Activate vol 3 issue 1

SOLIDARITY AND / IN PERFORMANCE: RETHINKING DEFINITIONS & EXPLORING POTENTIALITIES

activate e-journal Vol. 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2014)

SOLIDARITY AND / IN PERFORMANCE: RETHINKING DEFINITIONS & EXPLORING POTENTIALITIES activate e-journal, Vol. 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2014)

GUEST EDITOR: Katerina Paramana, University of Roehampton, London and Birkbeck, University of London MANAGING EDITOR: Maria del Mar Yanez-Lopez, University of Roehampton, London ASSOCIATE EDITORS: Betina Panagiotara, University of Roehampton, London Emily Sweeney, University of Roehampton, London

EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD: Chair Jennifer Parker-Starbuck, Reader in Performance and Cultural Practices, University of Roehampton, London Members Simon Bayly, Principal Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton, London Laure Fernandez, Research Projects Officer at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton; Associate researcher at ARIAS-CNRS, Paris Ella Finer Writer, Artist and lecturer; her PhD from University of Roehampton attended to the vocal female body in performance time and space Sarah Gorman, Principal Lecturer in Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton, London Mariella Greil-Moebius, Choreographer, dancer and performer; She is currently working on her practice-as-research PhD at University of Roehampton, London Adrian Heathfield, Professor of Performance and Visual Culture, University of Roehampton, London Joe Kelleher, Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Roehampton, London

Susan Mar Landau, Independent dramaturg and interdisciplinary artist, New York City, NY Austin Mcquinn, Visual artist and lecturer in Live Art, Waterford Institute of Technology, Ireland Flora Pitrolo, Writer, broadcaster and scholar currently investigating the image on stage in the Italian 1980s Efrosini Protopapa, Choreographer and Senior Lecturer in Dance, University of Roehampton, London Rachel Zerihan, Director, performer, and lecturer in Theatre, University of Sheffield

activate is a peer-reviewed e-journal in the field of performance and creative research, based in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, London. Š 2014 activate. All Rights Reserved.

The Copyright of individual articles remains with the authors.

CONTENTS EDITORIAL Solidarity and/in Performance: Rethinking Definitions & Exploring Potentialities 1 Katerina Paramana ___________________________________________________________________ NEW CRITICAL WORK A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy Wendy Hubbard

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Solidarity Means Attack: Choreographic Analysis and the West Coast 27 Port Blockade Olive Mckeon ___________________________________________________________________ ‘PERFORMING SOLIDARITY’ The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011 40 Br. Runo Johnson ___________________________________________________________________ NEW CREATIVE WORK Solidarity and Soldier(ity): Using Theatre in Military Contexts Nandita Dinesh

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Jeux Sans Frontières 58 I’ll be with you again Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira ___________________________________________________________________ REVIEW Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art) Megan Garrett-Jones

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___________________________________________________________________ NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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Editorial Solidarity and/in Performance: Rethinking Definitions & Exploring Potentialities Katerina Paramana Solidarity

and/in

Performance:

Rethinking

Definitions

&

Exploring

Potentialities addresses understandings of solidarity and performance, and the relationship between the two. The current socioeconomic crisis has elicited calls for solidarity from philosophers, sociologists and activists. Yet these calls reveal the long and complicated history of the term solidarity itself.

1

Furthermore, different

languages, elicit different understandings of the ethics, responsibilities and actions of those ‘in solidarity’. 2 This issue therefore seeks to rethink the definition, use and potential of the term solidarity through, in and in relation to performance. It aims to question and re-examine the process and role of art making, what it might mean to be ‘in solidarity’ with an ‘other’ (where ‘other’ might be defined as the artwork, the spectator, the fellow citizen, a country, a/the collective) and how such understandings produce strategies and actions that can play a significant role in the current crisis and in the reorganisation of global society.

Near the time of the theme’s conception (summer of 2013) and the distribution of the call for proposals (September 2013), Franco Bifo Berardi, Jürgen Habermas and Slavoj Žižek, among others, called for solidarity in the face of the socioeconomic crisis in Europe and the US and the massive demonstrations that accompanied it. In a talk delivered on 9 March 2013 for TedxCalarts: Performance, Body & Presence, Berardi argued that ‘solidarity is not a political or moral word. It is about empathy’ and ‘pleasure of others’ bodies which today are victims of competition’. He argued 1

First used in the Roman law of debts, it acquired political meaning during the French Revolution of 1789 (‘solidarité’) being used synonymously with ‘fraternité’. It was separated from ‘fraternité’ during the mid-19th century class struggles and the workers’ movement. With a capital S- (Solidarność) it was the name of an independent trade union movement in Poland, formed in 1980.

2 For example, in most English dictionary definitions, ‘solidarity’ implies unity, unanimity, a singular vision and/or agreement. In contrast, in Greek, ‘solidarity’ – ‘αλληλεγγύη’ [alilengíi] from ‘αλλήλων’ [allilon] (others) + ‘εγγύτητα’ [egytita] (distance / proximity) – is understood as ‘the ethical imperative/ obligation of members of a group to reciprocally support one another’. This latter definition emphasises the support of others as a right and responsibility and foregrounds the protection of common rights and responsibilities. Most importantly it does so without the erasure of individuality or the assumption of unity, harmony or cohesion. In addition, its etymology leads to the definition of ‘αλληλεγγύη’ [alilengíi] as ‘the distance / relationship / proximity between people’.

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that ‘real change cannot be political, because it has to do with the body of the other, with solidarity’, new forms of which are needed as crisis and panic have become ‘commonplace in daily life’. Berardi describes panic as the sudden perception that the relation of your body to your environment is broken and accelerated…that the outside rhythm is not the rhythm of your body, of your needs and desires, but of fear, competition and precariousness (Berardi 2013).

He expressed the belief that today’s social movement needs to ‘become a healer: a common breath/body/activity of healing’. A month later (April 2013), in a lecture delivered in Leuven, Habermas argued otherwise, that solidarity is a political act – not one of moral selflessness – that depends on ‘the expectations of reciprocal favors — and on the confidence in this reciprocity over time’. In response to the current crisis, Habermas stated that If one wants to preserve the Monetary Union, it is no longer enough, given the structural imbalances between the national economies, to provide loans to over-indebted states so that each should improve its competitiveness by its own efforts. What is required is solidarity instead, a cooperative effort from a shared political perspective to promote growth and competitiveness in the euro zone as a whole (Habermas 2013). Žižek has spoken numerous times about the current crisis in Europe and the US, as well as the uprisings in Syria, Tunisia and Egypt, and has publicly supported the political struggles of different countries (for example, he spoke at Occupy New York and openly supported the Greek left-wing party Syriza). Discussing with scholar Tariq Ramadan on Al Jazeera’s ‘What do you think? Egypt’s political future’, Žižek advocated that we are ‘solidary’ the moment we fight tyranny. Universal solidarity, Žižek holds, is built through the struggle for freedom (2011).

The differences in each of these philosophers’ responses, each of which based on different, sometimes conflicting ideas of what ‘solidarity’ is, highlights the complexities inherent in the term. Yet we should push on. Since these calls for solidarity, the recent Euroelections have seen a number of right and far-right parties, playing on the economic instability of the Eurozone, garnering a significant

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proportion of the vote, while the countries most affected by the crisis (e.g. Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) as well as a couple others (Slovakia and Romania) have pushed back, giving the highest proportion of their vote to left-wing parties.3 In light of this economic and political divide, it becomes even more necessary to rethink what solidarity might mean amongst Europeans and for what kind of Europe we hope and need to work for.

How, then, do we define solidarity and how can discussing the term through performance practices or theories help us not only rethink it, but perhaps redefine it in such a way that it creates different possibilities for how we can be with and support one another? And what might this support entail? What gestures, strategies and actions might it produce that can affect positively the relationship between the individual and a/the collective? Ana Vujanović (2014) argues that, in recent years, artists have ‘embraced immateriality and its nomadism’, flexibility, mobility and selfmanagement, which has contributed to the ‘normativisation of precarity’. In response, this issue asks: how might artists in today’s neoliberal capitalist economy that promotes competitive individualism, self-management and self-care begin to address these issues and how can a rethinking of solidarity contribute to a change in today’s economy? We have invited artists and scholars to respond to this issue’s theme with articles (‘new critical work’ category), text-based creative work (‘new creative work’ category), audiovisual material (‘performing solidarity’ category) and performance or book reviews.

Wendy Hubbard’s article opens the conversation. In it, she draws on her experience of watching Nic Green’s Trilogy, in which female volunteers are invited to participate in the work by appearing onstage together naked, performing a solidaritous act both with one another as well as with the work’s ideas. Hubbard proposes solidarity as a moment of instability ‘in which a commonality is recognized, essayed, asserted or practiced’, as opposed to ‘a permanent, categorical commitment’ that the term might otherwise suggest. She describes the work as ‘an event of feminist solidarity’, a ‘powerful reservoir of feeling’, and what Jeremy Gilbert names a ‘site of collective joy’ (2014, p.xii). Hubbard is concerned with how an act of 3

Although it should be noted that, for example in Greece, the fascist party Golden Dawn has maintained its power.

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solidarity can enable a sense of togetherness or ‘magnify long-reasoned convictions to tip them towards action’ and emphasises the potential of solidarity to ‘produce future events’.

Olive Mckeon’s work discusses a political action as a performance of solidarity. The vehicle of her discussion is the West Coast Port Blockade of 12 December 2011, organised by community picketers who ‘shut down ports along the west coast of North America […] in solidarity with the struggle of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU)’. Addressing dance scholars Randy Martin and Susan Foster’s

theorising

of

political

organisation

and

social

movements

using

choreographic analysis, Mckeon points to both the limits and fruitfulness of such an analysis. She suggests that it is expanded beyond the politics of representation of embodied movement and that it takes into account ‘the political economic dimensions of corporeality’; that it is ‘applied to analyse not only political struggles, but also the functioning of capitalism in general’. Mckeon argues that an understanding of the term solidarity is not possible when we consider the term abstractly, but only when we analyse specific instances of acts of solidarity within the specific historical context and social movements or political struggles from which they arise.

Br. Runo Johnson’s work, consisting of a video and an accompanying text, performs solidarity by speaking out and speaking up. His ‘solodarities’ are ‘slides in the life of The People’s Mic, and its driver Br. Runo Johnson, who heard the noise in 2011 and set out to stand up, on his own for us all, or as many as he could find’.

Aligning with Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s statement that ‘The main stake of street actions is the reactivation of the body of the general intellect’ (2012, p.143), The People’s mic, using an old church pulpit and amplification devices, is an ‘ongoing series of performative street appearances all with the aim of stimulating and encouraging civic discourse’.

Nandita Dinesh’s contribution complicates what we regard as being ‘in solidarity’ by questioning who we are in solidarity with. In her creative work, she reflects on her experience of making theatre in military contexts, where the ‘others’ with whom she performs acts of solidarity are military cadets, those who are considered ‘future

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perpetrators’ of ‘future victims’ of war. Dinesh asks ‘If theatre is to respond to war, must it not also engage with those who are considered the “perpetrators”?’ Drawing on texts from Foster, Haupt & De Beer’s Theatre of Violence (2005) and James Thompson’s Performance affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect (2009) she suggests that, perhaps, working with ‘perpetrators’ of violence is not about explaining, understanding nor forgiving or excusing their acts of violence; that solidarity, in this case, is about ‘a gesture toward those who fall outside conventional boundaries of aesthetic events, the exploration of the liminal space between understanding and ignorance, between explanation and obfuscation’. After Thompson (2009, p.134), Dinesh suggests that solidarity might be about ‘an examination of “systems of possibilities” rather than assertions of certainties’.

In their creative work, Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira propose that the term solidarity is context-specific – that its definition should be understood ‘in relation to specific practices’ and ‘tied to a specific space and situation’. This assertion is enacted as they (re)define the term solidarity through a dialogue between a sound piece they created with excerpts of ‘speeches by politicians and intellectuals, songs and news reports’ (‘from Charles de Gaulle’s words about Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Judith Butler’s speech at Zuccotti Park in 2011’) and which is offered along with their interjections at the beginnng of their text and a dicussion of their collective practices of Jeux Sans Frontières (JSF) – ‘a transdisciplinary project, a magazine and a website, working at the intersection of art, theory and politics’.

Megan Garrett-Jones’s contribution draws the issue to a close. She takes up the task of reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art) through the lens of solidarity, connecting the term’s relational dimension to a temporal one. Through her review of the book’s texts, Garrett-Jones redefines solidarity as the condition of ‘being present with’, for example ‘an artwork, another person, a text’, and as an ‘action not only in time, but across times’.

As the plurality of perspectives of this issue shows, solidarity is not realised in consensus, but in dissensus – in discussion and in the search for mutual recognition and understanding. In offering different perspectives on the understanding of solidarity in or in relation to performance, Solidarity and/in Performance seeks to

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take a step in this direction and to stimulate further reflection and debate by its readers.

I am indebted to Maria del Mar Ya単ez-Lopez (Managing Editor), Betina Panagiotara (Associate Editor) and Emily Sweeney (Associate Editor) for our conversations, their insights and criticism, the time and work they put into this issue and for their solidarity this entire year. Many thanks as well to the Editorial Advisory Board for the clarity, precision and generosity of their comments in reviewing the submissions.

Finally, this issue would not be possible without the works of the authors, whose different perspectives on solidarity offer insight and inspiration.

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Bibliography Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. 9 March 2013. Online Lecture for TedxCalarts: Performance, Body & Presence. http://new.livestream.com/tedx/tedxcalarts (Accessed 9 March 2013).

Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Intervention Series #14. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

Foster, Don, Paul Haupt, & Maresa De Beer. 2005. The Theatre of Violence: Narratives of Protagonists in the South African Conflict. Oxford: James Currey Limited.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. Choreographies of Protest. Theatre Journal 55 (3), 395412.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Gilbert, Jeremy. 2014. Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. London: Pluto Press.

Groom, Amelia (ed.). 2013. TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art). London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. 2013. ‘Democracy, Solidarity and the European Crisis.’ Lecture delivered in Leuven, 26 April 2013. http://www.kuleuven.be/communicatie/evenementen/evenementen/jurgenhabermas/en/democracy-solidarity-and-the-european-crisis (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Martin, Randy. 1990. Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self. New York, NY: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

McNeill, William H. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

Thompson, James. 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Vujanović, Ana. 2014. ‘Public Good Will not be Curated.’ Paper presented at the BMW Tate Live: Spatial Confessions (On the question of instituting the public) fourday programme. Tate Modern, London, 21-24 May.

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Žižek, Slavoj. (3 February 2011). Discussion with Tariq Ramadan on Al Jazeera’s What do you think? Egypt’s political future. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pieE1EuSCsY (Accessed 30 May 2014).

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A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy Wendy Hubbard Abstract: This article argues that Nic Green’s 2009 feminist dance/theatre work Trilogy involves its audience in the drama of its making, drawing attention to an event of feminist solidarity that it both aims to produce and that it simultaneously depends on. I am concerned, throughout, with solidarity as a powerful source of feeling, and with considering the conditions that make solidarity possible and perceptible. I draw on my own experience as a spectator of the performance, and I work to understand the forceful mixture of exhilaration and relief I felt watching a large troupe of female volunteers dance naked together on a brightly lit stage.

The first main part of the article engages with crowd theory. I think about the sense of political threat and promise associated with collective gatherings where solidarity might manifest. I use the misogyny of some crowd-theory in order to suggest that particular dynamics and histories – concerning the exclusion of the female from the political – come into play when Green crowds her stage with women. The next part of the article thinks about the co-implication of joy and solidarity that I suggest is visibly, palpably at work in Trilogy. Here I consider affect theorist John Protevi’s engagement with historian William McNeill, around McNeill’s claims for the power of rhythmic entrainment to produce a powerful and consequential sensation of solidarity, a collective joy (McNeill 1995; Protevi, cited in Gilbert 2014, p.183-4).

Finally, I think about the mechanisms by which this performance event draws attention to its dependence on solidarity, such that its very existence seems to occasion, evidence and expose that solidarity. I argue that Trilogy succeeds in making the expansive event of solidarity itself sensible: perceptible, and indeed – spectacular.

Keywords: solidarity; feminism; crowd theory; performance; affect; unison.

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A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy Wendy Hubbard Conditions of Visibility Hannah Arendt describes the revolutionary events in Paris, tellingly, in terms of a coming-to-visibility. The revolutionaries, she writes, were irresistible in the sheer force of their number. And this multitude, appearing for the first time in broad daylight, was actually the multitude of the poor and the downtrodden, who every century before had hidden in darkness and shame (Arendt 1965, cited in Connolly 2006, p.79).

Moving onto the streets the multitude appear, not least to one another. Solidarity is an event of recognition: it names and it activates what is first a sensed experience of togetherness. Therefore, who has access to the emboldening resources of solidarity depends on the prevailing conditions of visibility. I gesture here to Jacques Rancière’s claim that politics hinges on a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (2004). What this implies, in theatre-scholar Theron Schmidt’s cogent gloss, is that: ‘[c]ommunity is not revealed but created through its perception, and perception is a mechanism regulated by politics: politics is the regulation of perception’ (2011, p.51).

This article thinks about some of the perceptions that Nic Green’s 2009 feminist dance/theatre performance Trilogy makes available.4 I argue that Trilogy involves its audience in the drama of its own making, and I frame this specifically as a drama of recognition and of solidarity. A fuller description of the performance will follow below, focused on one particular sequence. Throughout, I draw on my own experience as a spectator of this performance, and I work to understand the forceful mixture of exhilaration and relief I felt watching a large troupe of female volunteers dance naked together on a brightly lit stage.

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Trilogy, Nic Green, (12 August 2009), The Arches @ St Stephens, Edinburgh UK, 15 July 2009 - 7 November 2010, at BAC and Barbican, London in 2010, as well as Dublin Fringe Festival; Belfast Festival at Queens; LICA; Bristol Mayfest; and Glasgow IETM. Extensive information on the production, including links to press, blog and scholarly commentary are held at Traces of Trilogy: Digital Archive. http://nicgreen.wix.com/trilogy (1 May 2014).

