When you think of radical, if you’re anything like me, you’ll think of punk music, large movements and…the young. And in today’s society, especially today’s society, it has fallen on the shoulders of the young to run with the flag and keep it high.
In performance, and life, to be ‘radical’ is to be current. Pushing boundaries, social expectations, limits and laws, forcing issues to the surface which perhaps others would want to stay hidden under the mass media. If theatre is not the place to be radical in safety, then where is? We all talk a strong game on social media, offering up a ‘keyboard warrior’ whenever we feel the urge, or when someone views just don’t quite align with your own (aka – racist, bigoted or general stupidness…), but how many people are engaged or forced to think during this typing battles?
When discussing the Radical in performance, I personally couldn’t recall any performances on stage which I would consider to be so – perhaps this is a flaw, choosing perhaps to see more ‘safe’ theatre, or purely because I don’t have access to those which would be considered Radical. There is one way however which I feel as though the whole world, on a mass scale, are being invited to watch the Radical from the safety of their own homes/work places/mobile devices… And that is through television, mainly, Black Mirror.
Charlie Brooker has created a universe which is seemingly a few seconds in front of our own, literally holding a black mirror up to us and forcing us to look back at the distorted version of ourselves – something which he does with uncanny and eerie foresight, perhaps his most noted one being that of Waldo.
Radical performance always participates in the most vital cultural, social and political tensions of its time.
(Kershaw, 1999, 7)
Waldo, a bald blue bear, created for comedic purposes. To entertain on a comedy show, offering up crass and different insights into the world we live in. Sometimes entering into politics. Until he runs for president. And people get behind him and his ‘non policies’. Until he’s a front runner in an actual real life election. Where the creation grows beyond those who created it. And before we know it, a small, blue, rude and sexually charged bear is running the country.
Sound familiar?
No?
Oh, just me then.
This was first broadcast in 2013. Three whole years before the inevitably destructive rise of power that will be Donald Trump when he takes the presidency in January. Although not theatre, Brooker has certainly seemed to prove Baz Kershaw correct. He just happened to have his finger on the pulse a good few years before the rest of us.
The decomposing corpse of performance is, after all, transforming into something else, a different kind of performance matter. And we write about performance because it matters.
(Shaughnessy, 2012, xiv)
We create and need radical work because it matters (my emphasis). Be it performance, written, spoken, mimed, thought or even crafted, it matters. Without the medium to speak out and against topics, what are we? Or more importantly, what will we become?
References
Kershaw, B (1999) The radical in performance; between Brecht and Baudrillard, London: Routledge.
Shaughnessy, N (2012) Applying Performance: Live Art, Socially Engaged Theatre and Affective Practice, London: Palgrave Macmillan.