakistan
9. Iran
10. Turkey
11. "Europe"
Piece of theatre must be conprehensible to cultures above and be about something which concerns them all equally.
Examples:
1. Climate Change
2. Oppression (in various forms e.g from government, from system, from the boss, from culture, from violence, from being in the position of "oppressor" which is also being oppressed)
3. The Future
4. "Ingen-ology" (a combination of technology and ingenuity, including both technological progress and its interaction with human forms of ingenuity like improvisation)
5. Humanism, opportunities for human connection and learning.
Opportunity is to create a theatre show for the following countries:
1. Australia
2. Indonesia
3. Singapore
4. Malaysia
5. Thailand
6. Myanmar
7. India
8. Pakistan
9. Iran
10. Turkey
11. "Europe"
Piece of theatre must be conprehensible to cultures above and be about something which concerns them all equally.
Examples:
1. Climate Change
2. Oppression (in various forms e.g from government, from system, from the boss, from culture, from violence, from being in the position of "oppressor" which is also being oppressed)
3. The Future
4. "Ingen-ology" (a combination of technology and ingenuity, including both technological progress and its interaction with human forms of ingenuity like improvisation)
5. Humanism, opportunities for human connection and learning.
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