The Social Body

 

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  • When: May/June 2014
  • Where:  TBA

An interactive performance work and dance theater installation exploring the politics and personal and environmental impacts of the new energy resource extraction technologies and how the radical changes happening in the energy economy are affecting all of us.

  • Tar Sands Oil extraction and the Oil Pipelines
  • Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking)
  • Mountain Top Removal Mining
  • Expansion of Nuclear Power
  • Global Climate Change
  • Economic inequity
  • Loss of social safety nets
  • Destruction of food production and fisheries
  • Environmental destruction in Alberta, the Great Bear Rainforest  of BC, The Gulf of Mexico, and Prince William Sound, Alaska
  • Dismantling of government funded environmental science and environmental protection laws.

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This performance is a development of the 2011 piece, Body of Knowledge, which explored the many ways that we process social information, from the visceral to the intellectual and in contexts ranging from interpersonal dynamics to the political.  This piece takes the work more explicitly into the personal and political realms, offering a forum for the processing of what it is to be a citizen of North America, today.

There will be inevitable improvisation as the research process proceeds and more directly involves collaborators, but it starts with a framing vision, the ending point of Body of Knowledge in California. The envisioned performance, off of which the actual piece will be constructed, is in 4 parts

  1. The Installation: the audience wanders through a subdivided space to watch a collage of intimate events processing information about politics, environment, and society in a range of modes.  These will be performed by a core crew of collaborators and a series of invited artistic guests.  The point is not to make one didactic point, but to expose the subsurface range and depth of issues, their embodied emotional impacts, and visions of response. These events may include, but are not limited to…
    • Micro lectures on energy and environmental issues by engaged scientists
    • Live conversations about personal impacts, unprocessed feelings, and actions taken or envisioned
    • Processing of embodied  reactions to ongoing social processes using techniques from somatic psychology
    • Artistic responses to accumulating information about environment, society, government, and economy by Vancouver artists.
  2. The Interaction: In reaction to the installation, the audience is invited to respond in a variety of modes.  Frames for exploration and interaction are provided by the performers and the audience can participate or witness as they like.
  3. Tea: To end the show, the frame of the performance is dropped, results of the opening experiment are provided, and the audience is invited to stay or go as they like, with tea provided to facilitate a convivial meeting ground.

(photos by Jeff Perry from Body of Knowledge, 2011.)

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