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A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy

I have already begun to suggest that solidarity, in this article, will be seen first of all as an unstable event in time: a point of suspension, a moment in which a commonality is recognized, essayed, asserted or practiced. (Rather than, say, a matter of permanent, categorical commitment – despite the fantasy of ‘solidity’, lodged in the word ‘solidarity’.) The unstable event of solidarity is also, I will suggest, a powerful reservoir of feeling. Grant Kester provides a neat summation of concerns about the totalitarian, unreasonable tendencies of groups; concerns that he argues dominate current thinking and shape art practice: [T]he ‘impossibility’ of social cohesion will become a leitmotif of poststructuralist thought. It is precisely when we come together (in collective forms of action and identity) that we are most at risk of succumbing to our instrumentalizing nature (2011, p.49).

I bear carefully in mind the concerns that Kester gestures to, around coercion and the erasure of difference. But I am here concerned to consider how acting in solidarity – sharing needs and capacities, experiencing the belonging of having a common cause – can create a sense of solace and company, or magnify longreasoned convictions to tip them towards action. Whilst it has risks, solidarity can also galvanize: it is itself an expansive event of recognition, and it contains the potential to produce future events. Trilogy attracted a significant volume of comment across newspapers and blogs over the course of its run of performances in 2009 and 2010, and has subsequently received substantial academic attention (e.g. Harris 2013; Heddon 2012; Shevtsova 2010). This article seeks to contribute to that stillgrowing body of debate and response by setting out an argument that Trilogy made the expansive event of solidarity itself sensible: perceptible, and indeed – spectacular.

In what follows, I draw on several distinct critical literatures to advance the claims that I’ve begun to make for the mechanics, the pleasure and the efficacy of Trilogy. I begin by offering a fuller description of the performance, and the gestures, invitations and exclusions it involves. Then, I turn to crowd theory, in order to think about the political threat and promise associated with collective gatherings where solidarity might manifest; and to consider the resonances of Trilogy’s crowded stage. Next, I think about the co-implication of joy and solidarity that I suggest is visibly, palpably at work in Trilogy. Here I consider affect theorist John Protevi’s engagement with 11

A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy

historian William McNeill, around McNeill’s claims for the power of rhythmic entrainment to produce a powerful and consequential sensation of solidarity, a collective joy (McNeill 1995; Protevi, cited in Gilbert 2014, p.183-4). Finally, I think about how this performance event draws attention to its dependence on solidarity, such that its very existence seems to occasion, evidence and expose that solidarity.

My primary focus is on drawing out the dynamics around a theatrical event that is by my analysis set up to summon and to ‘show’ feminist solidarity. The questions that arise in the course of the analysis – particularly around solidarity’s importance as affective resource potentially productive of change – also have further contemporary relevance. In Common Ground: Collectivity in the Age of Individualism, Jeremy Gilbert stresses that democracy can function effectively only if the capacity exists for potent collectivities to form, take decisions and act upon them (2014, p.24 and throughout). Democracy depends, that is, not only on dissensus and division, but also upon the effective coming of events of solidarity (2014, p.190). Neo-liberal capitalism and post-Fordist labour practices increasingly combine to create a crisis for democracy, Gilbert claims, through their tendency to relentlessly differentiate and therefore to isolate people, privatizing needs and problems as well as pleasures (2014, p.45). In comparison to the more homogenous groups of citizens, labourers and consumers who were able to perceive common cause, and to co-ordinate their efforts and needs in order to fight for collective interests and social justice in the twentieth century, in the twenty-first century and in a world of increasing social complexity and disorientating, continuous flux, it becomes ever harder to perceive commonalities of interest, and therefore to enact or experience solidarity (2014, p.47). Meanwhile powerful elites are problematically well placed to lobby for, consolidate and expand their interests, without effective, democratic check (2014, p.27).

Its specifically feminist valence (very briefly) bracketed, I suggest that Trilogy’s well documented affective force might have much to do with the crisis that Gilbert describes. This show of solidarity is perhaps particularly striking in a social and political context where solidarity is problematically deprived of effective forms and is

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A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy

struggling to ramify, and where it is urgently needed, not least to redress the threat to the most deprived that is currently posed by austerity economics.

Invitations and Exclusions Trilogy is led by Green, alongside her close friend Laura Bradshaw. Both women are naked for most of the course of the performance. The performance is linked through by moments of direct address in which Green and Bradshaw narrate the feminist concerns that underpin the show’s making – including the toxic misogyny Green observed in a group of eight year old girls’ relation to their bodies, which she also recognizes in herself. These framing moments are interwoven with other elements, including choreographic sequences performed by a small troupe, including one man (all naked); footage of the infamous 1971 confrontation between Norman Mailer, Germaine Greer and Jill Johnson known as ‘Town Bloody Hall’ (Hegedus & Pennebaker 1979); and a live phone-call to Bradshaw’s mother to discuss the latter’s shifting attitude to feminism. By far the most impactful moments of the performance, for me – and on the evidence of reviews and blogs, also for many other spectators (see Brennan 2009; Fischer 2010; Higgins 2009; Taylor 2010; Trueman 2009) – involve the invitations extended to women outside of the core company of professional performers to stand or to act together. These invitations are always clearly framed by Green as opportunities to add oneself to the performance and by doing so to align oneself with its stated concerns and its aspiration to generate female empowerment. An invitation, issued through venues some time prior to the performance, gathers female volunteers willing to attend rehearsals and to appear naked on stage together, dancing (Green 2010). In the last part of the performance,

Photo by Will Potts. © Nic Green

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A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy

Green invites female audience members to cross the dividing line between audience and performance and to add themselves to the group of women standing naked together on stage. The rest of the audience are meanwhile invited to sing the suffragette anthem ‘Jerusalem’ (Hastings Parry and Blake 1916).

There is plenty that Trilogy does not do. It does not go very far in acknowledging how race, class, sexuality and gender-identification will determine experiences of genderbased oppressions and structure the priorities of different women struggling for social justice. It equates nudity with liberation in a way that is very particular to Western culture. Its emphasis on the biologically female body means it excludes others who identify as female. The performances are not accessible to all women and do not speak for all women. It does not present a comprehensive analysis or solution, and its limitations are important. So too, though, is what it does achieve.

What it does is to produce a very specific set of situated opportunities for those women who are drawn to them and can access them, to share a charged act of collective and public self-definition as feminists in a Western public where feminism has come to be seen as passé and, crucially, joyless. That is – it creates an opportunity for women to make a spectacle of themselves in the practise of solidarity.

I saw Trilogy at The Arches@St Stephens early in its run at the 2009 Edinburgh fringe festival. The naked chorus dance in the first part of the performance involved about twenty-five women. It was, for me, a shockingly moving sequence, crosswiring joy and protest, individual courage and collective strength. By the time the show appeared on London’s Barbican main-stage in 2010 there were more than 200 volunteer performers in this sequence. At its most basic, this sequence reclaims the naked female body for female subjects of volition and vitality, countering the defensive logic that might be concerned for the female ‘nude’ as the likely victimised object of a male gaze. Trilogy explicitly aligns itself with first- and second- rather than third-wave feminist activism (see Harris 2013 for incisive analysis of Trilogy’s relationship with the three waves of feminism). It foregrounds a shared condition of bearing the female body, and so might seem in danger of tacitly reinforcing essentialism. However, the possible emphasis on biology is productively complicated

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A Show of Solidarity: Nic Green’s Trilogy

by the use of laughingly self-objectifying movement vocabularies. Expansive, athletic movement is combined with movements and sequences designed to shake bits of the female body that bounce and wobble on their own terms. The performers display and also observe bodies that seem (to me) more intriguingly various than homogenous or unified, even given the admittedly high number of white, youthful, normatively-abled bodies in the mix. The dancing bodies are notably free of garments, postures or gestures associated with hegemonic performances of femininity: it is strikingly unusual to see a single naked female body appear in cultural space and remain so utterly un-sexualized; let alone to see so many matterof-fact breasts. To borrow from Giorgio Agamben’s essay ‘Nudity’, these are bodies that seem to say ‘Look at this absolute, unforgivable absence of secrets!’ (2011, p.90). Displaying their ‘knowability’ as flesh, they confront this viewer at least with the sense that beyond their bareness they share no secret feminine essence (2011, p.81). The naked, visibly sexed, dancing bodies express or reveal nothing other than the fact of themselves, and what seems to be a joy inherent in this act of gathering.

A Crowd of Women I turn now to thinking about Trilogy in relation to crowds, and in particular the sense of a gathering’s capacity for auto-empowerment that haunts much crowd-theory. This enables me, in due course, to suggest that particular dynamics and histories come into play when Green crowds her stage with women.

Gustave Le Bon claimed that a modern ‘era of the crowd’ began when the ‘divine right’ to rule was called into question. When the demos is posited as the legitimate source of sovereignty, crowds become an issue (2009, p.14-15). A partial, nonrepresentative instance of the demos, gathered in time and space, the crowd has an intimate and unstable connection with democracy. In 1714 Britain introduced The Riot Act. Described as an act for preventing ‘tumults and riotous assemblies’, it authorised local authorities to declare any group of twelve or more people to be unlawfully assembled, and to require them to disperse. Failure to disperse after this requirement is spoken becomes a felony punishable by death, licensing authorities to use lethal force. Here, a group of twelve or more people, gathered in one place, is identified as a serious threat to the peace and to the political status quo. The crowd’s

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power is potentially destabilizing because it is not dependent on anyone’s position in an existing social hierarchy or system of representation, but comes from collectivity itself. Its twin threats are riot and solidarity: the potential disorder of a crowd at odds with itself, or the unacceptable power of a crowd with common purpose, potentially pressing for a change. The crowd theory of Gustave Le Bon (The Crowd, 2009 [1896]) and of Elias Canetti, (Crowds and Power, 1962, cited in Gilbert 2014, p.99) is haunted by Edmund Burke’s figure of the gathered crowd as a ‘swinish multitude’ – a group intoxicated by itself, sensing its own potentially de-forming or re-forming collective power (Edmund Burke 1790, cited in Jonsson 2006, p.53). It is intriguing to think that any iteration of Trilogy could theoretically have occasioned a reading of The Riot Act. Writing of a rather more meditative, peaceable experience of the crowd’s power, Baudelaire claims of the flâneur that: The crowd is his element […] His passion and his profession are to become one flesh with the crowd […] it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement [...] To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world (Baudelaire 1863, cited in Welge 2006, p.345).

For the invisible flâneur, holder rather than object of the gaze, the ebbing of an every-day, unfocused crowd is perpetually available as a capacity-building resource and experience (Wilson 2004, p.67). The flâneur feels himself connected; plugged in to the energy of a public realm through which he moves freely. By contrast, for some of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a woman in public tended to be hyper-visible and morally suspect, and was vulnerable to proposition and to police harassment. ‘Public man as citizen emerged arm in arm with the public woman as whore’ (Wright 2013, p.44, citing Landes 1988; see also Wolff 1985). The limiting association of women with the private sphere, the domestic – exemplified in Coventry Patmore’s figure of the woman as the ‘Angel in the House’ (1863; a focus of critique for Virginia Woolf, 1995) – also functioned to separate women from one another. Middle-class women, particularly, had restricted access to movement in public unescorted by a man, let alone opportunities of associating en masse with other women. This restricted women’s opportunities to feel their potential power as a 16

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mass; to experience and put to use collectivity, and to perceive the possibility of solidarity. Just as the female nude tends to be isolated in her frame, female subjugation was largely structured in time and space as a profoundly private matter.

‘Politics’, suggests Rancière, consists in reconfiguring the partition of the sensible, in bringing on stage new objects and subjects, in making visible that which was not visible, audible as speaking beings they who were merely heard as noisy animals (2004, p.10).

In the United Kingdom, the early public gatherings of the Suffragettes, forcing what Rancière would call ‘a redistribution of the sensible’ and making women visible to one another in and as a possible collective, were regularly described in terms of both horror and ridicule, even as they were reportedly policed with a combination of condescension and often thoroughly sexualized violence (Nym Mayhall 2003, p.101; Cowman 2007, p.262; see also Glenn 2000, p.150 and throughout for parallels in the United States).

Even before women began to form female crowds, crowds largely composed of men were denounced as prototypically female. Leading crowd-theorists forged rhetorical links between the perceived irrationality of the crowd and the assumed irrationality of women (Barrows 1981). Gabriel Tarde claimed that ‘when women assemble in the streets they are always appalling in their extraordinary excitability and ferocity’ (Tarde 2010, p.287), while Gustave Le Bon argued that: Crowds are everywhere distinguished by feminine characteristics …the simplicity and exaggeration of the sentiments of crowds have for a result that a throng knows neither doubt nor uncertainty. Like women, it goes at once to extremes (Le Bon 2009, p.59).

Leading futurist Marinetti likewise understood the crowd to be ‘feminine’, citing its ‘malleability, its incapacity to reason, its susceptibility to flattery and hysteria, and its secret desire to be seduced and dominated’ (Poggi 2002, p.712). Across three centuries of crowd theory, as various mechanisms (such as affective contagion, hypnosis and suggestion) are successively deployed to explain how gatherings can alter priorities, diminish inhibition, and produce change, the Bacchae hover in the background, suggesting a deeply gendered form for a nightmare of collective power 17

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unleashed. Anarchy is very often female. A gathering of ‘disorderly’ female bodies like that staged in Trilogy, then, not only makes female solidarity sensible in the present, but also resonates with a history of its own prohibition: the exclusion of the female from the properly political (Pateman 1995).

‘Ecstasy is a Number’ I have begun by turning to crowd theory in order to draw out the proto-democratic valence that is associated with gathering, and that, I contend, is particularly acutely at play in this performance, which frames a gathering of women. But Trilogy’s gathering takes place on stage rather than in the street, and is structured by the rhythm of music. I want now to turn attention to dance and to joy, to consider how these might contribute to an understanding of both solidarity and of Trilogy’s curious, reflexive, affective force.

The short dance sequence I am focusing on here involves women volunteers dancing naked in a reasonably intricate, energetic choreography performed, successfully, in unison. The nakedness matters, not least as a legible gesture of commitment. The unison also matters. Perceptible collective- and self-discipline gives the dance form, and allows each dancer’s presence to read as deliberate and intentional, as an investment of time and of effort, rather than as a casual whim or careless gimmick. Where uniform constrains, regularizes, and unifies bodies, here the lack of all clothing – let alone uniform – means that the tendency of unison to seem totalitarian is complicated by the variety and motion of ‘disorderly’ female bodies. The overall effect is not of docile participation or ‘union’ among the women but rather of a chosen encounter or a sharing – something that is currently in process. A second of Baudelaire’s meditations on the crowd catches at something that seems to me to be unusually palpable on Green’s stage: The pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of sensual joy in the multiplication of Number. All is Number. Number is in all.

Number is in the individual. Ecstasy is a number (1863, cited in Jonsson 2006, p. 51; emphasis in the original).

A similar sense seems to be at stake when historian William McNeill recalls his experience that military drill produced in him a ‘sense of pervasive well-being…more specifically a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling-out, 18

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becoming bigger than life’ (1995, p.3). McNeill’s Keeping Together in Time re-tells a sweep of human history in which, he argues, coordinated rhythmic movement to music plays a crucial role as a strikingly reliable mechanism for producing pleasurable – and often historically consequential – sensations of solidarity. John Protevi takes up McNeill’s claims in the terms of Deleuzian affect theory. Rhythmic entrainment is best understood, Protevi argues, as a source of ‘joyous affect’, defined as ‘that which increases the potential power of bodies, enabling them “to form new and potentially empowering encounters’’ – connections with other elements of the world’ (Protevi, cited in Gilbert 2014, p.183). That is, ‘joyous affect’ magnifies capacity, which also, importantly, means capacity to connect. Gilbert proposes that ‘[t]he political implications of this idea are very significant, for it implies that in some sense all joy, all pleasure, is precisely an experience of sociality-asempowerment’ (2014, p.184). The pleasurable, empowering sharing produced by dance or drill is however politically indeterminate in itself. The interpretative schema by which the rhythmic actions are framed will shape the meaning accorded to the pleasure and the political effects it can create, in any instance. Unison has, McNeill’s account suggests, equal success in creating group cohesion and expanding collective capacities across military training, fascist politics, religious devotion, and repetitive labour. A sense of solidarity is a powerful pleasure, whatever the cause.

My access to the rhythmic entrainment at play in Trilogy is, largely, second-hand observed; a matter, again, of what is visible. Freud’s intervention in crowd theory argued that being in a crowd is psychologically intense because the crowd multiplies the sheer quantity of affective visual cues that each individual is receiving: The fact is that the perception of the signs of an affective state is calculated automatically to arouse the same affect in the person who perceives them. The greater the number of people in whom the same signs can be simultaneously observed, the stronger this automatic compulsion grows’ (Freud 1922, cited in Brennan 2004, p.56; emphasis in the original).

In Trilogy the strongest visible signs of the numerous dancers’ amateur status are their unusually legible-seeming, animated, uncertain, laughing or intent faces. Many of these faces seem to communicate something of the intoxicating experience of the dance, from the dancer’s perspective. That is, the dancers gathered on stage in 19

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Trilogy seem to me to expose to one another – and to their audience – the pleasure and empowerment they are currently finding in the athletic, expansive movement they are executing together under our gaze. I cannot know what is actually felt, but what I seem to see is something like the operation of a real-time feedback loop.

Individual impulses to solidarity have first led these women to share their time in rehearsal, and now to both the entrainment of their bodies in the rhythm of the music they inhabit together, and the mutual recognition of the pleasure that is thereby produced; a play of self-reinforcing and self-multiplying affect.

Gerri Harris points to a consensus amongst commentators that the naked dance movements in Trilogy 'are presented in such a way that it is difficult to focus on any one body let alone in a way that might “objectify” them’ (Harris 2013, p.107). An essay by Christina Poggi describes the dynamic produced in the futurist Umberto Boccioni’s painting ‘Riot in the Galleria’ (1910) in terms that resonate for me, here: The radiant electric light that suffuses the scene enhances the sense that a current of energy runs through this crowd, connecting each individual to the others. Dazzling specks of complementary colour dissolve the boundaries between figures so that bodies flow into each other and into the pictorial ground […] Many of the figures lack visible feet and hands so that at their extremities they seem to dissipate into atmospheric flux (Poggi 2002, p.722).

On Trilogy’s stage, even as individual bodies give themselves to be seen, and confess their lack of secrets, these bodies also exceed themselves and blur together, becoming somewhat electric, a flickering between figure and ground.

Solidarity, in Trilogy, looks like it feels really good.

Showing Solidarity Trilogy seems to me to have at its heart a looping and somewhat unstable causality.

