Haunting Dreams of a Wild Future

Abstract

In the last years we have witnessed an increased number of experimental performances that engage with children. Shows made in collaboration and/or performed by children. Children on stage, children as our tour guides through cities, children leading us though darkness. There are many ways to analyze this ‘interest’ including curatorial schemes encouraging participation, funding agendas, institutional logistics and so no. However, I would argue that crucially this ‘interest’ offers a fruitful way to engage with current political imaginaries. After the ‘social turn’ in the arts since the 1990s and the ‘political turn’ post 2007 what radical imaginaries performance practice can produce at this moment in time? What methods children bring into contemporary performance making? Why experimental performance ‘needs’ children and what that reveals about the temporalities of our political and social conditions?

In this article, I will theorize on children, performance and radical imaginaries as a way to discuss the political dead-end of collective struggles in the years post 2011. I will propose that children in performance sketch a glimpse of an ‘elsewhere or an otherwise’ in an era when ‘the given is a prison’ (cited in Gordon, 2004:116). An elsewhere that cannot be realized within the established social order, an otherwise that has been rejected as ‘bad facticity, not real, not possible, mere utopia’ (Gordon, 2004). Witnessing children on stage mis-perform, we witness the attempts of dominance and at the same time the breaks, failures and (mis)operations of the societal ‘sub-power’ (Castoriadis, 1998) – moments of a fugitive elsewhere. I will argue that children on stage ephemerally institute an elsewhere to our current condition contesting visions of normative futurity – ‘where the children will be our future’ (Munoz, 2009:49) – by becoming the ‘examples of the things we are and do that exceed … what’s dominant and dominating us’ (Gordon, 2004:129).

Notes

1 See Jackson (2011), Bishop (2006), Kester (2011) and Harvey (2013) among others.

2 Some examples of cultural workers practically rethinking cultural production include occupations and self-organized experiments such as Teatro Valle, MACAO, ESC Atelier in Italy, Embros in Greece, Case Invisible in Spain amongst others.

3 There are numerous examples of performance works taking place in an area prior to its regeneration/ gentrification. These often seek to engage inhabitants in a ‘controlled’ participation before developers’ actual plans materialize. Similarly, large-scale exhibitions or ‘monster institutions’ frequently attempt to engage with political issues without, however, questioning the politics within of their own structures.

4 Green Park is an occupied, self-organized space in the centre of Athens born of the experiments and struggles of the last few years in Greece. It has been occupied since June 2015 and since then has sought to function as an evolving cultural and political intervention in the here and now of Athens. To that end it has initiated and hosted structures and practices that question established modus operandi and circuits of power. A public programme of exhibitions, performances, screenings, lectures, workshops and publications has challenged what constitutes contemporary cultural production in the current shifting socio-political landscape.