Simon Taylor
& Minus Theatre
A workshop in thief (theatre of
imitation, expression & f___ery)
The work of Minus Theatre is unique in its openness to the use in
performance of different first languages (in Boneseed, February
2015, Brazilian Portuguese, Cantonese and English were spoken
together on-stage) and for extending the disciplinary parameters
of theatre by including non-performers as well as dancers and
actors.
Minus Theatre interrogates the communicative regime of theatre
as representing community or society through distributing the
signs emitted by individuals across the whole of the group and
across the whole of the working space: rather than essentialising
the individual, the practice drives towards a dividuation, a de-
identification of the individual; she becomes directly the subject
of the group’s extemporisations, which are the different lines of
variation on her life each performer and participant makes. Now
she speaks Mandarin, now English, now Russian, now an accented
English; here her movements are smoothed and here broken; in
each encounter with the variations others provide, her past and
her present collide to make a new movement, to set a new series
of singularities in motion. It is in the time-images that crystallise
around the chance encounters of performers and participants
working in the space that the horizon of a futurity arises: where
hope could not flourish, where movement locked up and affec-
tive tendency, or interest, was blocked by habit or memory, there
are multiple flows—a hopeful plenitude of possible actions and
affects.
This performance/workshop has been designed specifically for
this event.
9am Wednesday 11 November
University of Auckland Epsom Campus
N Building