Moments of coordinated action produce the spectacle of a feminist solidarity that the performance also presupposes and indeed that it depends on for its completion. In the context of a reasonably small theatre space such as that at St Stephens, the numerousness of the dancing bodies created – for me – the sense of a joyous, reckless expenditure of energy. It is unusual to encounter the kinetic energy generated by a sizeable troupe of performers in motion in such a small-scale theatre-

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space. A cast of this size is prohibitively expensive outside of commercial musical theatre or established dance. Literal scale can produce impressive effects.

Magnitude often suggests capaciousness or seriousness, when it only reflects wealth and power, a trick of the eye that is unnervingly, frustratingly reliable.

Experimental performance work is often possible only on a very small scale, such that its makers have to struggle to make impactful meaning from the DIY aesthetics, tiny casts and under-rehearsal that are often their only option. Here, though, the presumably relatively small budget of the work and its vulnerable position outside of mainstream theatre and dance are successfully re-appropriated by the performance as aspects of its meaning, even as Trilogy transcends its funded scale to become somewhat monumental. Solidarity is what makes this spectacle possible – even as solidarity is also what makes this so powerful and unusual a spectacle.

The explicitly feminist sign-up of the performers to the work in which they are performing is radically at odds to the relationship we might assume, for example, between a company of dancers and the West End show in which they perform. Many of Trilogy’s performers are choosing to bear the cost of the socially necessary labour time that rehearsal and performance subtracts from the rest of their lives. Or, differently phrased, a crowd of women have found ways of reorganizing their working lives and families (not to mention, for some, presumably, their inhibitions) so as to appear together. Trilogy resonates provocatively against a norm of economized performance (see Ridout 2013). Its performers gather as a temporary, project-based, community and also present an apparition of togetherness that seems selfilluminated by an internal, reciprocal play of recognition. Invited, as a spectator, to stand in solidarity with the performance, I am given a way to see and feel myself in solidarity with other women.

Trilogy’s success suggests a hunger for collective forms and practices through which to attest to feminism, and in which to ‘make touch’ with others doing so. It constructs an unusually safe opportunity to experience the intoxication of strength in numbers and at the same time to experiment with the sensations of public nudity. It borrows something of the intensity and power of the crowd, without the crowd’s instability.

The polite conventions, exclusions and restrictions of bourgeois theatre-going are

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appropriated and put to work to enable (some) women to inhabit civic space naked, and to do so as a clear gesture of self-empowerment and of solidarity with (some) other women. Commitment is both rhythmically, affectingly choreographed, and framed by a broad feminist agenda. Each naked body provides company, amplification and justification for the others.

In A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit records the ‘startling, sharp joy’ widely attested to by survivors of disasters called out from private concerns to collaborate, often with strangers, on projects of shared survival (2009, p.8). The depth of positive feeling attached to palpable solidarity, and to participating in urgent, shared, voluntary, public work in these disaster communities is something for which, Solnit argues, we lack an adequate vocabulary. The shared catastrophe at issue in Trilogy – less spectacularly visible or evidently life threatening than the earthquakes, fires and explosions of Solnit’s account – is patriarchy. The analogy may sound absurd. I make it because my experience of the performance is well described in Solnit’s terms. Watching Trilogy, I recognize myself with a startling immediacy, as part of something like a disaster community.

In ‘an intensely absorbing present’ I

experience an acute immediacy of pleasure and relief in sharing pressures and difficulties with other women (2009, p.5). And I feel a serious joy in contributing, by my presence and participation – my visible gestures of solidarity – to a show of mutual recognition that seems to effect, of itself, a partial redress.

Trilogy puts an unusually clear frame around an event of solidarity, such that solidarity’s affective, galvanizing properties can, in turn, be perceived. Jeremy Gilbert argues that a functioning democracy, in which the collective has a real capacity to challenge established interests, requires not only an openness to dissensus but also the possibility of solidarity. The careful, ongoing labour of attending to difference is both theoretically and politically imperative. But in the context of a neo-liberalism predicated on rewarding competitive individualism, an equally important labour concerns attending to and taking forward how we think and practice collectivity (Gilbert 2014, p.x). This is not only a matter of which specific communities can be perceived. It is perhaps also a question of how collectivity itself is perceived and understood, whether – according to the hegemonic liberal individualist model – as

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always potentially impinging on the freedom and identity of an individual, or rather as a constitutive and creative ground of individual being. This article gestures towards that broader work, seeking to celebrate Trilogy as, specifically, a ‘site of collective joy’ (Gilbert 2014, p.xii).

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Barrows, Susanna. 1981. Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late NineteenthCentury France. London: Yale University Press.

Brennan, Mary. 12 August 2009. A triumph of creativity that will get right under your skin. In Herald Scotland. http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/stage-visualarts/a-triumph-of-creativity-that-will-get-right-under-your-skin-1.822687 (Accessed 26 May 2014).

Brennan, Teresa. 2004. The Transmission of Affect. London: Cornell University Press.

Connolly, Joy. 2006. Crowds: The Myth. In Jeffrey T Schnapp & Matthew Tiews (eds), Crowds, 77-88. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Cowman, Krista. 2007. ‘Doing Something Silly’: The Uses of Humour by the Women’s Social and Political Union 1903-1914. In Marjolein ‘t Hart & Dennis Bos (eds.), Humour and Social Protest, 259-274. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Fisher, Philip. 2010. Trilogy. In British Theatre Guide. http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/trilogy-rev (Accessed 26 May 2014).

Gilbert, Jeremy. 2014. Common Ground: Democracy and Collectivity in an Age of Individualism. London: Pluto Press.

Glenn, Susan A. 2000. Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. London: Harvard University Press.

Green, Nic. 2010. Calling all Women! [Call out flyer] In Traces of Trilogy: Digital Archive. http://nicgreen.wix.com/trilogy#!call-out-flyers/c8k2 (Accessed 1 May 2014).

Green, Nic. 2014. Traces of Trilogy: Digital Archive. http://nicgreen.wix.com/trilogy (Accessed 1 May 2014).

Harris, Geraldine. 2013. Chapter 5: Once More With Feeling: Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female Of The Species and Nic Green’s Trilogy. In Elaine Aston & Geraldine Harris, A Good Night Out For the Girls: Popular Feminisms in Contemporary Theatre and Performance, 93-113 . London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Heddon, Dee. 2012. Chapter 7: The Politics of Live Art. In Dee Heddon & Jennie Klein (eds.), Histories and Practices of Live Art, 175-205. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Higgins, Charlotte. 11 August 2009. Naked Ambition: Edinburgh Show Seeks Volunteers. In The Guardian.

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Le Bon, Gustave. 2009 [1896]. The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind ebook: The Floating Press.

McNeill, William H. 1995. Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. Harvard: Harvard University Press.

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Pateman, Carole. 1995. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Cambridge: Polity.

Patmore, Coventry. 1863. The Angel in the House. London: Macmillan & Co. Poggi, Christine. 2002. Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd. Critical Inquiry, 28 (3).

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Solidarity Means Attack: Choreographic Analysis and the West Coast Port Blockade Olive Mckeon Abstract: The old anarchist slogan 'solidarity means attack' calls for collective action that shows solidarity with a political struggle by extending its force and scope, by claiming it as part of one's own struggle. The West Coast Port Blockade of 12 December 2011 followed the logic of this maxim. A successful blockade shut down ports along the west coast of North America, including the ports of Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, and Anchorage.

Community picketers organised the West Coast Port shutdown in solidarity with the struggle of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to preserve the jurisdiction of their union against the efforts of Export Grain Terminal (EGT) to hire non-unionised workers. Organisers in Oakland called for a solidarity strike that utilised community pickets to shut down ports in a number of cities, hoping to revitalise both the Occupy movement and the longshoremen's struggle. These pickets in solidarity with the longshoremen became the condition of possibility for their strike.

Through the example of the West Coast Port blockade, this article considers how performance scholars study acts of political solidarity and social movements more broadly. Within the field of dance studies, several scholars have proposed choreographic analysis as a method to study social movements, as it can illuminate the corporeality of political struggles, the literal movement of bodies as they coalesce and dis-aggregate that is constitutive of a 'social movement.' This article explores the resources and limits of choreographic analysis as a methodology to study political solidarity. Rather than define solidarity as a concept or specific set of practices, I examine what we can learn about its meaning through a case study in which a solidarity strike by non-unionised picketers became the means for workers to strike at all.

Keywords: choreographic analysis; dance studies; labour struggles; social movements; historical materialism; solidarity.

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Solidarity Means Attack: Choreographic Analysis and the West Coast Port Blockade Olive Mckeon Introduction The old anarchist slogan 'solidarity means attack', which came back into global circulation following the Greek insurrection of 2008, puts forward a notion of solidarity as the act, not of supporting others, but escalating the breadth of a social movement.

It calls for collective action that shows solidarity with a political struggle by extending its force and scope, by claiming it as part of one's own struggle. The West Coast Port Blockade of 12 December 2011 followed the logic of this maxim. A successful blockade shut down ports along the west coast of North America, including the ports of Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, and Anchorage (Romney, Murphy & Linthicum, 2011). Community picketers organised the West Coast Port shutdown in solidarity with the struggle of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) to preserve the jurisdiction of their union against the efforts of Export Grain Terminal (EGT) to hire non-unionised workers.

Weaving together the repression of the Occupy Oakland encampment with the wildcat strike5 that broke out amongst ILWU workers in the fall of 2011, organisers in Oakland called for a solidarity strike that utilised community pickets to shut down ports in a number of cities, hoping to revitalise both the Occupy movement and the longshoremen's struggle. Used up and down the west coast, these pickets, in solidarity with the longshoremen, became the condition of possibility for their strike.

Through the example of the west coast port blockade, this article considers how performance scholars study acts of political solidarity and social movements more broadly. If one wants to reflect on the meaning and function of solidarity, why might it be useful to do so through performance scholarship as opposed to labour history, political theory, or ethnic studies? What conceptual or methodological tools do performance scholars have for thinking about solidarity that are distinct from other

5

A wildcat strike is a strike action taken by workers without the authorization of their trade union officials.

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disciplines? Within the field of dance studies, several scholars have proposed choreographic analysis as a method to study social movements, as it can illuminate the corporeality of political struggles by drawing attention to the literal movement of bodies that coalesce and dis-aggregate to constitute a 'social movement.' This article explores the resources and limits of choreographic analysis as a methodology to study political solidarity. Rather than define solidarity as a bounded concept or specific set of practices, I examine what the term might mean through a case study in which a solidarity strike by non-unionised picketers became the means for workers to strike at all.

Expanding beyond the formulations of previous dance theorists, I argue for a more materialist approach to choreographic analysis: configuring choreography as primarily a representational or discursive practice can overshadow its role in making a material intervention in the means of economic production and circulation. After framing my argument by reviewing several texts by dance scholars on the choreography of social movements, I explore the relation between materiality and choreography through an analysis of the West Coast Port Blockade. I conclude with some wider implications for performance studies and approaches to solidarity, cautioning that, in addition to analysis of the embodied meaning-making processes that take place in political struggles, performance researchers must also explicate how material conditions effect and shape the movements of bodies in space, in order to avoid an ahistorical analysis.

Choreographic Analysis Before examining how one might use choreography as an analytic frame to understand political struggles, let us begin by locating the term 'choreographic analysis.' Since the inception of critical dance studies in the 1980s and 1990s, researchers have proposed dance as both a subject worthy of scholarly inquiry and a methodological optic to study other embodied practices. Termed choreographic analysis, this methodological approach focuses on how moving bodies make meaning, shape identities, and impart cultural values. Formulated in Cynthia Novak (1990), Susan Foster (1986), and others' work, choreography can function as an analytic device to interpret the codes embedded in physical culture, including the

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political investments evidenced within movement choices and movement as a mode of constructing and negotiating identity. Choreographic analysis extends the purview of dance studies beyond dance practices to the analysis of diverse social contexts.

Several dance scholars have taken up an interest in using choreography as a model for theorising political organisation and social movements, particularly Randy Martin (1990, 1998) and Susan Foster (2003). Their approaches focus on choreography as both a model and a means for political organisation. I will touch briefly on how they conceive of the relationship between dance studies and research into social movements.

In dance, Randy Martin finds a viable model for political organisation. His book Performance as political act: The embodied self (1990) provides a theory of agency rooted in the body as a locus of desire. For Martin, performance yields insight into political activity. He characterises the study of dance as observing how bodies overcome the fright of entering the historical stage. Engaging with the structure/agency debates of social theory, Martin's ethnographic account of making dance narrates how a group moves away from the initial authority of the choreographer to become a social totality. Less focused on the politics of representation or semiotic interpretation, Martin orients his approach to social relations and forms of organisation. He views dance as a laboratory and model of social practice in which dance becomes a form of lived utopia. In his following book Critical moves: Dance studies in theory and politics (1998), Martin takes up the question of what dance can offer to political thinking. He argues that dance as an art of social mobilisation makes visible the very conditions of political organising. Martin takes as his subject matter a disparate set of dance practices – a performance at Judson Church, a Bill T. Jones piece, modern dance technique class at a university, an MTV music video and a hip hop aerobics class – which show how bodies become mobilised to move together. While remaining wary of collapsing the difference between dance and politics, he posits dance as concurrent with the efforts of social movement and drawing a group into motion.

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Susan Foster's essay 'Choreographies of protest' (2003) takes up Martin's question about what dance can offer to social theory and suggests that choreography can illuminate the ways in which the embodiment of protest contributes to its political effects. The essay provides a choreographic analysis of three protests: lunch counter sit-ins in the south during the civil rights movement, the die-in actions of Act UP in the 1980s, and the 1999 anti-globalisation protest in Seattle. Foster argues that the corporeality of the protests provided those involved with a source of strength, resilience and solidarity.

Both Martin and Foster share an attention to the embodied movement involved in social mobilisation. However, they differ in terms of how they understand dance's intervention into politics. Martin uses dance to render a picture of the social totality, a vision of politics already in motion. For him, dance functions as a prism through which one can find the social tensions and possibilities that exceed any specific set of movements. Foster, rather than using dance as a lens through which to see social relations that exceed it, suggests that corporeal movement intervenes discursively into instances of social protest. Sharing a commitment to bringing choreographic analyses into conversation with social movements, Foster uses choreography as a political tactic, while Martin uses dance as a model to understand how social mobilisation occurs.

Informed by the approaches of Martin and Foster, my own use of choreographic analysis seeks to foreground the ways political struggles intervene in a material, as well as a discursive register. My focus here is less on how dance practices stage the embodiment of social movements or how bodies become communicative with protests, and more on the material conditions and dynamics of social movements.

While bodies may perform discursive operations in the midst of struggle, they also make a physical intervention in material relations. For example, political struggles may inflict economic losses, withhold or destroy machinery, disrupt the circuits of capitalist production and circulation, prevent the daily operation of exploitation and dispossession. What may fall out of a choreographic analysis that emphasises movement as a signifying act is the political economy of such struggles: what set of material circumstances gave rise to the struggle and what material consequences

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endure for those involved. In his work on the German New Left, Shane Boyle argues that performance scholars' focus on protest as a form of communicative action has upstaged analysis of the material and psychic effects of political struggle: In both New Left historiography and performance studies, protest and direct action appear primarily as symbolic action, most often engineered for the media. While any performance analysis of protest since the 1960s must pay careful attention to the role of media in political life, the ‘staged’ character of these practices should not be our only or even primary focus of study. What other questions about protest and direct action does the lens of performance allow us to ask? [...] At issue here is not the focus on the symbolic effects of political action, but the unacknowledged exclusion of critical methods and political practices that do not privilege symbolic or communicative modes of intervention (2012, p.20-21).

Boyle, here, thoughtfully shows the political assumptions and implications of the methodological focus of protest as a communicative act. Understanding embodiment instances of protests solely as discourse may threaten to obscure the material register of such struggles.

Inquiries into the choreography of social movements must navigate the danger of rendering movement solely as discourse. Bodies are not merely bearers of meaning and cultural values, but occupy a particular position in relation to capital. As an example of a text that muddles the politics of representation with forms of material praxis, Marta Savigliano's Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (1995) charts the transmissions of tango through the political history of colonisation, using the language of political economy to describe the discursive construction of identities.

She claims to write in the mode of Guevarian guerrilla warfare, perhaps betraying the degree of distance her text has from political uprisings. By referring to the movements of women in the midst of a tango as strategies of insurgency, she makes actual insurgency illegible. Challenging the gendered conventions of tango is not politically symmetrical or synonymous with women in Argentina or elsewhere engaging in militant tactics, armed with Molotov cocktails or rifles. It becomes necessary to clarify the differing political stakes involved in forms of social movement.

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Solidarity Means Attack: Choreographic Analysis and the West Coast Port Blockade

I do not intend to create a dichotomy between the representational and the material dimensions of social movements, as political struggles operate on both levels at once. Forms of direct action ̶ strikes, blockades, occupations ̶ are not opposed to symbolic interventions. They may halt certain economic phenomena while at the same time disseminating a narrative and an analysis of a political situation.

Additionally, struggles over the control of space and resources involve an exchange and interpretation of gestures: 'The cops are staging over there with full riot gear so we need to back track and regroup.' Those involved quickly interpret what the bodies mean in the midst of a struggle, but this does not eclipse the material stakes of the contestation. It may be necessary to preserve the difference between the type of choreographic analysis performed by dance scholars and those done by demonstrators and rioters. While dance scholars have developed a range of approaches to studying the implications of embodied movement, they are not alone in developing proficiency for interpreting how to do things with bodies in space.

West Coast Port Blockade In order to examine these reflections on choreographic analysis in the context of a particular social movement, let us turn to the events of 12 December 2011, when a successful blockade shut down ports along the west coast, including the ports of Oakland, Los Angeles, San Diego, Portland, Tacoma, Seattle, Vancouver, and Anchorage. To contextualise West Coast Port shutdown, I will introduce two circumstances that preceded it: the after effects of the shutdown of Occupy Oakland and the struggle of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) against EGT (Export Grain Terminal).

In the fall of 2011, occupy encampments sprouted up many cities around the United States. By November, a significant number had been raided and forcibly removed by police. Organisers took the raid and repression of Occupy Oakland as an invitation to escalate and expand its reach, calling for a general strike that erupted across the city on 2 November. With a massive turn out, the day's events culminated in a march on the port of Oakland, successfully shutting it down for the 5pm shift. Despite the endless attempts to retake Oscar Grant Plaza (Oscar Grant was a young man shot point blank in the back of his head by transit police on 1 January 2009), occupiers

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were unable to resurrect the camp. Struggling to find a form that would harness the energy of the repressed encampments towards further mobilisation, Occupy Oakland put out a call for a west coast wide port shutdown. Organisers hypothesised that the best way to revive the strength of the Oakland Commune was for it to surface in a much larger geographical scope.

