City Council Meeting: Blog

You can participate! City Council Meeting is having an open meeting in NY!

December 21 at 7:00 PM. University Settlement - 184 Eldridge Street in Manhattan. Please join us!

Details:

 

THE FACEBOOK EVENT HAS ALL THE INFO.

City Council Meeting, which is alive in four cities and counting, has it's own website. We hope that if you like what you see here at HERE, you'll sign up on our mailing list, read more about our history, our partners, staff and participants, and come to a meeting near you!! The site was engineered and designed by the great Maggie Hoffman.

 

Participatory Budgeting on a local level is something subtle and revolutionary. New York is starting to do it. Find out more here, via City Council Member Brad Lander's website:

PARTICIPATORY BUDGETING in BROOKLYN.

Also, Brad Lander is amazing.

We did a little showing for students and faculty at SUNY Stonybrook last week. It was fun and informative.

As I am working on City Council Meeting, getting ready to get back into rehearsal in September, I'm being blown away by Chantal Mouffe's 2000 collection of essays, The Democratic Paradox.

To wit: "No amount of dialogue or moral preaching will ever convince the ruling class to give up its power. The state cannot limit itself to dealing with the social consequences of market failures." (from the introduction).

During the debt ceiling "crisis" a couple weeks ago, a friend of mine, who's been inside the national political process for years turned to me and said, "I can't imagine why anyone would go into politics now, with the hope of doing anything positive." And I realized that's why I am drawn to these local meetings. The procedure, the need to actually get things done on a daily basis, allows people with very different views, ideas and passions to get together and do something real.

In other news, Don Gerard, the Mayor of Champaign, IL (where I'm spending half my time these days) makes $35,000 per year. The nine council members here make $5,000. They meet almost every Tuesday. I'll be publishing an interview with the Mayor here soon.

Here are some things I think are at the heart of City Council Meeting:

- what does a physical structure, space or set of rules do to one’s participation in an event that takes place under it?

- how much control do we have? how much can we choose? how much can we win? or is the engagement about something else?

- how can a performance of power contain the stakes of an enactment of power? how much are what seem like enactments actually performances?

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Also - here is an exchange of critiques from the visual art world that I have been learning a lot from:

(click the first link to download a .pdf of Claire Bishop's "Antagonism And Relational Aesthetics.")

GO!

 

And then click the second link to download Liam Gillick's hearty response:

GO GO!

City Council Meeting will be in Boston next week.

Think of it as out-of-town tryouts for performed participatory democracy.

Our project will be part of the Emerging Americas Festival, a collaboration among the ICA, American Repertory Theater and Huntington Theater. Please come see. It's also our first foray into the design wonderments of Jim Findlay, who's doing video and scenic.

Two shows only!

May 14 at 6:00 PM, and May 15 at 4:00 PM

All the details are here.

For more info, check out the thinaar.com page of news.

I did a real nice little interview with HERE's resident dramaturg, Peter McCabe about City Council Meeting. It also gets you from point a (what I was up to before) to point b (this new piece).

PLEASE ENJOY

The lovely new blog howlround.com has just published this piece on City Council Meeting (written by me). I invite your thoughts, feelings, disagreements, worries and calculations:

http://www.howlround.com/2011/03/23/asking-everyone-to-act-by-aaron-landsman/

Is City Council Meeting, the theater piece, going to end up being a history play?

Here is an article forwarded by a friend of mine, from Michigan, where many towns and cities are facing bankruptcy.

http://michiganmessenger.com/47013/bill-offers-no-guidelines-for-use-of-emergency-managers-powers

The precedent is scary: private managers are given powers to rule over local elected officials, due only to economic circumstances. Like martial law, only for fiscal reasons.

Director Mallory Catlett and I will be showing a new 15-minute excerpt from City Council Meeting on Saturday March 5 and Sunday March 6.

Please join us.

Details, details!

What is the value of theoreticians and practitioners getting together? What do we artists have to offer the academy and vice-versa? "Are you sure you're in the right place?"

These questions were buzzing in my brain as I spent last week at Stanford University, where I did a quick workshop with undergrad and graduate theater students and presented about City Council Meeting on a conference about the subject of "Delegated Performance." Which to me translates as "leting the audience do the work" performance.

Here's a link.

I felt very fortunate to have been invited, I felt intimated - in a good way - to be among some really amazing thinkers (Claire Bishop from CUNY, and Peggy Phelan and Branislav Jakovljevic from Stanford's PhD program, for instance), as well as artists like Helen Paris and Leslie Hill from the UK, who I got to know and who are wonderful. Also on the docket was a roundtable about the German group Rimini Protokol, whose work I've been curious about for years.

So it was great? It was an odd fit? I felt my brain was in a boxing ring and I struggled to either use the ropes, ala Ali, or stay off them?

I presented for 45 minutes, incluiding some background on a couple of my earlier projects, as well a few short readings and reenactments from the current iteration of City Council Meeting, performed by my intrepid and wily students. And then I took responses from the 40 or so people there.

I had to keep reminding the room that I was there to talk about a work I was currently making, rather than a finished piece that was open for review - it seems like a reflex for academics to name your work, to place it in the context of other work out there, and to problematize what you're doing by thinking through its possible ramifications, politically, ethically, and aesthetically.

This turned out to be helpful for me - having worked with ERS for awhile, I like to think of the artistic process as the creation of a series of problems, and in dealing with them you make material. It turns out thatCity Council Meeting is at a place where we have addressed some formal problems and now we are stepping back to see what larger problems those first solutions have engendered. And then we'll get back to work, and see what happens next. And so these folks helped me see the newly created problems. Or at least what they felt those problems might be.

