She She Pop

What is the future of the audience?

She She Pop, Orakel-Box, Prognoses on Movement(s) from Two Antennas on Vimeo.

SheShePop’s performances are interaction experiments between performers and the audience, sociable party games in a literal sense. From the collective negotiating and bargaining of the game’s rules arise scenarios, which reflect not just the reality of society but also an overwinding, a transgressing and a thinking beyond.

From a natural and socioscientific perspective a scenario is a prognosis beyond the predictable, a future in which less than fifty percent probability can be accounted for. A scenario is therefore not probable, but probably a possible future.

In exactly this sense the situations which arise from SheShePop performances are scenarios, because as in an experimental simulation prototypical parameters are determined and rules are developed, which then produce unpredictable constellations and improbable occurrences – theatre as a test run.

The Prognosis on movement(s) project asks the question of which types of movement will constitute future collectives. At the same time this project is also a question of how collective forms of prognosis might appear. What could be more appropriate to test out this two-pronged question than a theatre test run by SheShePop?

Testing the collective

Performances such as Why aren’t you dancing? and Camp fire can be understood as arrangements for the examination of collective movements. Camp fire, for example, simulates the scene of the establishment of a utopian community. SheShePop write:

In the course of the evening – if all goes well – the random crowd of onlookers and performers identify with a collective vision of future and responsibility, and experience an exhilarating moment of joint emergence in a spontaneous, collective narration. What can we plan together? What is the slogan which makes everyone stand up? Which political song, which utopia is still tolerated by our notorious irony?

Prognoses on movement(s) begins with the doubt as to whether the community-creating potential of utopias can be resurrected; indeed, whether it should even be resurrected at all. Can prognoses on movements replace utopias of community? Perhaps the themes which were discussed at the camp fire already point in this direction, since again and again the discussion touches upon the

movement and transport systems of the future; the conception of a nomadic society without a fixed domicile, without being localised. […] Here we could possibly be more concrete.

The audience makes its own prognoses

SheShePop’s contribution deals with an arrangement which allows the audience itself to make a collective prognosis. At issue is therefore the future of the audience.

However, what differentiates the formation of a community under the aegis of utopia from a gathering crowd which collectively makes prognoses? Furthermore, what if both happen on the theatre stage? Which performative instruments and tricks are able to open a passage from one to the other? How will SheShePop guide the audience through this passage? Which collective movement will it place us in?

SheShePop will further develop the strategy of the collective narration for this and elicit desires, longings, visions and perplexities from the audience to momentarily personify, visualise, comment on and displace.

From the forecast to the test to the forecast?

This is, as a first step, a test that the audience decides on – How much are we obsessed by the futures of the past? Is the future on the whole still unknown territory towards which we are heading? Or does the future begin exactly at the time when the audience sees itself predicting the future as a strategy so as to narrate something quite different?

If the subject of prognosis is a collective – namely the audience itself – who then assumes responsibility for the prognosis and for the effects which the prognosis has already caused in the shared present? And how will SheShePop deal with their responsibility as “Wise guys of Movement”?