That same fall, a fiercely militant wildcat strike led by members of ILWU Local 21 broke out in Longview, Washington. The grain company EGT had refused to hire union labour to operate its new $200 million grain elevator in Longview, breaking a decades-old tradition of hiring ILWU workers at West Coast terminals. When the first grain shipment arrived by train in the evening on 7 September 2011, nineteen demonstrators blocked the tracks and were arrested. The next morning, approximately five hundred longshoremen stormed the Port of Longview: they broke down gates at about 4:30am, cut brake lines, spilled grain from a car in the EGT terminal, smashed windows in the guard shack, and held six security guards hostage for several hours. A police sergeant was forced to retreat when longshoremen threatened him with baseball bats. Despite the appearance of moving on the offence, the longshoremen’s struggle had a defensive logic: they attempted to preserve the jurisdiction of their union, rather than to claim a larger share of companies' profits or better working conditions.

In my opinion, the West Coast Port blockade sought to weave together these two currents, the struggle against the repression of occupy encampments in Oakland and elsewhere and the attack on the jurisdiction of the Longshoremen’s union, in the hope that this strategy would seize the potential energy of both. The longshoremen could not legally go on strike, but if a legal arbitrator ruled conditions unsafe for workers due to extrinsic picketing, they could effectively withdraw their labour without legal consequence. Organisers in Oakland arrived at a strategy that utilised community pickets at the entrance to every berth throughout the port.

Choreographically, the blockade amounted to marching to the port of Oakland, distributing several thousand bodies amongst forty-eight berths and having a group at each entrance gate walk in a circle long enough for the arbitrator to deem the shift unsafe for workers. A week before the coordinated port blockade, a communiquĂŠ

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titled 'Blockading the port is only the first of many last resorts' published on Bay of Rage, an anti-capitalist new blog for the San Francisco bay area, under the moniker 'Society of Enemies' offered a critique of this strategy: In such a situation we are not really blockading the port. We are participating in a two-act play, a piece of legal theater, performed for the benefit of the arbitrator [...] There are two reasons why this charade is problematic. [This strategy] ensure[s] that class antagonism finds only state-approved outlets, passing through the bureaucratic filter of the union and its legal apparatus, which says when, how, and why workers can act in their own benefit. This is what 'arbitration' means.

Secondly, examined from a tactical position, putting us blockaders in small, stationary groups spread out over miles of roads leaves us in a very poor position to resist a police assault. As many have noted, it would be much easier to blockade the port by closing off the two main entrances to the port area– at Third and Adeline and Maritime and West Grand... But doing so will likely bring a police attack. Therefore, in order to blockade the port with legal-theatrical means we sacrifice our ability – quite within reach – to blockade it materially. We allow ourselves to be deflected to a tactically-weak position on the plane of the symbolic.

This communiqué offers a critique of the planned choreography for its privileging of a discursive or symbolic blockade as opposed to physically clogging the main entrances to the port. These two choreographic options reflect differing conceptions of wider strategies for anti-capitalist struggle: the first prioritises operating within the legal structures of a tamed trade unionism and the second conceives of the blockade as a lever to halt the movement of commodities into the San Francisco bay area, as against capitalist circulation in general. The use of the phrase 'legal-theatrical means' opposes the plan as theatre and contrasts it with the real politics of directly shutting down the port. Despite the apparent critique of theatricality, this statement by the ‘Society of Enemies’ makes a case for how important dramaturgy and choreography are to the political consequences of the blockade. The choice to picket at every berth or to block the main entrances to the port was a choreographic decision that was simultaneously a question of political strategy and analysis.

On 12 December, the blockade in Oakland proceeded as planned. Flying pickets circled at each berth until the legal arbitrator called the shift off at three different intervals, shutting the port down for twenty-four hours. In addition to blockades at ports up and down the west coast, numerous solidarity actions sprung up as far

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away as Honolulu and Japan, where Doro Chiba Railway Workers demonstrated at a facility of Itochu, a subsidiary of EGT. In February of 2012, EGT signed a contract that finally provided for the use of ILWU labour in the grain terminal at the Port of Longview (Eidelson, 2012). ILWU Local 21 explicitly stated that the west coast port blockade forced EGT to return to the bargaining table with the union.

A choreographic analysis of the blockade brings both the symbolic and material dimensions of the event into view. Thousands of bodies used their collective movements to convince the arbitrator to cancel multiple shifts, eventually pressuring EGT to change its previous position. In a narrow sense, the choreography acted as a felicitous performative for the Longshoremen's union. The coordinated day of action did not, however, function as a trigger point for a more generalised antagonism and refusal, one that escaped the trappings of a workerist agenda that seeks to continue and improve capitalist production processes rather than to depart from them. A broader set of historical conditions frames the contours of these events: the severe decline in the membership, strength, and radicality of organised labour in the United States, a shift in post-industrial countries to attack the circulation of capital rather than its production, the initiation of strikes by a motley assortment of non-union, unemployed, or precarious workers and the use of mobile pickets through an urban terrain. These conditions make certain forms of struggle possible and others impossible. The 2011 general strike in post-industrial Oakland could in no way resemble the general strike that pulsed through the city in 1946. To modify a passage from Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire (1994, p. 15), choreography can make history, but not under self-selected circumstances; it makes history under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. In addition to making evident the force of corporeality in a social movement, choreographic analysis needs to show the historical limits as to what bodies can do in space.

Materialist Choreographic Analysis The wider implication of this discussion for performance studies is to expand beyond the analysis of embodied movement as representation or discourse and to consider the political economic dimensions of corporeality. Choreographic analysis can be applied to analyse not only political struggles, but also the functioning of capitalism in

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general. The commodity labour-power has a choreographic dimension as capital exerts pressure to control workers’ movements in the pursuit of increased productivity and relative surplus value. Class struggle counters such dynamics with an arsenal of explicitly corporeal challenges: strikes, work stoppages, work slowdowns, sabotage, and a myriad of other forms. Marx's concern with 'human labour-power in its fluid state' (1976, p. 142) and the dynamism of the dialectic suggest a view of material processes as in motion, as dance. I do not view choreography as an analogous to social movements, but as methodological optic for how capital functions and how it can be overcome. In addition to addressing the politics of representation, performance scholars can bring the material conditions of movement into sharper focus. This expansion will successfully avoid collapsing the politics of representation with politics in general. Choreography can certainly be explosive, but it is necessary to specify the register on which it ignites.

Conclusion I would now like to return to the broader question about what the example of the port blockade can illuminate about solidarity. Solidarity can be understood as a set of actions moulded and cast by historical conditions. Rather than thinking of the term conceptually or re-contextualising it within the realm of the aesthetic, I prefer to think about concrete instances of solidarity. What the term means and how it operates will be worked out on the streets and in the waxing and waning of social movements.

Coming into the English lexicon in the 1840s, 'solidarity' has designated a wide set of political strategies and tactics, including participating in trade union strikes, harassing scabs, shipping off to a foreign lands to fight fascists and so forth. The word 'solidarity' belongs to capitalism as a period,6 and as such, it is fraught. The forms of association, unity and class composition specific to this epoch may or may not tip us out of the period of capital and the organisation of social life around the production of value. The self-organisation of workers, women, queers, the unemployed, the indebted, the incarcerated, the dispossessed, the lumpens, the surplus populations, are rife with contradictions and marked by this stillborn world. This does not have to do with the limits of the concept of solidarity or with some ontological gulf between 6

Here, I am referring to capitalism as a period itself, as in the period that follows the feudal mode of production.

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the ‘I’ and ‘the other’, but more with the way that capitalism constrains the kind of thinking and doing within it. In considering the ways performance scholars can approach conceptions of solidarity, let us avoid thinking of the term abstractly within a cultural plane or rendering it metaphorical to politics, but instead remain historically specific and grounded within discrete social movements and political struggles.

As we ascended the overpass heading down into the port, I held a wooden shield, decorated with the words 'hella blockading your flows of capital' written in glitter. As the truck with the sound system passed us, we danced. Or really, we were dancing the whole time, even when idly standing down at the port watching the sun set over motionless machinery.

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Bibliography Boyle, Michael Shane. 2012. The Ambivalence of Resistance: West German Antiauthoritarian Performance After the Age of Affluence. University of California, Berkeley: PhD thesis.

Eidelson, Josh. 2012 (Feburary 24). How Occupy helped labor win on the West Coast.

Salon. http://www.salon.com/2012/02/24/occupy_helps_labor_win_on_the_west_coast (Accessed 21 May 2014).

Foster, Susan Leigh. 2003. Choreographies of Protest. Theatre Journal 55 (3), 395412.

Foster, Susan Leigh. 1986. Reading Dancing: Bodies and Subjects in Contemporary American. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Martin, Randy. 1998. Critical Moves: Dance Studies in Theory and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Martin, Randy. 1990. Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self. New York, NY: Bergin & Garvey Publishers.

Marx, Karl. 1976. Capital, Volume 1. (Tr. Ben Fowkes) New York, NY: Random House.

Marx, Karl. 1994. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. New York, NY: International Publishers.

Novack, Cynthia J. 1990. Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation and American Culture. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.

Romney, Lee, Kim Murphy & Kate Linthicum. 2011 (December 13). Occupy protesters take fight to West Coast ports. Los Angeles Times. http://articles.latimes.com/2011/dec/13/local/la-me-occupy-ports-20111213 (Accessed 21 May 2014).

Savigliano, Marta. 1995. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Society of Enemies. 2011. Blockading the Port is Only the First of Many Last Resorts. http://www.bayofrage.com/from-the-bay/blockading-the-port-is-only-the-firstof-many-last-resorts/ (Accessed 30 April 2014).

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The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011 Br. Runo Johnson Abstract: These solodarities are slides in the life of The People’s Mic, and its driver Br. Runo Johnson, who heard the noise in 2011 and set out to stand up, on his own for us all, or as many as he could find.

The People’s Mic (www.dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com) is an amplification enterprise, consisting in an ongoing series of performative street appearances all with the aim of stimulating and encouraging civic discourse.

A rustic street media platform, the Mic consists of an old church pulpit, a common handtruck, microphones, media, and a high-volume, battery-powered street amp.

With anything from a simple MP3 player to a high-end tablet device, the People’s Mic can host extended broadcasts of sound, video and live action in public space. And it does. Perhaps you will too?

The People’s Mic works on a volunteerist contractual basis and has done so for a wide range of events, actions and opportunities in Helsinki, Tallinn, Venice, Paris and Berlin. Requests and invitations can be received at: www.dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/contact/ Later it turned out his whole philosophy statement in the activate e-journal publication had been lifted from one ten-dollar paperback, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, by this old Italian guy: ‘The main stake of street actions is the reactivation of the body of the general intellect’ (Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi 2012).

Keywords: occupy; street performance; The People's Mic; protest; solidarity; performance art.

Watch ‘The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011’ here: http://vimeo.com/93944664 40

The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011 Br. Runo Johnson Solodarity 101: The People’s Mic - Vehicle of civic discourse enhancement Err-Regular street presence and events since Oct. 15 2011.

by Br. Runo Johnson – www.dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com Watch the Video ‘The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011’ here: http://vimeo.com/93944664 .00 BASIC INFO Name: The People’s Mic Born: Oct 15 2011 Helsinki, FI

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The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011

.01 BRIEF DESCRIPTION The People’s Mic (dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com) is an amplification enterprise, consisting in an ongoing series of performative street appearances all with the aim of stimulating and encouraging civic discourse.

Launched in response to the 2011 global call to action, the People’s Mic took concrete form as a rustic street media platform, consisting of an old church pulpit, wheels, a microphone, and a battery-powered amplifier. With the addition of an MP3 device, the People’s Mic is also able to host extended broadcasts of sound and video content in public space.

In its first year of public service, the People’s Mic worked to spread the 2011 spirit of activation by supporting the efforts of Occupy Helsinki, the Reality Research Center’s Urban Utopia project, the 2012 Finnish Social Forum, PAND’s yearly peace benefit concert, and the 22nd Int’l INURA conference on urban activism in Tallinn.

During the subsequent years, the People’s Mic has continued appearing locally for purposes of urban life stimulation, building capacity and new ways of saying.

Ongoing collaboration with current project partners could lead anywhere. Do it.

Because you never know, what might happen, might happen.

Technical upgrades planned for the Mic include video projection, interactive tablet media, carny barkery and livestreaming. Content plans are available for all worthy occasions, on a wide variety of topics addressed from a wide range of angles, in an assortment of styles and different languages. For more on the available content, see the Occupod (http://dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/occupyin-2/the-occupod/) or contact the Mic (http://dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/contact/%5D).

Walk, talk and spread waves, like the Brother says. .02 CONTENT: THE OCCUPOD Loaded content plug-in.

Heart and brains of the People’s Mic, the Occupod contains a year’s worth of Occupy. From the first live feeds, through heaps of media, music and creative action, on to the fancy talk and academic conferences.

We will have more from the Occupod available soon, meanwhile much of the content collected and rebroadcast in the first weeks and months of Occupy has been gathered and made available on Occupy.com and other sites. .03 ABOUT BR. RUNO JOHNSON It says on his stickers and flyers: ‘Wandering street reacher seeking revolutionary solidarities in the heart of your town.’ Not sure what it means, but sounds like a

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The Solodarities of Br. Runo Johnson on the People’s Mic - Part 1: 2011

stretch. Like ‘reacher’, what’s that? Range. Finder. Journey. Earshot. I mean, is he a preacher or isn’t he? And if so, you said it, not Br. Runo.

– More about him later. .04 ABOUT THE WAGON The wagon is self-assembled of parts, with a heart of empty-case worthwhile.

The first wheels were from the fire-red handtruck & later lights for making way in the dark.

The pulpit itself is hand-picked salvage, from a town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, out of some short-lived church up on Road 200 rolling into North Fork, incidentally Indian territory, and the exact center of California.

Straight out of the box, the Roland street amp he had found for it, fit right into its slot.

Original – Fall 2011 The wagon had known service also in various poetic enterprises before and after its removal to Finland, but was first called into the people’s service in the wake of 17 September 2011. Hearing the noise from America, Br. Runo completed construction on the wagon, and tuned it, voluminous, to do service as an instrument of standing up.

Br. Runo steps to the People’s Mic and stands up.

People’s Mic lite - 2012 Other versions of the People’s Mic have emerged to meet need and opportunity, while the original wagon continues to serve as a vehicle of stimulant disruption and utopia-targeting public discourse.

The People’s Mic lite was assembled last-minute for a trip to the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale. Seemed like a lucky year to attend, and attend we did.

People’s Mic report: Venice 2013 (http://dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/travels-3/).

The People’s Mic is mobile, because where the Mic is needed, the Mic should be.

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.05 PHILOSOPHY Just as all his content was borrowed, or so it seemed to some observers, all his ideas were stolen. Later it turned out his whole philosophy statement in the activate e-journal publication had been lifted from one ten-dollar paperback, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance, by this old Italian guy7: The main stake of street actions is the reactivation of the body of the general intellect (p.143).

Once poetry foresaw the abandonment of referentiality and the automation of language; now poetry may start the process of reactivating the emotional body, and therefore of reactivating social solidarity, starting from the reactivation of the desiring force of enunciation (p.20).

We have to start a process of deautomating the word, and a process of reactivating sensuousness (singularity of enunciation, the voice) in the sphere of social communication (p.21).

Poetic language is the insolvency in the field of enunciation: it refuses the exaction of a semiotic debt. Deixis acts against the reduction of language to indexicalization and abstract individuation, and the voice acts against the recombinant desensualization of language (p.21).

Poetic language is the occupation of the space of communication by words which escape the order of exchangeability: the road of excess, says William Blake, leads to the palace of wisdom. And wisdom is the space of singularity, bodily signification, the creation of sensuous meaning (p.22).

Poetry is the reopening of the indefinite, the ironic act of exceeding the established meaning of words (p.158).

When general intellect will be able to reconstitute its social and erotic body, capitalist rule will become obsolete. This is the new consciousness that comes from the explosion of the last months of 2010, from the reclamation of knowledge’s autonomy (p.142). .06 SOLIDARITIES SINCE 2011 2014 – Nadja Haas, Hertz Frequenz, Berlin 2013 – Reality Research Center, Utopian Reality, Helsinki 2012 – Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice INURA Conference, Tallinn Finnish Social Forum, Helsinki PAND Peace Benefit Concert, Helsinki 7 Berardi,

Franco ‘Bifo’. 2012. The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance. Intervention Series #14. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e).

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2011 – Occupy Helsinki and the flying spark of world revolution Occupy Musta Kissa, rowdy concert evening, Helsinki Occupy mbar, rowdy concert evening, Helsinki .07 OTHER PEOPLE’S MICS This project pays ongoing tribute to the creative arts of public speech everywhere. A brief log of kinds and types appearing in the ambit of Occupy can be found on the Other People’s Mics webpage (http://dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/other-peoplesmics-2/).

THE HUMAN MICROPHONE First, there was the Human Microphone – the original People’s Mic. For some early coverage and commentary on the People’s Mic as Human Microphone, check here (http://dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/#.U2oG38cYLm0).

THE PEOPLE’S MIC – Helsinki remote Oct. 15 2011 – In response to the global call to action, a pulpit-powered open-mic street amp relayed the noise from near and far.

For more about the Mic or the Wagon, see here (http://dapeoplesmic.wordpress.com/about-2/).

THE PEOPLE’S AMP Quite a bit later, after Zuccotti Park was evicted, and in support of the first organized attempt to ‘reoccupy’ (#D17), there came the People’s Amp. See the original here (http://occupywallst.org/article/d17-reoccupy-schedule/). The idea for the cool diagram came from Occupy Wall Street. Gladly copied in solidarity.

STREET SPEAKING A whole wildlife of charismatic street speakers came out on the occasion of Occupy Wall Street, and for a moment word from the street was getting channeled through onto mainstream TV news. See this guy (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQow0Fhua1A) for example.

STREET PLANS One genre of communicative strategy advanced by Occupy has been the choreography of direct actions carried out in the street. From #S17 2011 to #S17 2012, OWS provides us ample matter for psychogeographic analysis.

See for example this study of Liberty Square (http://places.designobserver.com/feature/mapping-liberty-plaza-zuccottipark/35948/).

