David Pledger on "Operating Systems In Concentric Circles" | ADN Satellite Symposium 2017

Acknowledgements

Cultural
Before I begin I would like to acknowledge that the land we meet on today is the traditional lands for the Kaurna people and that we respect their spiritual relationship with their Country.

I’d also acknowledge the Kaurna people as the traditional custodians of the Adelaide region and that their cultural and heritage beliefs are still as important to the living Kaurna people of today.

Sporting
And on the subject of Adelaide, I would like to convey my commiserations to all those Adelaide Crows supporters who followed the game yesterday. I was in your corner but as often is the way, in both sport and art, momentum overwhelms quality.

Event
For this event, I would like to thank Centre 42 – and in particular Yanling, Casey and Daniel - who in my experience always go above and beyond what it takes financially and logistically to present these, often, influential meetings, in various countries (this is now the third following on from Singapore and Japan) and this time in association with the Australian Theatre Forum and with the support of OzAsia Festival and the National Arts Council Singapore.

We are here in Adelaide at the Asian Dramaturgs Network’s first Satellite Meeting in Australia. The Network represents a very interesting configuration of artists and cultural operators from Asia, a configuration which in this instance includes Australia.

For me, the ADN is a rather unique proposition, a mobile laboratory that re-formulates its intentions in response to local conditions. Its ambitions are to make a contribution to thinking about the arts and arts practice regionally and internationally by not limiting or prescribing propositions and definitions. In this way, it aims to be a genuinely experimental space for thought and action.

I have been kindly credited as a co-Director of this Platform although my time has been restricted to some enjoyable plotting and consultative sessions with my co-Director, How Ngean, who has done all the work and who has graciously allowed me to accept a little of the glory.

Orientation

The first time I heard the word ‘dramaturg’, I was barely 20 years old and on a tour of a theatre with an eclectic bunch of reprobates attempting to pass themselves off as artists, myself included. One of our party was the playwright, Roger Pulvers, who had recently returned from Europe and used the word ‘dramaturg’ countless times during the tour as if we all knew what it meant and appeared mortified at our ignorance when we declared we did not. Whilst it was impossible to ignore the referred cultural snobbery in his reaction, I will admit that as a group we were all somewhat seduced by the word as it sounded just a little bit ‘dirty’ - ‘dramaturg’ - a bit illicit, and I remember making a mental note to myself that I should find out what that word ‘dramaturg’ actually meant. Some thirty years later and I’ve still got no idea. Which is why I am not going to talk about dramaturgs today. As the opening Keynote, I feel a responsibility to talk to a subject on which I do have a little authority.

So I’m not going to talk about dramaturgs, I’m going to talk about dramaturgy.

And just to be clear, when I talk about dramaturgy I am not talking about the various activities of the dramaturg, although I am talking about something not altogether unrelated but which operates in multiple spaces simultaneously.

And just to keep your interest up, whilst the word dramaturgy is certainly not a dirty word there is something potentially illicit in its usage.

A disclaimer before I forge ahead is that everything I say today is provisional even if my delivery and tone smacks of certitude at times. It is there only to frame the discussion sufficiently to amplify its quality through your responses and feedback.

To kick us off, I’d like to ask myself two questions: Who am I? and What do I do?

My answer is that I am an artist and what I do is: work at making things. All the other activities I work at - producing, curating, public commentary and arts advocacy - stem from my artistic practice. Some of these I do within my company, not yet it’s difficult, and some I do outside the company structure.

This framing is important as it leads me to the matter at hand – dramaturgy. Because for me dramaturgy has always been about how a thing works, whether it’s a work of art or the world itself.

For me ‘dramaturgy’ is quite a useful concept. It is flexible in as much as it can be transposed into different meanings depending on the artistic context and it can have meaningful value when applied outside the arts. This is what interests me. For some time now I have prosecuted the idea of dramaturgy as an ‘operating system’ in the circle of artistic practice and its application to cultural and social circles.

Today I will unpack the source of this idea and its trajectory outward from artistic dramaturgy to the stratospheric heights of culture and society.

Framing

Ten years ago in Australia, the prime ministership of John Howard came to an end. His time was marked by what I would call a corruption of public discourse during which he waged a culture war that carved the Australian polity into rigid, discursive units, the consequences of which continue to resonate deeply in Australia’s culture.

It marked the beginning of a long-term project of mine to insinuate progressive ideas from artistic practice into the national conversation by valorising the language of contemporary practice in discussions inside and outside the realm of the arts.

