Today is gonna be the day.

We’ve described our work as creating the circumstances for a conversation between strangers.

We start with the people in the room. We end with the people in the room. We need more people in the room. We need people in the room we haven’t met yet. We need people in the room not like us. We need people in the room we haven’t even thought of. We need people in the room who might be our adversaries³.

 

 

1. “People, performers, loads of others too: director, production manager, set designer, lighting designer, philosopher, experts and non-experts, seemingly random people, administrators, babies and baby sitters, choreographers, writers, interns and mentees etc. Performers that are people, people as performers, performers as people.  More often than not, non-performers or non-professional performers at least, but not always, ‘performers’ more or less playing versions of themselves, people ‘performing’ themselves, or not performing at all perhaps, or only ever so slightly, but still somehow….

Quarantine’s work dreams of a kind of raw directness of interaction and knowingly fails at this…full of issues, complicated issues and questions concerning life, death and politics…a strange mix between the politics of representation and the representation of politics …flirting with failure, openly failing, but always staying stubborn…there is a lot of “empty fun” – fluffy animals, rabbit costumes, glitter curtains, star cloths, disco dancing, food and drink, soul and funk music, air guitar playing etc., etc., perhaps of course not so empty fun after all, the stuff of shared pleasure, pleasure of being alive and on display, pleasure of being alive and witnessing, touching, sharing this pleasure…”

(Steinhauser, S. (2011) in Crawley, P. and White, W. No More Drama, Project Press, p.219-220)

2. “Introducing the category of the “adversary” requires complexifying the notion of antagonism and distinguishing it from agonism. Antagonism is struggle between enemies, while agonism is struggle between adversaries. We can therefore reformulate our problem by saying that envisaged from the perspective of “agonistic pluralism” the aim of democratic politics is to transform antagonism into agonism. This requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues, which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but as an adversary. An important difference with the model of “deliberative democracy”, is that for “agonistic pluralism”, the prime task of democratic politics is not to eliminate passions from the sphere of the public, in order to render a rational consensus possible, but to mobilize those passions towards democratic designs.”

(Chantal Mouffe / Deliberative Democracy or Agonistic Pluralism, p16., Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, December 2000.)

3. “An “adversary”, i.e. somebody whose ideas we combat but whose right to defend those ideas we do not put into question.”

ibid., p15

4. Who? What? Where? When? How?