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.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
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"
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