Performance, Identity and Community
Full Name: Adam Alston
Venue and Date: Camden People's Theatre, 28 March 2018
What were the main points that emerged from your interim event this year?
Our theme for this year’s interim event was “anarchy, desire and performance”. This was inspired by the closing business meeting from the 2017 conference, which served as a plenary and as an opportunity to look ahead. There was mutual interest in an event exploring punk and DIY aesthetics, optimism and desire, and re-thinking the place of the radical in performance. Anarchy seemed a useful means of steering some of these concerns.
In response, we set ourselves two core goals: (1) to begin to map fields of thought, practice and action related to anarchy and anarchism; (2) to think about anarchy and anarchism in terms of optimism and desire, particularly as an antidote to vilification and demonization of anarchy and anarchists that does a profound disservice to the spaces of creativity and interdependence that anarchism opens up. For reasons that will become clear, our interim event was also given a certain timeliness given that it was book ended by the strike over pensions – which, of course, was about much more than pensions.
Our first speaker was Shiri Shalmy, a producer and activist who plays a key role with the antiuniversity – an autonomous, non-hierarchical, self-organised, decentralised and free open learning platform. She underscored how the antiuniversity is not about education per se; it’s about organising. She suggested that “everyone can learn to organise”, and this capacity offers an inspiration basis for emancipatory pedagogy.
Our second speaker, Valeria Graziano, is a research fellow at Middlesex specialising in the organisation of work, prefigurative practices, and political pleasure. She told us how she was attracted to our invitation to contribute because “anarchism always feels like the dirty bit of left wing thought and action”. She described how anarchism and Marxism can be thought of as “antidotes” for one another, which gives a compelling point of departure for establishing the prospect of an autonomous Marxism. Interestingly, in the context of the strike, she asked us to consider how the “cognitariat” participate in and contribute to their own precarity.
Our third speaker was Ally Walsh, who is a lecturer in applied theatre and intervention (an enviable job title!) at the University of Leeds. Ally was looking at prisons as spaces replete with desire; desire for being not here, and not now. She was focusing on an immersive theatre performance by Les Enfants Terribles called Inside Pussy Riot, describing it as “a piece that hints at, but never approaches, desire for change”. It was fantastic to find some synergies with concerns raised at last year’s business meeting; she discussed how “the radical” implies a particular relationship with the past, whereas desire (e.g. for anarchism) is always in a state of becoming: “Desire in and of itself is a process, and does not always manifest in resolution”. Here, then, desire (as a process) takes on the edge of an anarchist politics.
In the Q&A that followed, we were inspired by the idea that anarchism is really about rejecting forms of authority that go unquestioned, which seemed particularly pertinent in the thick of a strike. We also discussed the place of prefigurative politics in the 21st century with regards to the Occupy Movement, which didn’t necessarily have “a demand” per se; rather, its power rested in a demonstration of alternative governance predicated on interdependence. We explored how the prefigurative “performs” the togetherness of politics in a very particular way that’s rooted in non-hierarchical social intelligence and understanding – a kind of intelligence and understanding that is more than the sum of its parts. At one point, the Q&A took a provocative turn when Shiri suggested that “the time for thinking is over. It’s time for action”. This prompted Valeria to suggest the need for critical reflection if an action worth pursuing is to be found, and a wider discussion around the need for a shift away from notions of “DIY – Do It Yourself”, toward “DIWO – Do It With Others”, or rather a need for an integrated, cross-sector approach to collective action.
In the closing performance by Daniel Oliver, a practitioner and scholar based at QMUL, we were offered a “long table” (a format developed by Lois Weaver) as the basis for a “weird séance” – a provocation that positioned us as time travellers tasked with imagining ourselves in an alternative future. This led to a rewarding discussion around the extent to which some people, particularly neuro-divergent people, might find the kinds of organisation being valorised over the course of the afternoon difficult. Daniel asked: “To what extent might organisation also require us to be mindful of people with autism, for instance, who may require instruction on how to engage with a particular practice?”
It was particularly rewarding, bookended by the strike, for this event to have taken place outside of a university setting at Camden People’s Theatre, and we are enormously thankful for the generosity and good will.
Types of contributions (papers, performances, workshops, etc.)
Papers and performance
Number of Delegates: 20
How many were new to TaPRA? TBC
Did you have any non-UK participants? Yes
Any additional points or feedback not covered above?
Overall budget awarded: 450
Amount spent: 450
Breakdown of costs:
Performance fee: £150
Speaker fees: £300
