Inoperative theatre
February 1, 2022 / Inoperative theatre is posed as a creative vocabulary, one that supports a mode of performativity with others. It follows various lines of thinking and making that aim for secrecy, evasion, joy, a weak form, conviviality. This might be an aesthetics consisting of frictions and encounters manifested by way of coming-together, working through a necessarily unstable grouping of topics, an invitation to join, where relationality moves in and out of articulation, and even recognizability. A destituent construct or tendency, where gathering is equally a dispersal, and composition is also fragmentation. Such a theatre (which is figured as a parallel scene, one that performs a type of occupation, wherever it emerges) exists in the moonlight, it is a lunar world constituted by the bright night, where vision is turned towards the moving shadows, the glow of faces, festivity, and where thought navigates by way of the stars, a cosmological ordering always close to magic. It is clear that the inoperative, in destituting ourselves, affords ways of collaborating that are never complete, never on the side of production. Slowness, distraction, being lazy, tender glances, passionate sharing, manic creativity, a doing that does, or that tends toward an impossible act, and which lends to an anonymous status, a state of making do and of falling in love. As Richard Gilman-Opalsky suggests, love is a public power that shifts from exchange to relational value, and which de-privatizes emotion. What I feel you also feel; we feel together the feelings of each other, independent and together. There is also a resistance at play, one that dissuades the binding of one to the other; to interrupt the relational tendency toward the familiar and the like, so as to remain formless, on the side of illegibility, migrant, inoperative. Inoperative theatre is founded on friendship, as that which expresses intimacy without fusion. A proximity, a tenderness, that is equally distant, separate, always open to the flows of time, a coming and going. Such a relational modality forms the ground for a general method or approach – a theatre directed toward the making of friends. A socially engaged art that is equally disengaged, general, and that is never only human. Something is put in the space, others move around, there is a built form, then the projection of material, voices also, discussing or presenting, with chairs from out of the backroom, a script perhaps, things, as someone exits, searching for drinks or fabric, all the while things continue, accumulate. Such dynamics draw us closer to a more-than-social art, where understandings of the social are never only communicable, or on the order of recognition; rather, other matters and entities become accomplices, partners in a craft that involves itself in an ecology of trash, the broken, ghosts, secret spaces, affection. A more-than-social position further suggests a less-than-relational figuring, where relationality is also obscure, masked, noisy, strange. Less-than-relational as what recognizes how others are not always there for one’s recognition. I take inoperative theatre not so much as a performative operation, rather, as a pedagogy: it is a pedagogical mode that works at keeping the conversation going, taking what happens as the basis for movement, articulation, grabbing hold of what comes, a certain momentum of joy and adventure that is also not without tears, an ambience of criticality. While performance begins, and aims for completion, as well as applause, pedagogy picks up where it left off, moving things along upon a wayward and probing course. If it searches for an ending it does so in order to multiply the narrative, giving the threads over to others, to be carried into other contexts and scenes (an expanding and wandering dramaturgy). Inoperative theatre as pedagogical expression is a poor form, a poor pedagogy which invites processes of co-learning or crafting, adventures in thinking together, an embodied coming-together that is ever so fragile and strong at the same time. It flees, it builds, it worlds, all the while tunneling, diffusing, engendering a scene that never fully shows itself.