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4 Resurfacing: continuous theatre for a creative city On 3 July 1987, ten thousand spectators looked on as the Bougainville, last ship to be built in Nantes, slipped into the Loire. A spectacular feat: a hull 113 metres in length had to enter a portion of the estuary just 150 metres wide. The crowd gathered on the Loire’s northern bank along the Quai de la Fosse, once home to shipbuilding activity itself but by that time a stretch of cafés and bars frequented by Nantes’ working classes. It was early evening, the hour for an aperitif among friends, but the
national myth’? 2 Or, like the migrant, must they inhabit an ‘as if’ state, permanently suspended in the mid-stride of becoming? Translations reports a personal history of creative encounters, mostly post-dating 1988, that have (most willingly) linked a revisiting of Australia's colonial past to a revisioning of a future place. Bizarrely ambitious, or lucidly naive, their explorations of language, in radio, public art, and dramaturgically extended to street and stage performance, are not art in the Bicentennial genius
, others wanted to ensure that the political message was unambiguous and strong, arguing that the world is divided and unequal and people have the responsibility to do something about it. At the end of the session students presented their artefacts through speeches or theatrical presentations. And in the final evaluation they commented on the experience itself, expressing surprise at the task but also acknowledging that the creative collective work was a welcome extension and change from the usual individual, competitive work expected of them at university: The event
How can we maintain hope for a more equal world? In this chapter we outline the theory and practice that undergirded our solidarity in the project. The chapter contains some of the readings, the references, the routes, that we all brought to the project to understand how creative forms of resistance have responded to hostile environments, and why. We begin by revisiting bell hooks’ work on ‘radical openness’, not to be confused with the United Nations’ adoption of radical openness as a template for transparent working and resilience. Indeed
vitalist forces. The most prominent vitalist theory of the period was Henri Bergson’s élan vital, as discussed in his Creative Evolution of 1907 16 Machine-Ghost.indb 16 6/12/2013 12:11:22 PM Bergson, psychical research, and vitalism  17 (English translation 1911). As Sanford Schwartz has noted, Bergson’s influence spread ‘to artists, scientists, theologians, and, at the peak of his fame, to educated society in general’.3 Yet if Bergson’s influence is more readily associated with modernism than with spiritualism, he did also become a cause célèbre for psychical
Writing this in the midst of the UK's exit from the EU (31 January 2020), we find ourselves at the threshold of a different Britain. When we began work on the Creative Interruptions project in 2014, we couldn't have imagined that by the time we came to write this book we would have witnessed three UK general elections (2015, 2017 and 2019) and two referendums (Scottish independence in 2014; EU referendum in 2016). We didn't plan or factor in alongside our work on the project, which incorporates research on anti-racist activism and advocating
money from building a short-term theme park. You make your money from building Disney World. Senior producer 2 As we have demonstrated, up to 2019, over its fifteen-year evolution and seventy-five productions, Secret Cinema's multiple and fractured identities, branding, titles and creative experimentation were stripped back, synthesised and unified into a
5 Commoning sense: translating globalised knowledge in performance Some time in 2006 when I worked at the Wellcome Trust, I remember being contacted by Matthew Walters, a young creative producer working in the Handsworth area of Birmingham (UK). He reported on a successful first meeting between a group of grime MCs and dermatologists at the local hospital. I remember this moment as, for some reason, the meeting between grime MCs and dermatologists seemed to exemplify a pioneering and important act of boundary-crossing. It was notable or unusual because of the
Conclusion: Inheriting the Task of Creative Democracy At all events this is what I mean when I say that we now have to re-create by deliberate and determined endeavour the kind of democracy which in its origin one hundred and fifty years ago was largely the product of a fortunate combination of men and circumstances. We have lived for a long time upon that heritage that came to us from the happy conjunction of men and events in an earlier day. The present state of the world is more than a reminder that we have now to put forth every energy of our own to prove
negotiations with the sometimes sickening upheavals of scientific and technological development that I introduced in Chapter 1. It has taken on a broad range of scientific and performative practices, because I would argue that there is a need to find diverse, creative ways of practising cosmopolitics. Doing cosmopolitics, for me, means facing the challenge of coming to terms with different ways of knowing. A lot of problems faced in the world are 160 Science in performance cosmopolitical problems: they are problems that cannot be solved by singular ways of knowing