MESSAGE DRESS Pictures can speak a thousand words, but sometimes it takes a costume to fit the whole message in one click. Walking your talk can begin with wearing it. Show up with what you know and smile. Like this lady (http://marnihalasa.tumblr.com/tagged/ows). Or Anarchopanda (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zatGYSqXmQ).

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STREET STARS Street-speaking stars like Reverend Billy, Tom Morello, Cornell West, Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Chris Hedges came down ready to talk to the cameras – and the people.

Br. Billy on the steps of St. Paul's - Revolujah! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5cUAr4LT8).

VEHICLES From bikes to bat signals, Occupy as could have been expected produced a number of advanced vehicular solutions for roving free speech conveyance.

The illuminator (http://theilluminator.org/post/24629749340/once-upon-a-night-ourfoggy-business) is the Occupy poster child of messaging vehicles.

LIVESTREAMS Tim Poole and other livestreamers brought the events of Occupy Wall Street to the world and made them happen there. If the eye is the mouth of the mind, livestream is its free speech. For a good article, see this (http://www.fastcompany.com/1796352/tim-pool-and-henry-ferry-men-behindoccupy-wall-streets-live-stream).

Or this Democracy Now feature about the Global Revolution livestream (http://www.democracynow.org/2011/11/18/the_revolution_will_be_live_streamed).

THE OCCU-COPTER Tim Poole was also behind the Occucopter, a catchy little aerial video drone, for counter-surveillance and good crowd cover.

For an early Guardian article, see here (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/dec/21/occupy-wallstreet-occucopter-tim-pool).

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Solidarity and Soldier(ity): Using Theatre in Military Contexts Nandita Dinesh Abstract: As a theatre practitioner-teacher-researcher-student, my work over the last few years has involved the use of community-based theatre in times/places of war. From Guatemala to Rwanda, from Northern Ireland to my own ‘Indian’ spaces of Kashmir and Nagaland, the potential and the limitations of theatre to respond to violence has formed the crux of my work. However, working primarily with ‘civil society’ (those who are widely considered to be ‘victims’ of war in all these contexts) last year has led to a critical questioning of my own biases in the choice of my target audiences. If theatre is to respond to war, must it not also engage with those who are considered the ‘perpetrators’?

It is in the context of this question that my six-week endeavour to teach theatre to military cadets emerges. My bi-weekly theatre sessions with cadets at the National Defence Academy in the city of Pune (India) resulted in the creation of a devised performance entitled Waiting – a piece that wove together excerpts from Beckett’s Waiting for Godot with monologues that the cadets wrote about things/people that they are waiting for. Using this experience as the primary stimulus, this text is a ‘creative new work’ that seeks to explore multiple performance (auto) ethnographies that emerged during the process.

This project’s approach to solidarity might be seen as an attempt to ensure ‘that we are only ever collaborators, co-inquirers, experiencing the work in an entirely valid but never superior way’ (Thompson 2009, p.134). In such an approach, solidarity can be about exploring – Thompson now quotes from Rancière – ‘an examination of “systems of possibilities” rather than assertions of certainties’ (Thompson 2009, p.134).

Keywords: (auto) ethnography; theatre & war; ‘perpetrators’; military contexts; solidarity.

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Solidarity and Soldier(ity): Using Theatre in Military Contexts Nandita Dinesh In my years of practice-based projects that seek to investigate the role of theatre in times/places of war, the concept of solidarity has had an unspoken, unquestioned, definition. This implicit, thesaurus-inspired, definition is evidenced by the many theatre-based projects in times/places of conflict that express their solidarity with ‘victims’ of war – rehabilitated child soldiers, genocide survivors and war veterans – by performing an agreement with anti-war rhetoric. By performing the narratives of those who face the effects of war, but only if they do not play an active role in its violent perpetration, theatre in contexts of violence seems to be about creating a solidarity with those who are considered ‘victims’. Power dynamics are taken for granted; so much so that armed ‘perpetrators’ – be they state-sponsored forces or otherwise – are widely accepted as falling outside the realm of the solidarity expressed by theatre work in times/places of war. As a precursor to my on-going and future theatre work that seeks to engage ‘perpetrators’ in active conflict zones, the preparatory project described here was designed to test the implications of such an endeavour in a more controlled setting. The work discussed in this text therefore, using theatre with armed forces cadets at the National Defence Academy (NDA) in India, is an attempt to explore what it means to perform solidarity in relation / response to future ‘perpetrators’ of violence.

In Theatre of Violence, Foster, Haupt & De Beer (2005) complicate the idea of the ‘perpetrator’ from South Africa’s years of apartheid by considering various approaches to how these men and women are understood. By discussing Arendt’s (1963) thoughts on the banality of evil, Milgram’s (1961) experiments that evidenced the role of authority in an individual’s committing of an act of violence, and the ‘routinisation’ of violence as in Rwanda, Foster et al. put forth the idea of a relational model for the origins of violence. The authors suggest (Foster et al. 2005, p.66): …that the origins of violence are not to be found within the enclosed figure of the individual perpetrator, but in the constellation of relations between persons, groups, ideologies and juxtaposed 48

Solidarity and Soldier(ity)

positionings which eventually emanate in the ‘toxic mix’ (Huggins et al. 2002, p.182), the ‘volatile mixture’ (TRC Report, Vol. 5, p.291), the spark of connections seen as a ‘short-circuit’ (Bauman 1989, p.93) or the ‘multiple identities which intertwine and resonate to generate violent propensities’ (Foster 2000b, p.9).

Drawing on Edward Said’s discussion on the multiplicity of identities, Theatre of Violence also complicates the ethics and the politics of working across and in between the lines of ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ by acknowledging the skewed power dynamics that often exist between members of these two groups. In addressing this concern though, Foster et al. (2005, p.90) carefully delineate the difference between understanding and empathy. Quoting a leading Holocaust scholar on Nazi perpetrators, Christopher Browning writes, ‘What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing, understanding is not forgiving’ (cited in Foster et al. 2005, p. 55).

Solidarity, in this piece of writing, uses Browning’s statement as a point of departure.

However, while the intention behind the work draws from Browning in its rejection of clichés around working with ‘perpetrators’, solidarity, as I see it, does not have to be about understanding or explanation either. What if working with ‘perpetrators’ of violence is not about understanding why or explaining how these men and women wield violence, just as it is not about excusing or forgiving those acts? What if this solidarity, in seeking to explore relational understandings of violence, is about the creation of a space, a gesture toward those who fall outside conventional boundaries of aesthetic events, the exploration of the liminal space between understanding and ignorance, between explanation and obfuscation? Perhaps this approach to solidarity might be best explained by Gumbrecht, who urges that we take a pause ‘before we begin to make sense’ (Gumbrecht, cited in Thompson 2009, p.132-133).

Thompson further elaborates on an ‘ethics of the position of the inquiry’ and considers the potential that comes from ‘research that coexists alongside experiences, processes or objects of interest’ (2009, p.133). This project’s solidarity then, its pause, might be seen through the lens that Thompson effectively describes.

By ensuring ‘that we are only ever collaborators, co-inquirers, experiencing the work in an entirely valid but never superior way’ (Thompson 2009, p.134), solidarity could become about exploring – Thompson now quotes from Rancière – ‘an examination

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of “systems of possibilities” rather than assertions of certainties’ (Thompson 2009, p.134).

The solidarity performed by my theatre work with the NDA cadets, who when later posted to conflict zones will most likely be considered ‘perpetrators’, was not intended to express a unity/agreement with the government’s armed forces. Rather, this work sought to perform its solidarity by examining the ‘systems of possibilities’ around the performativity of these young cadets’ military identities – their soldier(ity) – regardless of my acceptance of / agreement with what they expressed. What was at stake in this work was not an explanation of why or how the cadets approached their roles as ‘perpetrators’. Rather, the project was designed as an attempt to create a space in which theatre would engage those who condone the use of violence and are thus seen (generally) as being outside the purview of aesthetic endeavours. The potential of performing this approach to solidarity with soldier(ity) therefore, lay in the creation of a non-agenda-based space where I, having only previously worked with ‘victims’ of conflict, worked alongside those young cadets, many of whom would become those victims’ future ‘perpetrators’; a space that inspired insights that were just as auto-ethnographic as they were ethnographic.

In lieu of the balance between ethnography and auto-ethnography, this writing describes the work that developed from twice-a-week theatre workshops from August to October 2013. It weaves together an outline of my pedagogical approach to the project with the script of the final performance it resulted in, alongside reflexive analyses from my standpoint as the facilitator. The reflexive analyses that accompany the pedagogical design and the script of Waiting… – the piece that emerged as the result of this project – might be considered a form of performance (auto) ethnography that is described by Denzin as ‘mystory’ (2009, p.258): The mystory is simultaneously a personal mythology, a public story, a personal narrative and a performance that critiques. In making sense of its current historical moments, the mystory also consists of a series of quotations, documents and texts, placed side-by-side, producing a de-centered, multi-voiced text with voices and speakers speaking back and forth.

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By describing instances and excerpts from the process

and

product

of

this

theatrical

undertaking, the narratives (on the right hand side of each page) that accompany instances from the work (on the left hand side of each page) seek to invoke a performative and (auto) ethnographic approach to writing about this particular project that performs solidarity with soldier(ity).

A Note on Form The form in which this article has been written seeks to reflect the parallel, collaborative, and rhizomatic processes that were undertaken in the project. By placing the reflexive analyses alongside the pedagogical design and excerpts from the script of ‘Waiting…’, this article seeks to perform the simultaneous and complementary nature in which practice and theory came together in this work. The texts in this article therefore, evidence material that resulted from creative collaborations that thrived in being rhizomatic – one part of the project did depend on the next, but the relationships between the various fragments of this work could be re-defined and re-negotiated in other contexts. This work, therefore, might be read in multiple ways: as fragments, as sections, or sequentially.

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Waiting…: The Pedagogy Step 1: The cadets were asked to create and perform short plays about any facet of their lives at NDA, as a way to educate their new Dramatics Club facilitator (myself).

Step 2: The cadets were asked to write down why they joined the Dramatics Club and what skills they would like to develop.

Step 3: The cadets were introduced to the idea of monologues and the theme of Waiting… i.e. something/someone that they were waiting for. They were then asked to draft individual monologues around this theme.

Step 4: The cadets were presented with three performance strategies: using linear/fragmented narratives, playing with silences and pauses, and clarifying the target audience for their monologue. With these elements in mind, the cadets were asked to refine the first drafts of their monologues.

Step 5: The monologues were then grouped together according to the four main themes that emerged through the cadets’ first drafts: NDA Related Waiting; Friends & Family Related Waiting; Idealistic Waiting; Miscellaneous Waiting.

Step 6: The cadets were shown a video of the Lonely Soldier Monologues, a performance that is based on testimonies from US female soldiers who were deployed in Iraq. The screening was followed by a facilitated discussion about strategies that were used in the piece.

Step 7: The cadets were divided into four groups based on their interest in one of the four larger monologue themes, and were asked to combine the various monologues under that particular theme into one monologue, taking some creative licence as inspired by the Lonely Soldier Monologues.

Step 8: The cadets were informed about various production roles and were asked to choose the one that interested them the most. Appropriate reading and facilitated tasks were given to each group to prepare them for their particular role in Waiting.... The production roles included direction, stage management, design, acting, and playwriting.

Step 9: Taking into account the ideas from all the production teams, a draft for the final script was created; a draft that was later edited, rehearsed, and performed by the cadets.

Step 10: Waiting… was performed for an audience of the cadets’ peers at an international school close to the NDA; the students in the audience, in turn, performed a piece for the cadets. The performances were followed by a talkback between the two groups of young people, with them responding to each other’s performances.

Pedagogy at the NDA follows hierarchies, discipline, and punishment.

It was noteworthy therefore, that each of the plays created by the cadets in Step 1 – where they were asked to create and perform short plays about any aspect of their lives at NDA – invariably described a form of punishment that was part of the cadets’ training toward embodying the institutions’ ideals of creating ‘officers and gentlemen’. A process-based approach as the one I implemented, therefore, faced a number of roadblocks. The cadets were used to disciplinarian pedagogies, and the idea of being asked what they would like to talk about, what they would like to learn, led to an initial phase of chaos.

Cadets fell asleep when I, at the beginning of each session, asked them to just close their eyes and listen to a piece of music. (This idea was inspired

by Marilyn Nelson’s (2001) meditation time at the beginning of her poetry sessions at the West Point Military Academy in the United States. During her sessions, cadets, who had been forced to join the Dramatics Club by the NDA’s random allocation policy for extracurricular activities, did not bother performing their meditation, since there were no consequences/punishments for their actions).

My pedagogy then, evolved from being one that aimed to work with the Dramatic Club’s thirty-five cadets collectively, to one that placed an emphasis on choice – cadets were given four or five possible options of tasks they could undertake during each of my sessions. These tasks included relatively ‘easy’ ones like reading excerpts from plays and production role handbooks, to the more challenging tasks of being playwrights and creating original texts. Cadets could engage however they chose to, and for those who did not want to engage at all, I – in consultation with the civilian officers who had to monitor my sessions with the cadets – put in place a five-minute rule. If a cadet was more than five minutes late, he would not be allowed to join the class; however, he would still get his attendance sheet signed. So, the cadet who really did not want to make theatre had the option of showing up late, and yet, not facing any disciplinary consequences for that choice. This approach transformed the space from being chaotic, to 52 being creative.

Solidarity and Soldier(ity)

Waiting…: The Script Each of the segments from Waiting for Godot is the same excerpt, to establish the repetitive nature of waiting. Every time the segment is repeated, although, the primary emotion with which the scene is played is different. The primary emotion is indicated at the beginning of every scene and may be adapted as the director sees fit. Will this emotion be shown in the staging? The body language? The voice? The lighting? These segments are always performed by the same two actors.

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Each scene has two parts: Part 1 (which is the excerpt from Waiting for Godot) and Part 2 (which includes the cadets’ monologues). At a minimum, the piece requires 6 actors. However, this is subject to the director’s concept.

Scene 1: Part 1 Primary Emotion: Sorrow Estragon: Let's go.

Vladimir: We can't.

Estragon: Why not?

Vladimir: We're waiting for Godot.

Estragon: (despairingly). Ah! (Pause.) You're sure it was here?

Vladimir: What?

Estragon: That we were to wait.

Vladimir: He said by the tree. (They look at the tree.)

Do you see any others?

Estragon: What is it?

Vladimir: I don't know. A willow.

Estragon: Where are the leaves?

Vladimir: It must be dead.

Estragon: No more weeping.

Vladimir: Or perhaps it's not the season.

Estragon: Looks to me more like a bush.

Vladimir: A shrub.

The civilian officers who were my liaisons with the cadets, and whose presence was mandatory when an ‘outsider’ like myself was working with cadets, mentioned to me at our first meeting that theatre – to the cadets, and to NDA in general – implied a form of entertainment that was influenced by the genre of Bollywood. According to this logic, I was told, plays at NDA must not make audiences ‘think’ – since the cadets had rigorous training schedules that were physically and mentally demanding – but must only be an entertaining ‘break’ from the required discipline of their everyday schedules.

Deciding to frame the script around ‘Waiting for Godot’, using the cadet’s own monologues, and staging the performance in the round then, were conscious choices on my part – politically and pedagogically – choices that I had to consistently defend for the cadets I was working with.

Talking about the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ as a movement sparked many vibrant discussions with the cadets around what makes a performance ‘successful’ and what it means to create work that audiences ‘like’.

Similarly, discussing staging a piece in the round instead of the proscenium which was accepted among the cadets as the only way to stage a performance, sparked discussions that kept going back to one question for them: if audiences did not ‘like’ a performance, could that theatrical production be considered successful?

As for the monologues, the cadets asked me: ‘But why will people want to listen to what we have to say?’

I don’t think I managed to get the cadets to change their minds entirely about other values of theatre apart from its potential to entertain, but I do believe there was some critical questioning that was generated.

Ultimately though, the cadets only accepted the choices above because their final performance was not to be at NDA for their peers, but was instead to be performed for a group of international students at a nearby College (where I work). Assuaged by the fact that they would be performing for an audience that they believed would ‘get’ the piece in a way that their peers would not, this choice of our target audience became the only way in which the cadets were willing 53 to experiment.

Solidarity and Soldier(ity)

Estragon: A bush.

Vladimir: A—. What are you insinuating? That we've come to the wrong place Estragon: He should be here.

Vladimir: He didn't say for sure he'd come.

Estragon: And if he doesn't come?

Vladimir: We'll come back tomorrow.

Estragon: And then the day after tomorrow.

Vladimir: Possibly.

Estragon: And so on.

Vladimir: The point is— Estragon: Until he comes.

Scene 1: Part 2 What am I waiting for? Hmm…you know, two years ago I was living in Jammu. It was raining heavily and I was thinking of the assignment I had to complete and submit the next day. Amidst all this, I heard the melodious sound of a flute coming from somewhere. I turned my head around to find an old man sitting on the doorstep of an old age home, playing the flute in the most incredible way I had ever heard. Tears were rolling down his cheeks….This man sat on the doorstep every day, playing his flute, waiting, hoping that his son – his son who had just left him there – would realize his mistake and come back for him. It’s just…fathers and sons just have this bond, you know? …

My father was an army man and when I got into the Academy, he was happier than I was! Seeing his joy, his pride, seeing that I might be able to do for him what the flute-playing man’s son does not….I am waiting for the day my father will see me in this uniform, with stars shining in his eyes, flagging off the aircraft which is being flown by his son.

Scene 2: Part 1 Primary Emotion: Happiness. Repeat same scene as Scene 1: Part 1.

Scene 2: Part 2 What am I waiting for? When I was a kid, I was told I was worthless, that since I was not good in academics, I was good for nothing. No one ever asked me what I wanted to do or where I wanted to go…And then, in the eighth grade I watched the Bollywood movie Border. For the first time in my life, I was fascinated by the armed forces and that night when I went to bed, I had a dream. An incredible dream. An army of 300 brave Spartans charging over the enemy territory. The anger and blood in their eyes, the feeling of patriotism for their land. One among them – a young soldier—charging; making his way out to shed the blood of his enemy.

