Introduction to the performance
Between historiography, ode and fractured confession, this new work gives shape to the problem of political action and its representation. The point of departure is the principles and problems of the council democracy, what Hannah Arendt suggested could form “a new concept of the state.” Articulated through embodiment, speculation and a “non-fictional imagination” (as Fred Dewey put it), this work involves the public in shared questioning and speculation about our own capacities.
While Hannah Arendt is known for major insights into the modern world like ‘the banality of evil,’ the general public is largely unaware of the affirmative political argument that is the core of her late work – the valorization of council-democracy through its key examples: the short-lived Rate-republic, New England town-meetings, and the Hungarian revolution of 1956. The American writer and activist Fred Dewey has further developed this work into neighborhood councils in Los Angeles, which forms a personal background grounding the theoretical into the concrete.
Following Arendt’s strategy of exemplification, much of 2016 was spent researching key sites to allegorize this argument: the parks of Istanbul where the public met in spontaneous assembly after the crushing of the Gezi occupation, and the town meeting halls of New England, the cradle of democracy in the US, which today seem like another planet altogether.
Accompanied by the improvisations of musician Bart de Kroon, the performance remains by its nature open and contingent, with its sense found in being recomposed each time anew. The sites, questions and stories and movements that are mobilized through the work unfold as a live and concrete experience with the public, and improvisation becomes a tool of turning the public into stake-holders of a shared speculation.
Drawing upon the strategies of Allan Kaprow’s “Non-Theatrical Performance” and Simone Forti’s “News Animations” – in which concrete subject matter is explored in a process of impressionistic questioning, not didacticism – the performance maintains more of the ambition of a happening than a lecture.
Arendt’s argument was that the main obstacle to council democracy was the absence of any broader consciousness of the tradition, and the work has been composed in response to this problem. The title is drawn from René Char’s notebooks of the Resistance, one of Arendt’s key references for “On Revolution.”
by Jeremiah Day