MANIFESTO
1. Every work we make should say something directly about contemporary politics.
We believe that the most important political issues at this moment are: the global gap between rich and poor, the assaults on democracy all over the world and the rise of the far right, the ongoing climate emergency, and the rights of migrants, refugees and minorities.
All of these are, fundamentally about the relationship of people to real and imaginary spaces, like theatre is.
2. Artistically, every project should speak formally to the questions we are asking.
The work we make is not just limited to “things that happen on stage”. The relationships between people and the things we build are paramount. Some work will meet its final product as something staged, but the collective thought, research and activity that goes into it is just as crucial.
3. Internationalist art is by its nature, anti-Eurocentric, anti-racist and consciously post-colonial.
Aside from the violence, death and misery, racism, the unconscious wages of empire make us stupid and boring. But the answer to this can’t be only representational, as our work isn’t only what happens on stage. Modernity and the West is something that happened violently to most people. So our response can’t be about having more different people on stage, or “telling new stories” or board diversity alone. Think of how Rachid Taha re-appropriated the colonial stereotype and made a new hybrid way of being, musically: rai rebel punk.
4. Every one of our projects will think specifically about what kinds of people are missing from the conversation and bring them in, as audiences, participants and artists.
We don’t make work for audiences, we make it for interlocutors. We want to be talking to the world. For better or worse, traditional arts organisations speak to the suburban white upper middle classes, and then train them into passivity.
5. Every project we make will have international collaboration within it.
We don’t think that political theatre is limited to the “state of the nation” play. We want to make “state of the world” work. This isn’t limited to the internationalism from above, of flying people around the globe, but can be the everyday internationalism of migrant communities, digital technology or metropolitan cities.
6. Every project should contribute to the development of a new infrastructure in some way.
To make work that sits between genres and is formally adventurous, or that seeks a participatory audience beyond the traditional white upper middle classes demands new infrastructure. Every one of our projects will think explicitly about how it does this and how it can be shared with other artists.
7. Every project needs to speak to history, and find something new about how we got here.
8. Every project should have some pervasive, participatory or interactive element.
The political realities that we face are ones that, consciously or unconsciously, as a species, we have built together. We are inviting people to “play” with these realities – so we need to give them something to play with. This is what we call “punk rock immersion” or “punk rock pervasiveness”. It’s not an interactivity that comes necessarily out of some new technology, but rather one that transforms how we see our complicity with the world as is and our power to make it.
9. Things have to be fun.
Things can be hard, complex and difficult. They don’t need to be simple, but they need to be playful and fun. When they’re not we’ll give up and become lawyers, teachers or politicians.
