Output details

Make Better Please

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

A devised performance directed by Clarke, which arose out of ongoing exploration of modes of participation and the politics of shared authorship. Rather than being a site-specific work, Make Better Please is specific to the date on which it is performed, with its content emerging from conversations with audience members, prompted by reading the day’s newspapers. The show’s fictional premise is that it is an exorcism of ‘bad news’. The audience-generated content feeds into a structure that borrows from other forms, Quaker meetings, open-space technology, shamanic rites, rock gigs and radio broadcasts.

RESEARCH QUESTIONS

1. What kinds of meetings and interactions with audiences might reconfigure the theatre event and its conventional relations?

2. What form could contemporary political theatre appropriately take?

3. How might a performance text be generated immediately, in collaboration with audiences, using current political journalism as a starting point?

4. Giorgio Agamben proposes profanity as the crucial political task of the moment, an act of resistance to forms of separation. How can archaic modes of performance, and religious or sacred practices, be put to new uses and profaned, repurposed in a secular theatre context?

APPROACHES & CONTEXT

Make Better Please contributes to current explorations of participation and collaboration with audiences in performance practice. In order to invent new traditions for temporary theatre communities, this enquiry re-used ‘abandoned practices’ (Alan Read) from folk theatre, mummers’ plays, agitprop and 1930s living newspapers, whilst also putting practices of political debate, broadcast and print journalism into the hands of publics. ‘Field work’ included attending Quaker Meetings and this form of non-hierarchised, collective ministry was re-contextualise for a non-religious, political and discursive purpose.

DISSEMINATION

Through 24 performances at 10 key national venues. Paper presentation at Re-Routing Performance, FIRT/IFTR conference, Barcelona, July 2013. Video documentation. [See portfolio for details.]