Trrr…trrr….trr…trrrrrrrrrrr.. To fly, to wear the uniform, to do something for my land…

So, when you ask me what I’m waiting for, well, I wait for the day a war breaks out and I get called to march

The monologues, as mentioned in the pedagogical overview above, were four theme-based collations of the thirty-five initial monologues that were written by the cadets. The monologues were as stimulating as they were banal; as clear as they were obscure; as honest as they were not. There were many interesting gleanings that I took from the process of the monologue creation – the creation that was the crux of my performance of solidarity.

Many of the monologues described the cadets’ waiting to graduate from the NDA. Talking about the intellectual degradation that came from the Academy’s primary focus on physical training, cadets mentioned the stress and fatigue of disciplinary mechanisms, and the acute homesickness that led to a countdown of DLTGH (Days Left To Go Home). There seemed to be an acute dissatisfaction with the current phase of their educational lives, and most of those who discussed their frustrations with the Academy expressed their confusion at the kind of education they were receiving – waiting for the day that they could leave the place. While many who expressed this angst did not articulate why then they continued to stay at NDA and seek this military education, some mentioned reasons that ranged from fulfilling parents’ dreams, to getting a free education, to embodying the romantic image of a military hero as performed in Bollywood films.

There were the few of course, who spoke of their nationalistic/patriotic fervour to fight for their nation. My ‘congenital pacifism’, to borrow again from Marilyn Nelson (2001, p.553), was constantly challenged by these particular instances.

Given that patriotism and nationalism are ideals that are highly critiqued, questioned – and even mocked – in other contexts in which I work, the sincerity with which the cadets spoke of ‘spilling blood’ and ‘conquering enemies’ was a quality that was provocative and stimulating in the performance of my solidarity with these young men and their context; a sincerity that has layered my thinking about these young men whose ‘perpetration’ in India’s conflict zones will, in the future, become actions I struggle with.

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ahead…I wait for the day I can shed every drop of my blood in serving my motherland and her boundaries, and when I come back from war, to continue my work to make this country a better place. It’s this wait that keeps me alive.

And all those people who told me I’m worthless, I’m waiting for the chance to prove them wrong.

Scene 3: Part 1 Primary Emotion: Anger. Repeat same scene as Scenes 1, 2: Part 1.

Scene 3: Part 2 What am I waiting for? I’m waiting for her. For her to come back to me and say to me that yes, she was wrong in her choice. I want her to feel that I was the best guy she could have ever met, and she made the biggest mistake of her life by choosing him. I am just waiting for the day that I will finish the Academy, become an officer, and go to her wearing that shining olive green uniform …Is that why she left me? Because I am an army man and she would have to be both the father and mother to our children? …I don’t know. All I know is that I want her to regret choosing him. And he, he will realize that he too made the biggest mistake of his life by betraying such a good friend like me…

What am I waiting for? I’m waiting for a true friend, true love. But what does this ‘truth’ look like? How does it behave? Do I ask for too much from the people in my life? I don’t know… Maybe I’m asking for too much…(Pause) An army man getting desperate about a girl… You know, I think it’s because I have too much time on my hands now. These peace postings, they give you too much time to think. Next week though, next week I’m being posted to Kashmir and then, I’m sure I’ll forget all about the past. And I will find someone new. Someone better. I guess that’s something worth waiting for!

Scene 4: Part 1 Primary Emotion: Desperation. Repeat same scene as Scenes 1, 2, 3: Part 1.

Scene 4: Part 2 What am I waiting for? You know, I wanted to become a doctor…or to just focus on buying a new car…or to start a chain of restaurants… but then, I got selected into the National Defence Academy... And now, now my life is so…screwed up. Running …7 km, 10 km, 12 km, 20 km, punishments for minor mistakes, physical strength but intellectual degradation….I am eagerly waiting for the day when I’ll finish the Academy. I feel suffocated; like I’m caged in some kind of prison.

But until that happens, I wait for the term break, count the Days Left to Go Home, clear my Physical Training tests, finish cross country runs, try to clear my exams.

The dubious position that the arts occupy at the NDA was revealed at many instances during the process.

Theatre sessions were cancelled a number of times for reasons ranging from football matches to examinations or dinners, and requests for the Dramatics Club to throw together performances at a week’s notice – ‘It’s only a play after all, how long can it take to put one together?’

Apart from dealing with the pedagogical challenges of working within a military context then, the complexities of my work at NDA were augmented by the very ‘low’ position that the arts seemed to occupy there.

While the Commandant of the Academy told me in a meeting that he always wanted to be a performer and that he thought the cadets would have a lot to learn from theatrical processes, his belief certainly did not filter down into lower ranks at the Academy. My focus on ‘affect’, on emphasising the potential of the ‘no point’ or the ‘bewilderment’ that James Thompson (2003, 2009) evocatively describes, seemed to be at odds with an education that was grounded firmly in an evaluation of ‘effect’. How to work within ‘effect’-based systems while not losing sight of the rich possibility of ‘affect’ then, was a constant renegotiation between myself, my civilian officer monitors, the cadets, and the Academy itself. A performativity of identities had to be juggled to address this renegotiation – that of being a theatre maker in a context that does not seem to value art; that of being a woman in an institution that does not allow female students; that of being a civilian in a civil-military binary that remains an unaddressed area of study and reflection in India.

These negotiations and renegotiations continued throughout the process and found their way into the final performance of ‘Waiting…’ for an audience of young people from different parts of the world. The performance was mired in complexities: battling NDA’s rules that cadets must not come into contact with foreign nationals; negotiating with officers in command, on the day of the show, who wanted to cancel the performance for a football game; facilitating discussions between young people who came from diverse 55 points on the political/idealist spectrum –

Solidarity and Soldier(ity)

Most of all, I wait to go home. For that day when I can wake up, pack my bags, check my tickets, get ready in jeans and a t-shirt, board the train, and leave the Academy. I close my eyes on the train and see people all around me, cheering, clapping. I’m playing on my guitar, performing to the words of my own life. Or, or, I’m sitting on a veranda with a good book, a hot cup of chai… (Long pause) You know what I’m waiting for? I’m waiting for the day that I have a child and then he or she gets to live her life her way. I’m waiting for her to have the freedom and the independence that I… (Pause) Every day that passes by makes me think that I am a day closer to what I am waiting for. For the wait to be over.

Scene 5: Part 1 Primary Emotion: Hope. Repeat same scene as Scenes 1, 2, 3, 4: Part 1.

While the work is still in too initial a stage to

one group that was from an educational institution that espouses non-violent ideologies and the other group that came from an educational institution that trains ‘warriors’. In the talk back after the performances, the two groups of young people reflected on each other’s work, resulting in the cadets making one particularly poignant statement: ‘We never thought someone would find our words interesting.’

The solidarity in this project therefore, lays in its attempt to create theatrical space for those who would one day become ‘perpetrators’ of violence; in one, infinitesimal, coming together of ‘Others’. ‘Perpetration’ was not judged; instead, future ‘perpetrators’ were approached through a solidarity that was not based on unconditional agreement, but on a grasping effort to reach out.

assert any certainties, this performance-based (auto) ethnographic approach did lead to an exploration of the ‘system of possibilities’ vis-àvis the position of theatre within a military context and thus, about working with (future) ‘perpetrators’ of violence. Defining solidarity as an attempt to reach out to an(Other) rather than as a unity that presupposes an agreement, enabled what was – for me, and hopefully for the cadets and their audiences – an incredibly rich learning environment that was steeped in layers of (auto) ethnographic insights. The insights ranged from perspectives on the cadets’ motivations for joining the army, to perspectives about the place that art holds in a military education, to perspectives about the performance of pedagogies and identities in disciplinarian contexts. These insights, then, are initial steps towards the larger consideration of performing solidarity within my work – a solidarity that attempts to create aesthetic spaces for those who are / will be ‘perpetrators’ of violence.

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Bibliography Denzin, Norman K. 2009. A critical performance pedagogy that matters.

Ethnography and Education, 4 (3). 255-270.

Foster, Don, Paul Haupt, & Maresa De Beer. 2005. The theatre of violence: Narratives of protagonists in the South African conflict. Oxford: James Currey Limited.

Nelson, Marilyn. 2001. Aborigine in the citadel. The Hudson Review, 53 (4). 543-553.

Thompson, James. 2003. Applied theatre: Bewilderment and beyond. Oxford: Peter Lang.

Thompson, James. 2009. Performance affects: Applied theatre and the end of effect.

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Jeux Sans Frontières I’ll be with you again Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira Abstract: Ana Bigotte Vieira (PT) and Sandra Lang (CH) present their collaborative project Jeux Sans Frontières (JSF) offering a perspective in which solidarity is defined or redefined through the description of JSF collective practices.

JSF is a transdisciplinary project, a magazine and a website, working on at the intersection of art, theory and politics. It functions as a nomadic platform, working on issues such as the financial and political crisis in Europe, migration, and artistic and activist practices of resistance against austerity politics.

An original sound piece is offered at the beginning of the text. The sound piece is a montage of sound excerpts from YouTube videos. It includes speeches by politicians and intellectuals, songs and news reports. From Charles de Gaulle’s words about Europe in the late 1950s and early 1960s, to Judith Butler’s speech at Zuccotti Park in 2011, it can be seen as a playful introduction to the themes addressed by the JSF platform, a path through the two editions of its magazine. In this text, Bigotte Vieira and Lang have chosen single interjections from the sound piece, using them as mottos or headings from which the different text sections are elaborated in a rather free and associative manner.

Keywords: Europe; friendship; borders; collaboration; Occupy Wall Street; solidarity; migration.

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1. Jeux Sans Frontières TV show in Italy and in France, courtesy JSF website (http://jsf.balas.pt/about/).

Jeux Sans Frontières I’ll be with you again Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira Introduction Jeux Sans Frontières (JSF) is a transdisciplinary platform, working at the intersection of art, theory and politics. It takes its name from the European TV show Jeux Sans Frontières – which, along with Eurovision, is one of the longest broadcasted programmes in the history of European television co-production, running between 1965 and 1999.

Besides producing and curating events, discussions, film screenings and artworks, JSF publishes irregularly a paper magazine on art, contemporary social movements and critical theory. JSF magazine’s first issue (JSF#1) was published in 2007. It addressed the construction of Europe, the Schengen borders and the south-north migration. Its second issue, currently in production, gathers a series of texts on micropolitical practices of resistance and invention throughout Europe and beyond since 2011. JSF#2’s framework is the ‘Crisis of Everything Everywhere’, which is also the name of the event in which Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira collaborated for the first time (16 Beaver Group, January 2012, NYC, http://www.16beavergroup.org/everything/).

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Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

Research on the term solidarity evidences that it is a ‘theoretically underdefined’ concept (Hoelzl 1998, p.45), despite being – or because it is – used in a wide range of fields and contexts. Considering its ambiguous origin and conceptual bleariness,8 the term ‘solidarity’, in our opinion, is difficult to be defined or re-defined from a theoretical point of view. We understand it more as a practice or a set of practices and behaviours than an ensemble of intentions. When it comes to JSF, we could say that solidarity operates on different levels or strata: 1. On an ‘individual’ level: solidarity informed our personal histories, how we met in NYC in 2011 in the aftermath of Occupy Wall Street and stayed in contact after returning to Europe. Since then, one of us lives in Switzerland and the other in Portugal, countries with contrasting ‘positions’ in the geopolitical order of Europe. It is in this context of friendship, but also in the context of a highly unequal Europe, that the idea of re-launching the Jeux Sans Frontières magazine project came up.

2. The second level is tied to the local context, mostly of Lisbon, in which JSF has been operating, proposing and taking part in diverse critical events popping up in the city, especially after the Troika-imposed austerity measures. Solidarity is manifested in the interaction with individuals and small collectives. It is not our concern to construct a brand or a ‘closed’ collective, but to build a multiplicity of connections.

Sometimes we create initiatives; sometimes we take part in activities launched by others; sometimes an idea that appeared inside a JSF event takes its own path.

3. On an ‘international’ level, JSF consists of exchanges (e.g. in symposiums, festivals, meetings) with people working in art, theory, critical theory-influenced 8

The term solidarity has a juridical origin. Coming from Roman law, it passed during the seventeenth century into French obligation law and designates still today a collective responsibility for a debt (Fiegle 2003, p.31-35). The passage to an ethico-political term happens during the nineteenth century in post-revolutionary France. Following Thomas Fiegle, the opinion that ‘solidarité’ was used in a revolutionary context as a synonym of ‘fraternité’ is not correct (2003, p.41). He states that the term was on the contrary introduced as an ethico-political concept by the ‘Ultras’, the conservative UltraRoyalists (Fiegle 2003, p.41). The Ultra-Royalists defended the return to a ‘natural order’, the monarchy in opposition to a man-made revolution (Fiegle 2003, p.41). ‘Solidarité’ in this context is tied to a conservative catholic thought and means a god given interdependency of men in a god given (unchangeable) social order (which is seen in opposition to the ‘fraternité’ between revolutionaries who want to change this order) (Fiegle 2003, p.43). This christian interpretation of solidarity has an interesting relation to the juridical one, in which solidarity is linked to a collective responsibility for a debt (or also a delicto in roman law). The interdependency of men in this religious interpretation is brought back to the original sin, to an original fault all men share (Fiegle 2003, p. 43-44).

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politics, people who are working on similar issues. This level has to do with building international collaborations, as well as with getting to know what is happening elsewhere and producing and facilitating the circulation of counter-information.

4. On the fourth and most ‘abstract’ level, solidarity is considered as something constitutive of a world where we desire to live in – and which we work to make possible at a local, as well as at a global level. In this sense, and as we both live in Europe, solidarity is currently tied up to our desire to participate in a collective ‘reinvention’ of Europe today – a Europe that should not be defined by its external or internal borders (‘fences’ and ‘walls’ built by a growing social injustice), nor by its colonizing impulses, but by emancipatory and egalitarian goals. Although these different levels or strata are intertwined in our practices, and listing them separately like this is but a thought exercise, we believe this operation can help us depict the complex interaction between issues, practices and affects at stake in such a project.

For the first draft of this text, each of us picked five sentences from the sound piece on JSF and sent them to the other. With these excerpts, we wrote paragraphs on JSF separately, taking as an inspiration the extracts of the sound piece we had received. After merging the different parts in one text, we reworked it together in an online-document, cutting out, adding and changing. Although remodelled, the text’s structure and style still reflects the initial concept of working separately and in relation to the sound piece extracts. The different parts still maintain a certain autonomy. The description of JSF unfolds in a way that is not completely linear; sometimes redundancies and language shifts take place, as they do in our project.

The explicit use of ‘broken’ English and the abrupt transition from one language to another (from English to French to Spanish to Italian to Portuguese) is at JSF’s very core. The confusion of languages is one of Europe’s main characteristics and we do communicate between ourselves mixing or using all these languages at once. Within this text – in an associative fashion – some of the crucial aspects, activities and ideas that compose JSF unfold.

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Click on this link to listen to the JSF sound piece: (https://soundcloud.com/user295376873/jeux-sans-frontieres-giocchi-senzafrontiere-jogos-sem-fronteiras)

2. Charles de Gaulle saying “L’Europe! L’Europe! L’Europe! (http://www.ina.fr/video/I00012536)

‘L’Europe! L’Europe! L’Europe!’

- says Charles de Gaulle at the beginning of the sound piece, notoriously agitated.

When speaking about Europe one should start in French and gradually change into English. The shift from French to English is also a temporal shift: a path from the aftermath of World War II when, in a world cut in two by the Cold War, l’idée d’ Europe, as a strong geo-political unity, appeared to our current global moment when broken-English had become the lingua franca – and the very idea of Europe, in itself, needed to be criticized and perhaps reinvented.

‘Bien entendu, on peut sauter sur sa chaise comme un cabri en disant l'Europe ! l'Europe ! l'Europe !... mais cela n' abouti à rien et cela ne signifie rien’. [Of course we can jump in the chair like a mountain goat saying L’Europe! L’Europe! L’Europe!.. but that means nothing and takes us nowhere]. Monsieur Charles De Gaulle, Président de la République, gets excited and jumps on the presidential chair, as we can see in this black and white uncredited video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKryjGXve_4). His hairless little head and his agitated gestures make him resemble a cartoon character.

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As contemporary witnesses of such a YouTube spectacle, we may surprise ourselves by bursting out laughing... L’Europe! L’Europe! L’Europe! We can play with the repeat button. Again: L’Europe! L’Europe! L’Europe! But nonetheless we, ourselves, jump in our chairs. His agitation – even if in twisted terms – is our agitation. What about Europe? ‘L’Europe est morte, il faut reinventer l’Europe’ [Europe is dead, we need to reinvent Europe] says Étienne Balibar later in the sound piece. And what if he too, was jumping on his chair? How can this relate to Jeux Sans Frontières show (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeux_Sans_Fronti%C3%A8res), a show De Gaulle himself is credited of having invented? What are all these jumps about?

3. Jeux Sans Frontières – learning to know Europe by competition, courtesy JSF website (http://jsf.balas.pt/about/).

In the TV show Jeux Sans Frontières, groups of people in absurd ‘traditional’ costumes would compete against each other inside swimming pools. The participants were citizens of little provincial cities all around Europe and carried the national flag in the opening and closing parade – which would therefore be seen as a parade of ‘brotherly’ nations. When analysed from today’s perspective, Jeux Sans Frontières summer competitions were one of the places where Europeans would learn who the other Europeans were, while relating to them in a competitive manner.

In that sense, the show can be seen as (part of) an apparatus to produce Europeans. They are an extension of Institutions such as the European parliament in Brussels or the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, as Jon MacAloon (1984, p.241-280) points out while analysing the relationship between leisure world events, such as the Olympics, and institutions like the United Nations.

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By re-proposing the name Jeux Sans Frontières now that Europeans have actually ‘been made’ and now that communication and travel technologies have reached such a point that people can effectively easily collaborate on a global level, we are calling into being other kinds of ‘games’, counter-games.

JSF is a project urging for the reinvention of Europe, while at the same time questioning the very ambiguities of Europe as an idea, a Europe (if we insist on this term), which cannot be based on exclusion and exploitation of individuals and entire geographical areas. We need to find out together what a different Europe may be, which ideas might hold us together. The mental image of Europe as a competitive game between nation states is a way of thinking that can lead to the notion that there is no point in trying to find solutions together – to a vision that refuses to see this crisis as a structural problem of late capitalism. It is a way of thinking, which on the contrary can lead to splitting Europe into 'successful ' and 'unsuccessful' countries, the 'successful' ones not wanting 'to pay' for the defeat of the latter. This way of thinking and acting is contrary to every kind of definition of solidarity we can imagine.

