activist theatre and clay shirky’s “here comes everybody”
April 1st, 2008 • improvisation, research
I’m reading Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody, and his schema of different kinds of participation gels pretty closely with different species of collective and collaborative theatre companies (students who took my honours course last semester will easily spot some obvious parallels). So here’s Shirky:
Sharing creates the fewest demands on the participants. [...] Cooperation is the next rung on the ladder. Cooperation is harder than simply sharing, because it involves changing your behaviour to synchronize with people who are changing their behaviour to synchronize with you.
And there’s a neat account of two common, initial stages of performance devised in groups - in improvisational terms, moving from simply listening to accepting, building and (re)incorporating.
Shirky again:
Collaborative production is a more involved form of cooperation, as it increases the tension between individual and group goals. The litmus test for collaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being with the participation of many.
Think Red Ladder, active in Leeds in the 80s, a company - amongst others - determined not to name individual members in posters or programmes as an attempt to resist traditional power hierarchies and avoid privileging one kind of creative activity over another.
Collective action, the third rung, is the hardest kind of group effort, as it requires a group of people to commit themselves to undertaking a particular effort together, and to do so in a way that makes the decision of the group binding on the individual members.
And in the case of political or activist-oriented companies, it’s a common or shared ideology which can (and has been shown to) provide the underlying motive to commit.
I’ll have more to say when I’ve finished the book - particularly in relation to some of the collective performances I’ve been looking at recently.
