Freedom is a Performance Hangout* (*Click on this fake sweat distraction technique to release infinite scroll)

Abstract

How can the infinitely distracted meet? We are no longer amused to death as we once were in Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, but rather we are as visual artist Hito Steyerl puts it, ‘represented to pieces.’ Both the decision to participate in or disengage from social networks renders subjects powerless over their attention. How, then, might theatre, which Rancière famously declared an exemplary community form, be redeployed as a way of testing alternate modes of ‘being together’ at a time of infinite distraction? What new modes of performance, attention and indeed meeting might be called forth and imagined? This article turns to an example of Parry’s practice-based research, a four-hour live performance titled fic.the.sky that he calls ‘a performance hangout’, and that was staged across various iterations from 2015 to 2019. A performance hangout, in this example, involves easy non-accumulative choreography, fake sweat, fan-made pop music, costume changes and hanging out across an extended duration in a theatre. Audiences come and go, lounge and picnic on beanbags, plug-in their digital devices to work, re-charge, nap, or follow the performance both in situ and simultaneously via the livestream on social media. Building on a history of experimental hanging out, this article explores a performance hangout as an open-ended, unreified concept; an emergent practice in search of a meeting – in search of a ‘scene’ – that seems to be missing or in pieces. While focusing on a singular example, this article offers up a performance hangout as a generative concept for making, attending to, and thinking about a range of contemporary performances and live artworks that test new, pleasurable modes of ‘being-together’, and comprise non-accumulative performance and hanging out across an extended duration.