Oficina sobre o amor
Extending from our work on inoperative theater, we're holding a workshop in Curitiba, Brazil, in collaboration with Iliadahomero, a theatrical platform aimed at forms of dramatical poetics. Taking place at the city's Teatro Guaíra from May 16 - 24, 2022, the workshop focuses on the topic of love as the basis for personal-political power and transformation.
Is love a potential framework for orienting labor by way of cooperation, festivity, the pursuit of hobbies, or even loafing around? Can love become a currency that emphasizes relational value and the making of solidarity economies? If love is often the basis for artistic craft, and the caring of things, might it move us toward a bolder art of living? Through such perspectives, the workshop engages with love as a deeply human experience and capacity, as something that traverses across cultures and societies. shaping the capacity for compassionate action, and which may also move us toward nonhuman others: love as a planetary relational power.
Based at the Centro Cultural Teatro Guaíra, the workshop will undertake a series of performative scenarios or explorative actions, including gestures of care and hospitality, where love extends us beyond closed intimacy toward a sense of responsibility for others. This will be guided by discussions and reflections on love following with what Richard Gilman-Opalsky calls “communist affection” – where love is posed as a form of collective potency. What might communist affection mean to the order of the city and the functions of civic participation? How does love inform a sense of citizenship and the right to have rights? Such questions entail a consideration of craft, where a relation to materials, things, knowledge, lend to the formation of “techniques” – from handcraft, and the careful handling of things, to the composing of materials, words, music, and speech, which contribute to social play and potency, hope and joy. From giving attention to each other to attending to the city around us, the workshop poses love as the basis for radical hospitality and the enactment of a speech of welcome. Love, in this regard, is never only about romance, rather, it forms the basis for movements of togetherness.