Open, inclusive and underscored by a desire for discovering new ways of working, creating and making, the language of contemporary arts practice has the flexibility required to deal with change and experiment and which, if introduced into an amplified discursive space, has the potential to expand the quality and depth of civic discourse and civil action. It is of necessity a language of progress.

Central to my notion of dramaturgy is the idea that an artwork is generated by an operating system driven by random and non-deterministic algorithms that are entered and extracted by human agency. In applying the concept of dramaturgy more broadly, it reveals itself to be an

adaptive notion that can embrace the idea of an operating system of culture or society. Because at its core is the element of change. In fact, dramaturgy is defined by change, and the value of thinking of it as an operating system is determined by its capacity to be altered by a creative and evolutionary process driven by the algorithms of human behaviour.

I have been quite influenced in this approach by the Belgian political theorist, Chantal Mouffe, who wrote:

What is needed in the current situation is a widening of the field of artistic intervention, with artists working in a multiplicity of social spaces outside traditional spaces in order to oppose the program of the total social mobilization of capitalism.1

My response has been to argue that we need to develop not only an artistic dramaturgy and a cultural dramaturgy but a progressive, social dramaturgy. And I’d like to map a process outward from my artistic dramaturgy to a social dramaturgy…

Artistic Dramaturgy

In an artistic context, dramaturgy is the process of connecting and matting ideas into practice. It operates in a way that is rarely fixed, necessarily adaptive and due to its reliance on collective, collaborative actions inherently resistant to the concretization and commodification of other practice-related words such as ‘creativity’ and ‘innovation’ which have largely been voided of their meaning.

In the context of the work of not yet it’s difficult, I’d like to map out for you the main way in which we work, how we operate. And I’d like to emphasise here that we have other ways of operating that have different shapes, speeds and frequencies but the way I am going to describe to you now is what I would call our ‘signature dramaturgy’.

We start with an idea. I don’t have any loyalty to any art-forms or any particular, artistic configurations so the idea is the centrepiece, the agent of motion in the creation of the artwork or event.

How an idea emerges from a group of artists that work closely together is difficult to identify. Usually, the kernel of the idea is generated by a curiosity I bring to the collective table but which has grown out of artistic and discursive contexts that have history within the company. This dynamic changes, depending on the people who gravitate towards the company. In the early days when there was a core group of founding members working on every project, for example our dramaturg Peter Eckersall and technical manager Paul Jackson, the dynamic was more centralised. These days, the dynamic is much more distributed as the NYID diaspora is quite extensive and artists are called on, or put their hand up for, specific projects. At the moment, artists such as Natalie Cursio, a choreographer and performance-maker in her own right, and Todd MacDonald, an actor, director and current Artistic Director of La Boite Theatre in Queensland, tend to feature regularly in NYID’s artistic adventures.

So we begin with an idea and then we invite a group of people to talk to us who know more about the idea than we do - they might be experts, academics or just people with specific, related experiences. As we gather information we invite a second group to respond to what we’ve been told and what we’re thinking about what we’ve been told and then we get a third group who help moderate this information through the filter of our originating idea. This is our dramaturgy, generative systems that operate within concentric circles of action and activity.

Concentric circles have proved to be both a useful image, and a mechanism. In practice, though, there can be a lot of overlapping in terms of personnel, agency and knowledge. In some instances, the lines remain clearly delineated but often it’s messy.

As I mentioned as an artist I’ve never really seen lines between art-forms and it is also the case for me as a citizen. Art, society, human behaviour, they’re all fluid and I’ve not discovered merit in keeping things separate. Separation has always seemed to be about territory and therefore power. I believe in the interconnectedness of things, at all times, in all circumstances. It is why I like circles. Circles are lines that resolve. And when resolved they tend to emanate rather than demonstrate. Vibration rather than static silos.

Probably the most concrete early example of this process in play is in the partner productions of K and Blowback which not yet it’s difficult created from 2002-2006. K collapses Franz Kafka’s The Trial, George Orwell’s 1984 and Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451 into a direct response to the crackdown on civil liberties in the aftermath of 9/11. The other piece, Blowback, riffs off Chalmers Johnson’s book of the same name and tracks a guerilla  resistance to an Australia, militarily occupied by America, in the not-too-distant future.

In prosecuting these ideas, we brought into the process a diverse set of knowledges and experiences. So, for example, in Blowback over a two-week ‘reading period’ we entertained a professor of divinity, a neo-conservative journalist, a national security expert and an anthropologist specialising in racism, nationalism and multiculturalism, all of whom brought to the project a world we were unfamiliar with, using languages that were not our own. They spoke to a revolving group of collaborators including actors, dramaturgs and technical staff.