4. Mapping out gentrification in downtown Lisbon, Jeux Sans Frontières newsroom-ballsroom, Lisboa, INATEL Mouraria, September 2013. ©Sandra Lang

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Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

‘Frontières: des lieux d’échange et non pas des lieux d’élimination des lieux de circulation, et non pas simplement des lieux de police’.

[Borders: places of exchange and not places of elimination, places of circulation and not simply places of police.]

The project JSF started in Lisbon, in 2007, as a response to the Ceuta and Melilla border fence assault (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceuta_border_fence) of 2005, and developed

as

an

answer

to

the

signing

of

the

Lisbon

Treaty

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Lisbon), which made Schengen borders even more rigid. By that time, many people were working on migration issues through a variety of media such as text, video, theatre and visual arts. Suddenly, in Lisbon, we (Ana Bigotte Vieira, Marta Lança and José Nuno Matos) found ourselves in a position where we could easily produce and help to produce discourse around these issues. Already by then thought of as a transdisciplinary platform, JSF#1 ended up being a magazine whose main subjects were south-north migrations and ‘the others’ produced by the mechanisms of exclusion represented by the Schengen borders.

The magazine, published in Portuguese, gathered 15 texts organised into three sections: ideas, experiences and practices. The section ‘ideas’ gathered texts with a prevalently theoretical approach; the second section of the magazine, ‘experiences’, was a collection of first person testimonials, while the third and last section, ‘practices’, focused on artistic and political experiments. The latter, in the opinion of the editors, was able to deal with the issues described above, developing emancipatory

practices

instead

of

adopting

humanitarian

or

philanthropic

approaches.

In 2007, when Jogos Sem Fronteiras #1 was produced, the global financial crisis was just starting. Today, more than five years later, the financial crisis has evolved into a deep crisis of representative democracy and new borders seem to have been drawn inside Europe and even inside each country. For these reasons, JSF reappeared as a project with a new editorial, curating and artistic collective formation (Sandra Lang, Ana Bigotte Vieira and graphic designer Marco Balesteros). Marta Lança, from Buala (http://www.buala.org/en/games-without-borders/games-withoutborders-on-the-magazine-as-a-zone-of-resistancepractice-of-inven) – a postcolonial studies platform with a focus on global Portuguese language (Portugal- Brasil – 65

Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

Cabo Verde – Angola- Moçambique- São Tomé e Príncipe) – is in charge of its Portuguese version: the JSF associated section on the Buala website.

Although JSF #2 has a different focus, migration and the mechanisms of exclusion through European state organs are core concerns and constitutive parts of the entire project. Since we cannot speak about Europe without speaking about its borders, we likewise cannot speak about solidarity in Europe while letting people die on its door stills, like it happened in Lampedusa in 2013. Addressing the border from an epistemological point of view means paying attention to changes, interconnections, struggles and tensions. As we understand it, this approach is in itself a form of solidarity, as its goal is to extend and expand the complexity of binary divisions between North and South, rich and poor, ‘developed and ‘underdeveloped’, ‘European’ and ‘Non-European’, etc.

5. Reading Series at Jeux Sans Frontières independent publishers book fair Lisboa, in the courtyard of Palácio Sinel de Cordes - Trienal de Arquitectura. Photo by Ruth Lang. © Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira.

‘I came here to give my support to you today: to offer my solidarity’ This sentence comes out of a speech Judith Butler gave at occupied Zuccotti Park in New York, in 2011. In many ways, 2011 was a significant year in terms of social

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struggles. The occupations of the squares spread from one continent to another, through social media and through bodies gathering in spaces, finding one another in unexpected ways. Occupations of squares emerged in several countries, bursting somehow the ideological barrier between eastern and western cultures, which was carefully built up with the ideological and material ‘war on terror’ led by the United States in the preceding decade. Although the protests in Egypt, Madrid or New York were born under very different conditions and emerged out of distinct local contexts, Tahrir Square and the so called ‘Arab Spring’ seemed to have opened up a new space of imagination and desire, which passed from one continent to another. In Europe, on a smaller scale, similar things could be observed. There was something like a new sense of solidarity emerging from the struggles in Egypt, Tunisia, Spain, Portugal, Greece and so on. This sense of solidarity was created through this very open common denominator of occupation of squares and ‘public spaces’. And squares were occupied in northern Europe, UK and Germany as well.

The question is, what happened since then? In Europe, the repression through transnational organs such as the IMF along with the austerity measures imposed by the governments of the European Union seems to have divided more than to have brought together people around Southern and Northern Europe. Old myths such as that of ‘the lazy and corrupt South’ versus the ‘efficient and productive North’ have been reanimated. Rumours about the failing of the European project are haunting the continent like a spectre. In this climate, to revisit and interrogate the basis of ‘the’ European project and its construction are urgent tasks.

With the year 2011, new aggregations of transnational alliance emerged. Today, those new alliances cannot be thought of any longer in terms of a leading avantgarde or party proposing a uniform cultural project (as it may have been in the official international workers movement for a good part of the twentieth century). If new transnational solidarity is to be built, one should look at the actual grassroots movements. The impulses must come from there. The occupations of the squares produced crucial moments of emancipatory subjectivation. New forms of protest developed and other ways of staying together and ‘building solidarity’ were being experimented with. In our opinion, it is very important to understand those bigger events as not separate from a practice of continuing and daily micropolitical practices 67

Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

of resistance that started before the occupations and helped to make them possible.

We should try to understand them in continuity, alongside a myriad of encounters, practices and actions, that together we call ‘zones of resistance and practices of invention’ – which is the subtitle of the JSF #2 magazine.

6. Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira, performance ‘La Production de La Plus-Value”, La Friche Belle-de-Mai, Marseille, September 2013. Photo by Ruth Lang. © Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira.

‘I will be with you again’ Although JSF is a nomadic project with no permanent physical space, its proposition has to do with creating a space of encounter and discussion, a discursive and performative space that is produced through different practices such as walks, film screenings, performances, exhibitions and discussions.

In terms of its discursive and imaginary territory, JSF is nonetheless marked by the fact that Ana lives currently in Lisbon and Sandra lives in Zurich. Being in a continuous dialogue about the political reality in Europe (and not only in Europe!) after leaving New York in 2012, we observed very quickly how the perception of (and the discourse about) the political and financial crisis in Europe changes drastically from a South European and strongly affected country like Portugal to a North European country like Switzerland, where the crisis is present but can still be ignored by some people. One of our main concerns has been to produce and disseminate images other than those circulated in the mainstream media9 about what’s currently going on in terms of precariousness, local struggles and artistic critical practices in metropolitan areas like Lisbon.

9

Think for example of the connotations of an acronym such as PIIGS for Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain.

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Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

7. Resistance. Miguel Pereira performing at Jeux Sans Frontières independent publishers book fair Lisboa, Palácio Sinel de Cordes - Trienal de Arquitectura. Photo by Ruth Lang. © Miguel Pereira

‘Una questione di qualità o solo una formalità’ [a matter of quality or a mere formality?]

‘Sans Frontières’ means not only without national borders but also crossing disciplinary borders and separate fields of knowledge. Up until now, our events and activities have always come from local specificities and contextual necessities – where contemporary issues are addressed through a variety of media. For example, in NYC, at the 16 Beaver Group mid-winter retreat Crisis of Everything Everywhere (http://www.16beavergroup.org/01.07.12.htm) which took place in January 2012 in the immediate aftermath of Occupy Wall Street, we organized a walk. The idea was to actively map out all the different places New York General Assembly thought of occupying before having chosen Zuccoti park. The walk and the elaboration of the map have performative aspects, which we see as instruments to better interact with and understand the local context. Topological questions are very important for the theoretical basis of the magazine and maps were already included in JFS #1, in which we re-printed Indimedia Estrecho of Gibraltar resistance. As we saw in New York, a walk to specific places can be a potent tool for opening up discussion and exchange of information and experiences. In Lisbon (December 2012), at Galeria da 69

Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

Boavista during the open call project ‘Ora Bolas, Há Espaço, Vamos Usá-lo!’, we curated O mapa não é o do país [It’s not about

your own country’s map]

(http://demimonde.weebly.com/13-19-dezembro.html), an event which is currently in its third instantiation. What is at stake in this project is looking at the crisis as a transnational problem.10 For our work in the framework of Sound Development City Summer Expedition (http://2013.sound-development-city.com/projects/artists/43/dates/) (Lisbon Trienal of Architecture and Marseille Capital of Culture, 2013), understanding production and circulation of knowledge as intimately related, we decided to produce JSF#2 magazine (on spaces of resistance and practices of invention) in Lisbon and present JSF#1 magazine (on borders and migration issues) in Marseille. With this in mind, we set up a newsroom in Lisbon where we edited JSF#2. As a response to the fact that several important Lisbon bookstores and publishing houses have been closing down due to the crisis, while at the same time a new scene of independent political and artistic publishers is popping up, we launched a book fair and invited independent publishers to join us at the Lisbon Trienal of architecture courtyard. This event was conceived as a meta-reflection on our own project of JSF#2: why were we doing a second magazine if we haven’t even sold JSF#1? What is at stake in independent publishing?

The idea of the fair was connected to the geographical location of the Trienal space itself, which is located in the same area in which the traditional ‘feira da ladra’ (translated, ‘the fair of the thieves’ which is actually the famous Lisbon flea market) takes place. Proposing a small and ‘DIY’ independent book fair was a response to 10

In Graz, at the international 10 days encounter on politics and art Steirischer Herbst’s Truth is

Concrete (http://www.truthisconcrete.org/) (October 2012), we produced an on-going Radio show called Radio Outono, during which we interviewed participants of the event on issues such as the situationist concept of ‘recuperation’ and the market of political art. In Zurich (March 2013, Corner College Gallery), we organized ‘Austerity? Ora Bolas!’ (http://www.cornercollege.com/Veranstaltungen/1364338800/684) a discussion on Lisbon, arts, demonstrations, and the crisis. In November 2013, JSF participated at Spielart Festival ‘Wake up’ (http://www.spielart.org/program/wakeup/) with the lecture-performance ‘Lisbon, Lack and Excess’ (the video of the performance can be seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGpf2DHJOWQ).

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Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

the culture of Global branding and of the franchising of stores that is taking place everywhere (at a very intense pace in Lisbon, we should add).

In Marseille, a city with a strong migrant tradition, together with the well-known documentary festival FID Marseille, we organized a screening of Pedro Pinho and Frederico Lobo’s Bab Cepta on the subject of borders in southwest Europe. The project for this film (still in production in 2007) had been published in JSF#1 magazine and in the meantime the film was awarded a prize at FID Marseille film festival. Suddenly, during our stay in this city, the 2007 JSF#1 magazine on borders of Europe became terribly real: hundreds of dead bodies were day after day arriving to Lampedusa. In this context, we presented the whole JSF project at Équitáble café, a grass-roots local association. Later, playing with both our condition of publishers and ‘creative class’ workers participating (even if on its margins) in ‘Marseille Capital of Culture’, we decided to make a performance in a location called ‘friche belle de mai’, a newer creative industry centre in Marseille. We decided to try to sell an extract of the JSF#1 magazine to people in this location, discussing with them the issues of the magazine and at what price it should be sold. The title of the performance was ‘La création de la plus-value’ and the entire event was a parody on precariousness and immaterial labour.

Most recently, in 2014, JSF took part in the Democracy workshop of The New Abduction

of

Europe

(http://nuevoraptodeeuropa.net/)

seminar,

where

a

transnational group of collectives and individuals tried to craft a Charter for Europe (http://www.euronomade.info/?p=1930). This is an on-going project, which will take place, among other places, at The Art of Being Many (http://the-art-of-beingmany.net/), a gathering in Hamburg in September 2014. JSF will be there.

Conclusion Instead of trying to come closer to an ‘essence’ or ‘root’ of the term solidarity, we’d like to propose a contextualised use and discussion of its possible definition in relation to specific practices. The use of the term solidarity would then be characterised by the unfolding of its various meanings every time, tied to a specific space and situation. As we experience in our practice with JSF, to be conscious of

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Jeux Sans Frontières. I’ll be with you again

the relations in space and the hierarchies and forms of speech always goes together with the discussion of a certain content.

Since 2011, the year of the occupations, many things have changed. New protests are still emerging, but as it happens in Eastern Europe, those protests – even if once again connected to an occupied square like the Maidan movement in Ukraine – can take on strongly nationalist tendencies. People seem to be ready to give up on the idea of a common Europe much more quickly than one of the nation state. On the contrary, it seems we are observing a return to various forms of nationalism around the European geographical territory. In this light, even if we have concluded without having proposed a ‘coherent’ and universally applicable definition of solidarity, we think there is an imperative to discuss this and similar concepts and their relation to Europe today. The possibility of merging these different points – the contextualised discourse, the development of emancipatory grassroots practices and the meaning of solidarity in relation to Europe – is what is at stake in experiments such as the Charter

of

Lampedusa

(http://www.meltingpot.org/Autori.html)

or

the

above

mentioned Charter for Europe. Discussions, experiments and debates shall happen at multiple levels and in a myriad of spaces – both live and online. And that is precisely how we read activate’s call: as an invitation to expand a field of discussion we are already engaged in through JSF.

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Bibliography Fiegle, Thomas. 2003. Von der Solidarité zur Solidarität. Ein französisch-deutscher Begriffstransfer. Münster: Lit Verlag.

Hoelzl, Michael. 1998. Recognizing the Sacrificial Victim: the Problem of Solidarity for Critical Social Theory. Journal for Rultural and religious Theory, 6(1), pp.45–64. http://www.jcrt.org/archives/06.1/hoelzl.pdf (15 May 2014).

Macaloon, J. John. 1984. Rite, Drama, Festival, Spectacle: Rehearsals Toward a Theory of Cultural Performance. Institute for the Study of Human Issues: Philadelphia.

Websites: Ana Bigotte Vieira | Sandra Lang – Lissabon zwischen Mangel und Überfluss. 2013. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGpf2DHJOWQ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Austerity?

‘ORA BOLAS!.

2013.

Corner College http://www.cornercollege.com/Veranstaltungen/1364338800/684 (Accessed 30 May 2014).

De Gaulle et l'Europe. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKryjGXve_4 (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Debt, war & democratic revolutions. 2014. The New Abduction of Europe. http://nuevoraptodeeuropa.net/ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Games without Borders - on the magazine as a ‘zone of resistance/practice of invention’. Buala. http://www.buala.org/en/games-without-borders/games-withoutborders-on-the-magazine-as-a-zone-of-resistancepractice-of-inven (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Progetto Melting Pot Europa. 2014. http://www.meltingpot.org/Autori.html (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Sound Development City.

2013. http://2013.sound-developmentcity.com/projects/artists/43/dates/ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

The Art of Being Many: An Assembly of Assemblies. 2014. http://the-art-of-beingmany.net/ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Truth is Concrete. http://www.truthisconcrete.org/ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Una Carta per l’Europa: note sull’incontro di Madrid e sulla rottura possibile di un’evidenza. 2014. EuroNomade.http://www.euronomade.info/?p=1930 (Accessed 30 May 2014).

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WAKE UP! Assembly for a different Europe.

2013. http://www.spielart.org/program/wakeup/ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

SPIELART.

16 Beaver Group. 2012. http://www.16beavergroup.org/everything/ (Accessed 30 May 2014).

11-19 DEZEMBRO ORA BOLAS! HÁ ESPAÇO! VAMOS USÁ-LO! Newsletter # 4.

Demimonde. http://demimonde.weebly.com/13-19-dezembro.html (Accessed 30 May 2014).

Sound piece: Lang, Sandra & Ana Bigotte Vieira. 2013. Jogos Sem Fronteiras. [12:35 Sound piece]. https://soundcloud.com/user295376873/jeux-sans-frontieres-giocchi-senzafrontiere-jogos-sem-fronteiras (Accessed 31 May 2014).

Images: 1. On: Nastrorosa. Blog. http://nastrorosa.blogs.it/2007/08/03/jeux_sans_frontieres~2751840/ (15.01.2014) On: Chez Toto-Rino. Blog. http://toto-rino.e-monsite.com/blog/totorigolo/fil-rouge.html (15 May 2014) 2. Office National de Radiodiffusion Télévision Française. 1965. Charles De Gaulle.

Cabri, l’Europe! l’Europe! [video still] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zufecNrhhLs (15 May 2014) 3. Sandra Lang, JSF TV show [ two screenshots from the JSF website] http://jsf.balas.pt/about/ (15 May 2014, the domain name will change soon to j-s-f.eu) 4. 5. 6. Lang, Ruth. 2013 Sound Development City. [Private Image Stock Bigotte Vieira, Ana. Lang, Sandra]. © Sandra Lang and Ana Bigotte Vieira 7. Resistance. Miguel Pereira performing at Jeux Sans Frontières independent publishers book fair Lisboa, Palácio Sinel de Cordes - Trienal de Arquitectura. © Miguel Pereira.

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Being with Time, Contemporary Art)

reviewing

TIME

(Documents

of

Megan Garrett-Jones Abstract: On 25 September 2013, Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press released TIME, the latest book in their Documents of Contemporary Art series. On 10 July 2013 at 14:32, I emailed the book’s editor, Amelia Groom, to ask for a copy to review. She replied two days later (12 July 2013) at 12:36. Some time in October 2013 the book arrived by post. TIME is a compilation of texts from artists and thinkers exploring a wealth of conceptions of time beyond that which is measurable, linear and driven towards the unified progress of humanity. It comes in light of contemporary obsessions with timekeeping and productivity. Among other times, I spent three of my days off work composing this review, which asks how rethinking time might also be a rethinking of solidarity. This April (2014), I am revising the article in light of my peers’ reviews. I am thinking about meaning as encounter, as being in the presence of some thing in the world. Writing and art (documents) are meeting points, permitting a being present with that not only forges meanings across time, but also creates our very notion of it. The term solidarity can be useful in rethinking our attention to being with in time, while the considerations of temporality in this review allow us to rethink solidarity as action not only in time, but across times.

Keywords: time; duration; art theory; Whitechapel Gallery; solidarity.

