MINUS Theatre at International Applied Theatre Symposium: The Performance of Hope

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

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