Had I been at a more vulnerable place I think the experience might have been devastating; and had I been working without amazing collaborators (Mallory Catlett and Jim Findlay) I would probably have been more shaken and maybe decided to start selling bonds or vaccuum cleaners for the rest of my life. But in the end it was exhilarating. Peggy Phelan asked a really amazing question - she quoted a theorist who says that when you place a reenactment of something real onstage, you drain it of its life. And that this piece seemed in danger of doing that. But she was asking me if that was true, rather than accusing me of something. And it seemed to come from a genuine place of inquiry rather than a desire to reduce a messy, unresolved and expansive process into a single summation.

That kind of thing is really helpful. And reading theory is sometimes a part of my process. But I was keenly aware at this conference of how the making of art and the itemizing it, however well-intentioned or insightful, are often separate languages from each other.

I would love to do a conference called "When Theory Met Practice," in which artists and academics who all try to push up against the boundaries of their forms figure out what we really have to teach each other. I don't think there's enough of that, on either side, yet.

Your responses are appreciated.

We are holding several open meeting/rehearsals next week and would love for you to come. Please check the schedule below and let us know if you can attend.

The time committment is short, you are welcome to bring a friend, and you will likely have fun. You do not need to be a performer to come.

Meetings start this Monday, January 3 and continue all week, in preparation for our showings at Culturemart on January 12 and 13.

Write to reserve: citycouncil@thinaar.com. We'd love to see you!

Monday January 3 - 12:30-2:00PM
Thursday January 6 - 1:00-2:30PM
Location: Good Shepherd Church - 236 East 31st Street
...
Saturday January 8 - 8:00-9:30PM
Sunday January 9 - 11:00AM - 12:30PM
HERE's Varick Street Space - 75 Varick Street, 3rd Floor

We tried out some material toward City Council Meeting at Prelude 10 last month. I gave some edited transcripts from the city commission meeting I attended in Bismarck, ND this past summer to several volunteers, only one of whom had seen it before. I assigned another volunteer the role of Secretary, and gave her the vague instruction of "keeping things moving," and then offered a few viewers the chance to offer testimony.

We had a blast, and one of the surest things I learned was that this piece has to be made in front of people, with participants. I learned that a "script" can include protocols for passing resolutions, timeframes within which to keep a certain activity, as well as text that is written out and performed. Viewers asked questions like "can this be a poetic piece?", "how can you avoid making fun of people outside big cities?" and "what is the point of this?" The answers are: yes, yes, and I don't know yet but I'm finding it out as I go.

In December, Mallory and I are going to be holding open rehearsals for City Council Meeting, in preparation for our January Culturemart showing.

Special thanks to the awesome individuals who participated, some of whom didn't know they would be: Brian Rogers ('da Mayor), Arny Lippin, Jose Perez IV, Gina Stevenson, Suli Holum, Ralph Lewis, Morgan Jenness, Kristin Marting, Anna Hayman, as well as a couple of strangers. Special thanks also to Prelude, for letting me do an "activity session" instead of a performance.

As much social sculpture as theater, City Council Meeting invites you to inhabit the room together and decide how you want to be in power.

Today I watched the Minneapolis City Council regular meeting, which lasted about an hour. It was almost entirely procedural, including moments when council members had to check with each other about what procedure for voting a certain item in was the right one. Meaning, there were no fireworks, just lots of roll-calls and a few in-jokes. Boring? Yes, but helpful in showing the architecture, the structure of how a city is run, the framework without the furniture. Which made me think about the role of rules and structure in the maintenance of power. And made me think about how to make this piece so that the script is procedure, architecture and custom.

Active Research on City Council Meeting began this week! I spent a day in Bismarck, North Dakota interviewing City Commissioner Mike Seminary and watching both a closed-door committee meeting and a public City Commission meeting. Here are photos from the meetings.

Favorite quotes from Bismarck:

"You can't push a rope."

"This is going to make me about as popular as a skunk at a birthday party."

I am thinking more about the physical structure of City Council Meeting and I feel like it's going to be mobil and be viewable from all sides. Meaning, this is a 360-degree performative installation I can set up in any space.

Will we be bringing democracy where it's asked for? Are we trying to democratize art? Aestheticize democracy? Both?

I want you to be able to walk around this thing and see it from behind. I want you to be backstage while decisions are being made. Can we decide to have decisive power? Can we go home after the show and do something?

What happens when the city council meeting is detached from its locale? Are we creating generic participation? Finding what's common no matter where you go? Placing the local outside itself?

Stay tuned for reports from my first trip - Bismarck, ND, city council meeting - June 22.

I got in a really good argument about one of my plays a couple weeks ago, that helped me clarify something. The end of this play (called Special Tonight), leaves characters in limbo, wondering where they will be the next day, hoping for something, walking toward something they can't quite see. An attendee at the first reading was frustrated that the play gave little indication how things would eventually resolve.

For me, that's how life is. Ultimately, we are walking toward something we can't see. And ultimately, I want the effect of the work I do to be that that predicament we all face, alone, be heightened. I am excited by all kinds of interaction in live art. Most of the time I and others don't do it well enough. But even to leave a viewer with a question that doesn't have an apparent answer, to leave her walking home wrestling with something impending in an imaginary world, that can be interaction enough.

I am hoping City Council Meeting has that kind of effect. Partly because democracy doesn't, we hope, have a resolution. It's forms are fluid, it's outcomes always revisited and reshaped. Who are we to know the future? Maybe we can just help each other try to see.