BRED: Dough-ing embodied research into value and productivity
Author: Julia Pond
Course: MFA Creative Practice
Year: 2021
BRED is a practice-as-research and performance-as-research project exploring paradoxes in the discourse on value in the capitalist system. It asks how politics happens in performance, and, secondarily, what practice and performance are able to contribute that theory is not. It is realised through a durational, participatory performance installation in which participants are ‘hired’ into a fictional company called BRED.
This document traces and reflects on the practical and theoretical research leading to this installation. Beginning with an overview of relevant economic and political concepts, it then covers theoretical and practical research along with methods through the lens of thematic areas of play, power, value, time, and expanded-body materials. Practices which are inherently resistant to capitalism by virtue of the temporalities they inhabit or the way they do (or do not) demonstrate their value publicly generate a performative embodiment of the same system they resist, yet manage to embed a critique within the performance. The document considers a particular iteration of BRED: an 8 hour installation where BRED’s headquarters opened its doors for a full working day, ‘hiring’ four groups of arrivals into a curated experience of training, working, and attending to a Powerpoint presentation. Drawing on political and performance theory from Paolo Virno and Peggy Phelan, the document relates work to traits of political action, politics to change, and change to the temporality of ‘now’, which is a defining trait of performance, thus opening a space for performance to be the site of political action.
| dc.contributor.author | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-12-13 09:00 |
| dc.date.copyright | 2021 |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://researchonline.trinitylaban.ac.uk/oa/thesis/?p=2371 |
| dc.description.abstract | BRED is a practice-as-research and performance-as-research project exploring paradoxes in the discourse on value in the capitalist system. It asks how politics happens in performance, and, secondarily, what practice and performance are able to contribute that theory is not. It is realised through a durational, participatory performance installation in which participants are ‘hired’ into a fictional company called BRED. This document traces and reflects on the practical and theoretical research leading to this installation. Beginning with an overview of relevant economic and political concepts, it then covers theoretical and practical research along with methods through the lens of thematic areas of play, power, value, time, and expanded-body materials. Practices which are inherently resistant to capitalism by virtue of the temporalities they inhabit or the way they do (or do not) demonstrate their value publicly generate a performative embodiment of the same system they resist, yet manage to embed a critique within the performance. The document considers a particular iteration of BRED: an 8 hour installation where BRED’s headquarters opened its doors for a full working day, ‘hiring’ four groups of arrivals into a curated experience of training, working, and attending to a Powerpoint presentation. Drawing on political and performance theory from Paolo Virno and Peggy Phelan, the document relates work to traits of political action, politics to change, and change to the temporality of ‘now’, which is a defining trait of performance, thus opening a space for performance to be the site of political action. |
| dc.language.iso | EN |
| dc.title | BRED: Dough-ing embodied research into value and productivity |
| thesis.degree.name | MFA Creative Practice |
| dc.date.updated | 2021-11-08 02:50 |