Full Name: Adam Alston
Venue and Date: Battersea Arts Centre, 9 April 2019
What were the main points that emerged from your interim event this year?
For this year’s interim event on ‘Cruel Optimism and Cruel Nostalgia’ we turned our gaze both inward, and outward. We turned inward by picking up on precarity, resilience and nationalist and xenophobic discourses as perennial concerns of this Working Group. However, we also turned outward by developing what has become an emergent preoccupation for the group cemented at last year’s conference on Anarchism, Optimism and Performance: namely, temporality. Our call was fundamentally concerned with temporality to the extent that it was appealing to the forward-thinking realism of Lauren Berlant’s theorisation of ‘cruel optimism’, and the backward glance of Robert Eaglestone’s writing on ‘cruel nostalgia’.
In considering these ideas, we were very aware of the current political climate and context, but were reluctant to pitch this as a ‘Brexit’ event. Inevitably, though, the politics of nationhood and community in Brexit Britain were ultimately pulled front and centre, and were usefully counterbalanced in light of some stirring discussion and debate about the populist left and right in Anglo-American contexts.
The afternoon began with a presentation on cruel nostalgia from Robert Eaglestone, who was discussing the tendency for Brexiteers and the right-wing press to make nostalgic reference to the ‘bulldog spirit’ and histories that are quick to embrace triumphalist discourses of empire and war provided that commonwealth countries are pushed into the background, or ignored entirely. We heard about how the so-called ‘Bad Boys of Brexit’ (a term coined by Aaron Banks to describe Farage and his allies) have tapped into national anxieties in establishing what they regard as a shared common purpose, one predicated on defiance and pride – in other words, an emotional connection that trumps logic and reason. This formed the basis of a triad in Robert’s presentation, one that pitches pathos (emotion) and ethos (community) against logos (reason): a framework which prompted some fascinating discussion around what it means to (re)turn to reason over and above affect as an answer to an illogical political campaign.
Robert’s presentation was followed by Louise Owen, who explored cruel nostalgia in Mike Daisey’s
The Trump Card (2016) and David Hare’s
I’m Not Running (2018). By way of reference to Daisey’s earlier work, Louise explored the grey area between facticity and representation when the subject matter is drawn from biography, unpacking the ethics of what it means to ‘bend the truth’ in theatre and political performance. In her address of
I’m Not Running, the racial politics of Hare’s work were teased out, drawing on a review of the piece that satirically honoured the work with the David Hare Award for the best new play by a white male playwright – a critique made all the more pertinent given the National Theatre’s latest season, which is comprised entirely of male playwrights. Reading across a Miliband-esque figure in Hare’s play, and Daisey’s
The Trump Card, Louise offered us a compelling historicisation of hypocrisy and superficiality in contemporary politics, which inspired welcome discussion about presentist politics and the gendering of the contemporary political landscape.
We concluded the day with a performance by fanSHEN, who presented their interactive work
Shutdown. Two groups of participants were presented with a scenario of a national blackout and the actions of particular citizens in a community during this week of crisis. Our task was to ultimately decide who deserves to receive an award for their actions during the blackout. Participants were asked to discuss their ideas in frequent intervals and vote how they would evaluate citizens’ actions. The piece raised some very interesting questions regarding community, responsibility and affect. Our group mostly responded affectively to how citizens were portraying themselves and voted for the most ‘likable’ characters (sometimes despite) their actions. We were also invited to consider how we would respond in the context of a national emergency of that scale and discuss strategies of survival and the limits of the law in moments of crisis. In a concluding debrief, we discussed what types of communities would be mobilized and cautioned against romanticizing more traditional notions of community.
This was one of the group’s best attended events, with lots of familiar faces, and plenty of new ones, which did much to signal the vibrancy of the group at the moment. It also gave us plenty of food for thought as we look ahead to the forthcoming conference in Exeter, which will extend our current interest in temporality by investigating “Performance, Futurity and Progress”.
The group would like to offer a special note of thanks to Battersea Arts Centre for hosting us in their incredible Council Chamber, to TaPRA for supporting the event, and to all of our presenters for their thoughtful and provocative contributions.
Types of contributions (papers, performances, workshops, etc.)
Two papers, plenty of discussion, and one interactive performance
Number of Delegates: 27
How many were new to TaPRA? approx. 5
Did you have any non-UK participants? No
Any additional points or feedback not covered above?
Overall budget awarded: £500 + £100 PG bursaries
Amount spent: £500 + £31 PG bursary
Breakdown of costs:
Invited speaker remuneration for travel and accommodation: £200 (£100 per speaker).
fanSHEN performance and workshop fee: £200
Venue hire at Battersea Arts Centre: £100
PG bursary: £31