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Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art) Megan Garrett-Jones It might seem strange to review a book in which texts have been collected around the theme of time for inclusion in a journal issue on the theme of solidarity. Still, the pervasiveness of questions of temporality in current thinking and creative practice, as exemplified in the book TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 11 begs consideration of how implications of these issues spill into other concerns. Under consideration in this review is rethinking solidarity by rethinking time. ‘Time’ is a long established theoretical base camp for the performance studies discipline. My reading of this book is impacted by an attempt to explore potentialities of solidarity and/in performance by drawing out a notion of solidarity that considers time. Attention is given to the textual enactment of being with and meetings of commonality amongst the contributions in TIME. First, I wish to address what the evocation of ‘solidarity’ means in regards to the key discursive underpinnings of TIME, which could be described as the proposal to wrest time from the modern narrative of linear progress and the objectivist perspective of traditional Western metaphysics. The desire for objectivity that holds time as a measurable and unidirectional element is of the same outlook that demands absolutes and truths verifiable with reference to an external nonhuman reality (Rorty 1991, p.21). Rorty suggests a conception of solidarity in contrast with objectivity, following the (largely poststructuralist) thesis that meaning is formed in relations amongst people (1991). The perception of time as progress in line with goals for a common humanity is one absolute that is undone with the awareness that the flow of time sees only the multiplication of difference. Solidarity emerges as dialogue between multiple understandings, and a continual process of (re)forging common modes of knowledge. For Rorty, this is the way that meaning forms in relation to a community, though we may go further with Jean Luc Nancy to say that being 11

Groom, Amelia (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

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Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art)

becomes meaning precisely in the condition of being with (2000). Solidarity then, in this text, is understood as this condition of being present with that considers different temporal understandings of this being with.

The question of what it is to be contemporary that concerns many of the texts in TIME may be refigured as a question of what it means to be with (an artwork, another person, a text), and as a question therefore of solidarity. In one of the weightier critical inclusions in the collection, Giorgio Agamben explores the figure of ‘the contemporary’ as one perceiving the present who is not subsumed by the here and now. From the perspective of the critic, he asks, how can we be contemporaries of texts we access from the (distant or near) past? Agamben draws a lesson from one epitome of contemporariness – fashion, in its ability to ‘recall, re-evoke and revitalise that which it has declared dead’ (2009, p.87). This ability for citation is linked with untimeliness, a Nietzschian notion that reappears throughout the book, referring to the archaic out-of-time. Untimeliness is to see the past, and perhaps the future, as always within the present. ‘Our age’ is thus fractured; its darkness is time not lived. ‘The contemporary’ shines light on this darkness by making ‘of this fracture a meeting place, or an encounter between times and generations’ (Agamben 2009, p.88). Here it is suggested that to be in the presence of is not necessarily to be present with, and the possibility for trans-temporal discursive communities is cleaved open.

The survey of artists in TIME via commentary and artists’ texts further asks what is a contemporary artist, examines the time of being with an artwork, and how art may act as a trans-temporal discursive nexus. In Quinn Latimer’s contribution, it is inbuilt anachronism that makes painter Sylvia Sleigh truly contemporary. Her realist style that documented the bohemian/domestic lives of her husband and inner circle was at odds with the context of their production: 1970s New York at the height of abstract painting and radical second-wave feminism. A sore thumb in the 1970’s, her work now creates a bridge for viewers to that time, but also to the realist figurative traditions it drew upon, a ‘doubling’ created through its ‘handling and dismantling of time’s autonomy and progression’ (Latimer 2013, p.92). Other examples are presented of artists bridging temporal divides, such as the home-movie mash-ups of

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Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art)

artist duo nova-Milne. A common thread is found in the challenging or ‘dismantling’ of rigid chronologies to place temporally disparate elements in dialogue.

Works of the artist (or critic) can forge meetings across times. In the introduction to TIME, editor Amelia Groom warns that to access them ‘simply as pedagogical historical documents is to suffocate them’ (2013, p.15). If solidarity is a meeting – a being with – then it must also be an activation. In TIME, George Didi-Huberman (2000, p.34) recounts the experience of standing before a 1440’s Italian fresco and having a ‘blaze of colour’ recall for him the action paintings of Jackson Pollock. While inadequate for a historical analysis, this ‘involuntary memory’, in the spirit of Proust or Benjamin, showed, not that the fresco was a precursor to action painting, but that ‘before an image […], the present never ceases to reshape’ (Didi-Huberman 2000, p.35). Viewing an artwork is an action of complex multi-temporality, and it is the effort and the perspective of the beholder that imagines a communion of meaning across time. TIME attests to the many artists and curators making this process explicit through

attention

to

the

archive

and

re-presentation

of

history.

Of course it is not only the relation between art and history under revision in TIME. The book is structured into successive sections of before, during and after, and this decision seems ironically framed by its iterations rejecting the dominance of linearity and progression. The texts, thus organised, work to define as much as to challenge these categories.

In during, Boris Groys succinctly iterates the feeling that gives rise to our contemporary fixation with time, which may well shape out notions of solidarity. It is proposed that contemporary anxieties about time are born from the dissolution of the Modernist project, particularly the accumulation of our time and work towards utopic futures. In this dissolution, the present time can be viewed as a pause, a reconsideration, and even a crisis of what we are doing with our time. As Groys states, ‘under the conditions of our contemporary product-orientated civilisation, time does indeed have problems when it is perceived as being unproductive, wasted, meaningless’ (2009, p.154). So-called ‘time-based’ art draws on wasted time, excess time, repetitive time, and even creates ‘art-based time’ to attest ‘to our life as pure being-in-time’ (Groys 2009, p.153). The old catch cry of performance as pure 78

Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art)

presence is rehashed here. We are to become ‘comrades of time’ and to consider the contemporary as ‘being with time’ – a state in which notions of past and futurity are stripped back to a being with in the presence of repetition and perpetual reinvention. Again, the dissolution of Modernist myths of progress affects a rethinking of solidarity. If we are no longer joined in a common goal for humanity, perhaps Groys’s ‘art-based time’ finds an equivalence in a pure being with others, attending simply to the presence of others.

The idea of pure presence is ever problematic. Revealing is that Nato Thompson’s contribution delivers little more than a description of Marina Abramović’s mystique and celebrity. In Abramović’s The Artist is Present, the event of being with the artist is supposed to provide a communion, and yet the short excerpt, ‘Contractions of Time: On Social practice from a Temporal Perspective’, never gets to the promising subject implied in its title. Later, Nancy Spector’s review of Il Tempo Postra, curated

by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Phillipe Parreno, describes a show in which the audience are with performance works staged in a proscenium arch theatre for a set duration as an experiment in ‘still-unexplored territory’ for the visual arts (2007, p.130). The difference between this show and theatre is that it was billed as a durational exhibition. Performance studies might however suggest such disciplinary distinctions are unhelpful, as the inclusion of artists from a variety of disciplinary leanings using an incredible breadth of temporal properties throughout TIME would confirm.

Triteness from a few of the magazine-style inclusions is one of my few criticisms of this book. Funnily, as they are discussing the more recent projects, they may just be there to give the book a ‘so contemporary’ edge. Often giving a mere taste, the format of this book can work as a prompt for further enquiry, an occasional touchstone, or food-for-thought for those of us who rush around our busy lives.

A collection of writings on time would feel lacking without Henri Bergson – an early critic of the dominance of a homogenous, unidirectional approach to time. His brief excerpt pertains to time’s indivisibility. Time as duration is in fact movement and division; even infinitely small points on a trajectory form an incomplete representation. This short text is a mere flash-in-the-pan of Bergson’s ideas, although provides for an also brief Bergsonian follow-on from Gilles Deleuze on the qualitative difference in both time and space. As a compilation, one could easily jump 79

Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art)

around the artificial linearity of TIME. However, reading the texts successively is rewarding, as key references and points are picked up from one text to the next. The editor’s hand can be felt in placing these voices in direct dialogue, making overt the very process of ‘making contemporary’ as described by Agamben.

What makes artists who deal specifically with duration continually accessible is the way that their temporal attentiveness produces documents. Teching Hsieh’s extensive mapping of his trajectories through New York City during his year spent outside (never entering a building of any kind), made it possible for critic Adrian Heathfield to retrace the artist’s steps for his book, Out of Now: Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh (Heathfield 2008). What makes On Kawara’s date paintings an effective prompt to consider our relation to the recording and measurement of time is their hanging on a wall, stubbornly announcing a date already past, a moment frozen to be pushed forward into the future. For Jean Luc Nancy reflecting on On Kawara in TIME, poesis (artistic production) is itself a ‘putting forward’ within the temporal passage – it is to encounter the already past (1997, p.110).

‘Art-based time’ may refer more simply to an understanding of time that is experiential, involving a ‘tactile attentiveness’ and ‘the collapse of objective measure’, as Adrian Heathfield notes (2009, p.97). It is the marking of our experience of time that allows it to be communicated to others and accounts for the multiplicity of human experience. In a way, TIME performs this exchange – making connections and facilitating circulation around particular notions of time. We might return to Rorty for the suggestion that solidarity emerges from common allegiances to the perception of ‘what it is good for us to believe’ (1991, p.8). With the particular slant of this book, rethinking temporality can be equated with rethinking a standpoint of solidarity: of being in time together – both a receptive opening up to the present and the forging of networks across time.

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Being with Time, reviewing TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art)

Bibliography Agamben, Giorgio. 2013 (2009). What is Contemporary?. In Groom, Amelia (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 82-89. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Groys, Boris. 2013 (2009). Comrades of Time. In Groom (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 152-155. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Groom, Amelia. 2013. Introduction. In Groom (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 12-25. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Heathfield, Adrian. 2008. Out of Now: Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh, Cambridge, MA: The MIT University Press.

Heathfield, Adrian. 2013 (2009). Thought of Duration. In Groom, (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 97-98. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Latimer, Quinn. 2013. A Step Out Of Time: Sylvia Sleigh’s Extraordinary ‘History Pictures’. In Groom (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 89-92. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2013 (1997). The Technique of the Present. In Groom (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 104-115. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. 2000. Being Singular Plural. California: Stanford University Press.

Rorty, Richard. 1991. Solidarity or Objectivity?. In Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers Volume 1, 21-34. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, .

Spector, Nancy. 2013 (2007). Time Frame. In Groom (ed.), TIME (Documents of Contemporary Art), 129-131. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press.

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SOLIDARITY AND / IN PERFORMANCE: RETHINKING DEFINITIONS & EXPLORING POTENTIALITIES NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS EDITORIAL COMMITTEE Guest Editor: Katerina Paramana is a London-based artist from Athens, Greece. She makes performances, installation- and lecture-performances. Her work examines the construction of systems, the relationships they afford and the economies of thought, interaction and exchange they (re)produce. It has been presented in theatres and galleries in the US, UK, Sweden, Portugal and Greece. Katerina has also performed for companies and artists in the UK and the US (e.g. Tino Sehgal, Ivana Müller, Bojana Cvejić and Christine De Smedt, Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, Lea Anderson, Simon Vincenzi) at venues including Barbican Theatre, Tate Modern, Laban, Siobhan Davies Studios, Southbank Centre, Kennedy Centre (D.C.) and Lincoln Centre (NYC). She is currently completing a PhD at University of Roehampton, London supervised by Professor Joe Kelleher and Dr Anna Pakes and funded by the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. Her research has been presented in conferences and symposia internationally. Katerina was an Associate Researcher with Performance Matters directed by Adrian Heathfield, Gavin Butt and Lois Keidan. She holds an MA in Choreography (Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance) and BAs in Theatre and in Dance (University of Maryland, US). She has taught modules, workshops and lectures on live art, dance, theatre and performance in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. She is an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London. www.katerinaparamana.com Managing Editor: Maria del Mar Yanez-Lopez is a PhD candidate at Roehampton University. Her research is situated within the area of historiography and feminism/s in performance.

She is researching ideas about the production, transmission and mediation of received bodies of knowledge and the role that ‘ephemeral’ art and ‘living’ archives may play in contesting hegemonic versions of these processes. Her academic background is in Art History (BA, Birckbeck College) and Collections Care (MA Northumbria University). Her research extends her previous interest in models of spectatorship and the politics of participation in the contemporary cultural arena, as well as critical questions about the management of media art in public collections.

These are aspects that she explored during her past collections care work in Spanish and UK museums and galleries.

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Associate Editor: Betina Panagiotara is a PhD researcher at the University of Roehampton – Dance and Drama, Theatre & Performance Department -, exploring artistic practices during times of social crisis, focusing on choreographers operating in Greece. In this context, she is looking at emerging artistic identities, historical representations in performances, contemporary dance making within a neoliberal context, and in particular notions of collectivity and collaboration. Her research is realized with a scholarship from the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. She has studied Communication, Media & Culture at Panteion University, Greece (BA, 2003) and has received her Master in Arts in Dance Histories, Cultures & Practices from Surrey University, UK (2006) receiving the Lansdale Prize for the dissertation “Sinequanon: an investigation of postmodern dance in Greece”. She collaborates with festivals and artists in research and production, and has worked as journalist for Greek newspapers and magazines. Email: panagiop@roehampton.ac.uk, Blog: Ferry bot & the dreadful supervisors

Associate Editor: Emily Sweeney is a movement artist, originally from Vermont (US), where she studied at Bennington College, but now working internationally, performing, teaching, and participating in artist residencies around North America and Europe. Her work is concerned with the interplay among improvisation, choreography, bodies, senses, spaces, and memory. Her current projects include: an adaptation of “Dynamic”, a solo by Deborah Hay; resonance, an ongoing research and performance collaboration with Martín Lanz Landázuri and William “Bilwa” Costa; and Imaginary is also real, a telepathic improvisation experiment in collaboration with Jil Stifel. Emily is a founding member of the interdisciplinary working groups Perpetual Movement Sound and Intercontinental Collaborations. She has performed in the work of Claudia Bosse/theatercombinat at Impulstanz Vienna, and with Emily Johnson/Catalyst Dance. Emily is also a yoga teacher, having received her certification through the Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Academy in Vrindavan, India. She holds an MA in Performance & Creative Research from the University of Roehampton in London. www.emilysweeney.net

CONTRIBUTORS Nandita Dinesh currently teaches Theatre and heads the Arts Department at UWC Mahindra College, India. She is a Ph.D candidate in Drama at the University of Cape Town, and has received an M.A. in Performance Studies from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Focussing on the role that theatre can play during and after violent conflict, Nandita has conducted community-based theatre projects 83

in India (Ahmedabad, Nagaland, Jammu, and Kashmir), Mexico, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, and Zimbabwe.

Megan Garrett-Jones is a writer and an artist who works in performance. She has a Research Masters in Performance and Creative Research from the University of Roehampton, London, a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Performance Studies from the University of Sydney, and a Bachelor of Creative Arts from the School of Music and Drama at the University of Wollongong. Megan’s explorations into time-based writing find occasional iteration on tumbr (http://timewrite.tumblr.com) and, coupled with an interest in performance in public, engendered her ongoing Advice To Park Users project (http://www.meggj.com/blog.php?index=advicetoparkusers#). Her Masters research focused on socially engaged art, for which she produced the walking tour Now, Monument with the assistance of young people in Tower Hamlets. She continues to follow questions on social value in art through the fledgling project ‘Artists’ Independent Auditing Creating Value’ (http://artistsindependent.tumblr.com), for which she gave a presentation at the University of Exeter International PG and Early Career Researcher Drama Conference in January 2014.

Wendy Hubbard is a PhD candidate in the Drama Department at Queen Mary, University of London, where she holds an AHRC studentship. Her thesis has the working title ‘In Company: Togetherness on the Postdramatic Stage.’ Her research interests include contemporary theatre, critical theory, the politics of authorship and amateurism, and philosophies of language and nonsense. Wendy is also a practicing director and dramaturg. Current projects include Interregnum, a new performance about the English Civil War and the disorientation of democracy, with Gemma Brockis (Shunt). Her recent directing includes Jamie Wood’s Beating McEnroe (2013); Chris Goode’s God/Head (National Tour 2012) and The Forest and the Field (National Tour 2013); and collaborating on Melanie Wilson’s Autobiographer (International tour 2011- 2012) and Landscape II (Dublin Festival, National Tour 2013).

Br. Runo Johnson is an Amero-European handtruck driver, charged since 2011, by his own conscience, with custodianship of The People’s Mic: an amplification enterprise consisting in the solidaritous mediated MC’ing of funk and revolution via the battery-powered PA-system-in-a-pulpit known as The People’s Mic, or one of its pragmatically improvised derivatives. Br. Runo crossed out a career or two in right angle sales to pick up the nobler rumble-drum of using his own lungs to shout and thump stuff, and speak up on the streets for the right of you and me to do as much.

Walk, talk and spread waves, as the Brother says.

Sandra Lang currently lives in Zurich where she is studying for a Masters degree (MA of Fine Arts, Mention Theory) at Zurich University of the Arts. Her work is situated at the intersection of different practices such as writing and philosophy, art

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and activism. She is mostly interested in the development of collective practices. Her theoretical interests include poststructuralist, Italian workerist and postworkerist theories and performance studies. In her researche, she focuses on historical and contemporary social movements, such as the Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and the global social movements since 2011. She has also worked in the field of violin and bow making in Italy, Belgium and France for ten years. For the last two years she has been collaborating regularly with Ana Bigotte Vieira.

Olive Mckeon is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles.

She is writing a dissertation on historical materialism as a dance historical methodology.

Ana Bigotte Vieira is completing her PhD thesis in contemporary culture. Her research centres on the ‘cultural transformation’ that occurred in Portugal after it joined the European Union, focusing on the performative role played by the opening of the Modern Art Museum. Vieira was a Visiting Scholar at NYU’s Performance Studies Department from 2009 to 2012. She graduated with a degree in Modern and Contemporary History from ISCTE, and holds a post-graduate degree in Contemporary Culture from Universidade Nova de Lisboa.

She has worked as a theatre and dance dramaturge and has translated, among others, Agamben, Lazzarato, Pirandello, and Spiro Scimone. She received a Dwight Conquergood Free Registration Award for the Performance Studies International Conference (PSi # 17) and was co-curator of Generative Indirections | Psi Regional Cluster/ founding member of baldio. Together with Sandra Lang she has been curating small-scale discursive and performative events around Arts and Politics.

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SOLIDARITY AND / IN PERFORMANCE: RETHINKING DEFINITIONS & EXPLORING POTENTIALITIES Vol. 3, Issue 1 (Spring 2014) Guest Editor: Katerina Paramana activate is a peer-reviewed e-journal in the field of performance and creative research, based in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Performance at University of Roehampton, London. © 2014 activate. All Rights Reserved.

The Copyright of individual articles remains with the authors.

Cover Image: ‘Dennistoun - Banksy update’ by Michael Gallacher, is licensed under CC BY 2.0 / Colour and contrast altered from original.

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