In the first instance, Blowback was a writing project and it was my task to process the ideas into some sort of dramatic literature that could also serve as a score which I could conduct as a director using discrete sound, image, spatial and corporeal elements. It also needed to be an artefact that could be used by all the makers of the work - actors, performers, film and sound editors, designers and production staff.

I wrote the script as I was listening to our experts talking, our collaborators processing and our company members proposing artistic responses to the swirl of new ideas – three circles of engagement emanating outwards and reverberating inwards amplifying the originating idea. What I became aware of was that our operating system, our dramaturgy as a company was being reconfigured in the operating system of the production. That is our system of working became the operating system of the production. It’s a transpositional process that became normative for us and that enabled us to develop and understand the mechanism for 2970° The Boiling Point which we have recently become known for.

2970° is, depending on the audience, variously described as a festival of art and ideas, a durational event, or for this audience, a ‘biennial happening’ which is how I like to think of it.

I’m going to park 2970° to one side for the moment because it is what I consider to be the closest thing we have to an example of a social dramaturgy which is where I’m heading.

On my way, I’d like to discuss the notion of cultural dramaturgy here, and the role of the arts or lack thereof in the operating systems of our culture.

Cultural Dramaturgy

A major tendency in the current formulation of our discussions around culture is the marginalisation and compartmentalisation of the arts as a thing in and of itself as opposed to a thing in and of itself that is intimately connected to other things. This lack of relational thinking exposes the arts in policy settings, funding settings and most poignantly in social settings.

The reasons for the isolation of the arts are multifarious and specific to history and geography and they operate in varying degrees according to these and many other factors.

In Australia, the isolation of the arts is often attributed to our perceived national attribute of anti-intellectualism and there is truth in that.

However, I’d like to make a bigger play and say that the arts are integral to theoretical and practical formations of democracy in a period where democracy is under siege from the ascendant ideology, neo-liberalism. It is necessary to isolate the arts - one of the main ways democracy expresses itself – in order to disable democracy which neo-liberal capitalism must do, because democracy disrupts its singular focus on profit maximisation. Democracy, and the arts, disrupt the flow of neo-liberal capitalism by valorising access, equity, sustainability and justice, all of which consume time and labor, the two essential elements in the growth of unfettered Capital.

This is a problem for the arts, and it’s hard not to perceive the recent attacks on the Australia Council for the Arts by the current Government through this prism.

So, we need to resist this push towards the isolation of the arts. My argument, in this space over the last few years, has been to propose attack as the best form of defence. Attack by way of bringing the arts into the centre of the national conversation.

We do not fully understand the workings of politics, the media, sport, our health and education sectors until we see them in relation to each other. That is the task of culture: to create a system that shapes these relationships, constructs meaning out of them and folds them back on us, a process through which we create our identity. And the language that is currently employed to shape these relationships and create these connections is the language of managerialism, productivity, efficiency. That is the language of culture these days. And that is why it’s A BIT sick.

In Australia, and my sense is we are not alone here, the operating system of our culture, our cultural dramaturgy, is in desperate need of a new language and my proposition is that we turn to the language of the arts and artistic practice.

So how might that work?

I can give you an example from the work of not yet it’s difficult.

From 2011-2014, we developed a project called AMPERS&ND which was a research-and- development laboratory that sought to develop a new artistic language across music, dance and performance by using as its foundation the body listening protocols we had been developing for some 20 years.

body listening operates on the premise that all properly functioning bodies have a sense of physical presence (proprioception) which when amplified confers a heightened sense of awareness on itself and the external world (sometimes called exteroception). The process of

amplification through a refined set of exercises cultivates a capacity for sensing shifts in the space without seeing or hearing them. AMPERS&ND was a deep artistic exploration and inquiry into the practices of listening with our body.

Throughout the 4 years of the project which took place in Germany, Australia and Korea we became aware that some of the artistic inquiry begged to be unpacked in contexts other than performance research. So, we developed a model for international artistic collaboration that placed artistic practice at the centre of broader cultural conversations. We wanted to understand how culture might operate when you place artistic practice at its centre rather than as an add-on or a thing to be fetishized or projected on or as a diversion for foreign businessmen trying to close a deal.

So, we offered ancillary events to the research and public performance program that directly arose out of the artistic inquiry of sending and receiving information with our bodies in a heightened state of listening.

