Proscenium•Performing Institutions

This training –takes– was in thinking with our bodies, using the body to research the norm, and produce the derailing of the norm. It was training to go off the script imposed by institutions—including museums, prisons, and heterosexual relations—as proxies for centers of power. Husni-Bey stresses the importance of performativity within the institution, as a way of streamlining its day-to-day operations and of maintaining control. Borrowing from theater terminology, she uses the term proscenium: the arch/framework between what is inside and what is outside the performance (and performative) space. In this training, participants choose concrete institutions as case studies. They both examine the workings of the institution from the outside, looking through the proscenium, as well as performing the institution themselves from the inside. “Embodying” the chosen institution, — drawing on Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed — participants perform the three crucial stages that comprise the arc of the institutional life cycle: the birth and “naming” of the institution, and the analysis of its functions and services using CA Conrad’s somatic rituals; followed by “peak institution time,” when its operations are harmonized; and, lastly, the final phase of decline or death of the institution, including explorations of what has led the institution to wither or to develop into another form by applying Adelita’s notion of the “solvent” as a process that dissolves assets that have become excess liabilities. Through what Husni-Bey sees as an intersectional analysis of power, the following questions are addressed: How does performativity give institutions their form? What is the role of performativity in operations that claim “justice?” How is naming an operating principle in both performance and law (nomos)? What is implied by the scenographic/theatrical elements of institutions? How do theories of complicity, accompaniment, and mis-recital offer ways to go off script? The trainings also include references to theoretical work by Achille Mbembe, Denise Ferreira da Silva, <3 <3 <3 Michelle Castaneda Ɛ> Ɛ> Ɛ>, Michel Foucault, Jackie Wang, Fred Moten, and others.