Fantasy Interventions

writing for site-specific performance / envisioning disruption        

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‘FANTASY INTERVENTIONS’ focusses on the early stages of imagination and conception when creating site-specific performance / urban interventions.

An architect will often create sketches or models which aim to chrystalise the essence of an idea or project. These kind of sketches are often seen as valuable work in their own right, both for the architect and others. For makers of performances outside safe or traditional spaces, or for activists planning performance-based interventions, it’s easy to skip or rush through these initial stages, pushed as we are by any number of more practical considerations. The workshop proposes ways to use writing and description as a form of ‘sketching’ that can help to anchor or chrystalise the vision behind these kinds of endeavour.

Architects’ sketches will often exceed any number of 'real world' limitations (financial, structural, political, aesthetic, etc). What does it mean to balance fantasy with feasibility in a performance / intervention context? To what extent are they separable? 

How do good writers create solidity and vivacity?

Is it possible to describe an event so vividly that it ‘happens’, without happening? A description of a live occurrence that is somehow more vivid  ‘than the real thing’?

With a focus on observation, imagination and writing, and involving an introductory ‘scattershot’ seminar, walks in the city, discussion and tryouts, the workshop is an exploratory 2-3 days (variable), culminating in a series of on-location presentations: each participant, having written a text for a particular found location, then records that text as a 'track'. The group tours the different sites, starting the tracks simultaneously, to hear the audio together. At each location, the writer will silently point / indicate the areas being addressed in the audio.

To date, Ant has led the workshop in Bahia Blanca (Argentina), Dublin, Cairo, Oslo, Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, Austin (Texas), Vancouver, Riga and Lima.

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