We offered a public workshop in body listening. We held a seminar by invitation called Not Just K-Pop which looked at the reverberations of the Korean Wave on global culture. We presented a large public forum called Asia + Europe = Australia which we featured the Belgian Ambassador, the EU Ambassador and the Director of Asialink Arts talking from their respective positions on Australia’s policy and behaviours in Asia and the EU. Each iteration – the public performance, the workshop, the seminar and forum - had distinct audiences and were generated as a set of concentric circles emanating out from our artistic inquiry.

Now, on their own, none of these elements are exceptional, many of us consider one or other of these activities when formulating our artistic projects as we had been doing for some years. However, as a program that emanated outward from the originating artistic idea

– that of an exploration of listening with the body - it stuck as a novel way of approaching the question of how culture operates, that is through the impetus of artistic practice. For example, one of the more telling fold backs came from the EU Ambassador to Australia in the forum Asia + Europe = Australia. He remarked on the deficit of Australia’s capacity to listen to Asia in the foreign policy spaces. Translated through a body listening paradigm, Australia’s policy default setting with Asia was all about sending information not receiving it, and not even listening for it.

In this way, the language of our artistic practice had resonated in the foreign policy setting. It gave me a real appetite to discover how we might develop this trajectory further.

Before I do so I would to add a big whacking coda here. Which is that for many years I have considered that the culture of Australia’s First Nations people represents best-practice operating principles. For good reason. Indigenous culture emanates concentric circles of knowledge and it does not separate art from culture nor culture from society. It is an astonishingly good template for the operation of culture and it motivated me to invite as the opening keynote speaker for 2970° The Boiling Point, indigenous elder Kyle Slabb to riff on the relationships between art, culture and society in the frame of a discussion about practising democracy.

Social Dramaturgy

I perceive the arts as one of the most conservative sectors of Australian society. Mentally progressive, professionally conservative. That’s how I describe the sector here.

One of the revelations I had during 2970° was understanding the different contexts of progressive and conservative.

There was a young high school student – one of about thirty or more at 2970° - and he stood up at the end and said: “I’m a conservative” after which he gave this big rave about how much he loved being at 2970° because people didn’t shout at him like they did at school whenever he aired his conservative views.

And when he was raving it dawned on me that whilst his views were conservative, his attitude was progressive because he was prepared to change his mind and in fact was most interested in being challenged to change his mind.

In Australia, and particularly the arts here, there are a lot of people who identify as progressive but for whom change is anathema, something to fear and resist. It explains the inertia I often feel when I am in arts contexts – and I don’t mean artistic contexts – I mean arts sector contexts. Change usually refers to changing the people who are in charge rather than any systemic or values change. And I’m really talking specifically here about the arts as a sector, how it behaves in relation to itself and in relation to other sectors. Its lack of interconnectedness is often remarkable.

The inertia of the arts sector was one of the motivating factors for me to develop a discursive context in which the arts and artistic practice could operate progressively as a language of change. So, I created 2970° The Boiling Point which is a biennial happening located on the Gold Coast. To explain the name – the boiling point of gold is 2970°. Conceived as an alchemy of art and ideas it is essentially a cultural provocation built on not yet it’s difficult’s signature dramaturgy.

To reiterate:

Take an idea, bring a bunch of people to the table who know more about the idea or its related parts than you do, invite responses from a diverse group of thinkers across sectors and develop that content from opinion to argument to action. In the case of an artistic dramaturgy that action is the production of an artwork. In the case of cultural dramaturgy, it may be considered the production of collective meaning. In the case of a social dramaturgy, at least in the most recent edition of 2970°, it is the production of a law.

In 2017 the idea was around practising democracy in an age when its value and agency is in question. The concentric circles created by this idea when dropped into the 2970° pool were represented first by four keynote speakers. They were invited to create a picture of the world they contribute to as a path to proposing a future they wish to live in. Each Speaker was invited to ask the 2970° delegates to vote on a law or protocol they believe will help that future to be made.

The second circle: Each keynote’s provocation was amplified by two respondents which created a triangle of content that was processed by delegates at roundtables - the third circle

- a process that was facilitated by a curated group of moderators to the point where each delegate voted for or against the law.

So, the architecture and the process of 2970° is basically an amplified version of our artistic dramaturgy and our attempt at creating a cultural dramaturgy as outlined in the AMPERSAND project.

Practising democracy was the second edition of 2970° following on from its inaugural edition in 2015, The Future Is Here, and there were significant developments from the first to the second that I’d like to frame within my overarching notion of dramaturgy as an operating system driven by random and non-deterministic algorithms entered and extracted by human agency.

In our artistic dramaturgy, we’ve used another word to describe these random and non- deterministic algorithms which is ‘free radical’. In order to refresh our way of working, we often deliberately introduced into our operating system an unknown element, a free radical, that could act as an agent of chaos or order depending on how it was invited into the system.

For 2970° the algorithm we entered was ‘young people’ because in the first edition we had a very modest representation from this cohort.

We invited 30+ high school students and 15+ university students to be directly involved in three different modes. Firstly, as roundtable participants. Secondly as members of The Fourth Estate, a media group gifted the task of reporting on and critiquing the event. Thirdly as members of an international collaboration between the local Robina State High School and two performance groups, Sipat Lawin from The Phillipines and Shock Therapy from the Gold Coast.

Here’s a little taste of how it worked out.

PLAY VIDEO 2970° PRACTISING DEMOCRACY

A second algorithm we entered was the Moderators. Well actually, it’s more that we re- wrote the code for the algorithm that ran the Moderators. Unlike other such provocations, 2970° is a contest of ideas in which the protagonists are not the speakers but the delegates, the participants. So, the role of the Moderators is crucial in terms of processing the triangle of information provided by the speakers and respondents and enabling the delegates to voice their opinion and shape it into an argument on which they could base a decision for voting. The objective is not to reach a consensus but for each delegate to arrive at a decision through the moderation process.

So, I paid a lot more attention to the curation of the Moderators who as a group needed inhabit a familial sensibility which the delegates could identify with as they progressed from one roundtable to the next over the program. So, I put together a group of individuals that had a strong background in a wide variety of arts practices as artists or cultural operators or both, and who came from around Australia. I considered that they needed a special set of characteristics. They had to be able to listen particularly well. They had to be confident enough to know when to follow and when to lead. They had to attend to the various needs of the delegate population which was genuinely inter-generational, cross-cultural and cross-sectoral. Their agency needed to be unified by humanist values, a capacity for empathy and a strong intuition. It is in this group that the language of the arts and artistic practice is embedded in 2970°. It’s not visible but it is evident. And it’s here not yet it’s difficult’s dramaturgy becomes a profoundly humanist enterprise.

In thinking our way through this trajectory, we are often asked and ask ourselves whether 2970° is an artistic event?

May be it follows Chantal Mouffe’s instruction and is an artistic intervention in a social space. Perhaps it is more of a conflation of the two, a social intervention.

One that is generated by a singular artistic process in which the arts amplifies and also contests its discursive agency, and in which the language of the arts is the language of interaction. It is designed to expand the quality and depth of civic discourse and action by concentrating on the basic tasks of proposing, processing, talking and listening with a group of people who don’t know each other and who get together to contest ideas in the spirit of productive criticism and an agreement to respectfully disagree. These are the rules of engagement. And they have been devised through years-long artistic practice and are projected out of an artistic impetus: to discover the act of listening in the art of democracy.

Commentary

In closing, I’d like to make some remarks about how I have begun to insinuate the idea of ‘dramaturgy’ when writing about things that are not directly about the arts.

Over the last few years I have written around thirty articles and essays for various journals and books. In the last year, I have started to insinuate into these pieces the idea of a dramaturgy as an operating system as a way of introducing the word into a broader vernacular.

So, for example in the global daily journal The Conversation I’ve written to the idea of the playbook of American football as its operating system, as its dramaturgy.

A couple of months ago I was commissioned to write a piece called The Dramaturgy of Universal Basic Income in which I frame a discussion on the potential, degree and kind of change imagined by the introduction of a universal basic income around the notion of an expanded dramaturgy.

I start by talking about a social dramaturgy as I have done here as the operating system of a society, as a flexible, evolving, series of interweaving ‘human algorithms’. I talk to the idea of entering a new algorithm into the system - a universal basic income. I talk about how there’s always trepidation when introducing a new piece of technology into an operating system whether it’s new media, like VR, into arts practice or a new piece of legislation within an existing legal framework. I say that in order to prosecute this idea we need knowledge of both the system, the new piece of code and a sense of how the two might impact upon each other.

And then because I have already established the language of the arts as the language of the essay, I use the arts sector as a prism by which to investigate just how this new algorithm – the UBI – would alter the real living conditions of artists and arts workers, and by extrapolation workers in other sectors.

Summary

By insinuating the language of the arts and artistic practice and the life of the artist into broader social conversation - whether that’s through a social intervention like 2970° or through public commentary – we introduce a language of progress into our daily life conversations that does two things.

It introduces new spaces in which to think and behave in a society that is deliberately polarised in order for the dominant hegemony to maintain control and secondly, it brings the arts into the mind-set of civil society in a way that does not fetishize or marginalise but shows multiple values that can be traced back to its intrinsic value.