we think the world is bad. we want it to be better. like you, we are often very tired and sad. we are often tempted to give up on wanting anything. our society trains us every day to believe that “it is how it is.” that this is as good as it gets.
as artists, our job is to interfere with the processes of perception and sense-making that support this complacency and this despair. for us, it’s not a matter of showing you what’s wrong with our society, as if you didn’t already know. it’s not a matter of telling you what should happen next, as if you had any good reason to listen to us. what we want to do is make spaces where we can all practice getting attuned to the impossible.
we don’t want to stage utopia. we don’t want to theater a better world into being. the minute you saw it, you’d already know it was a lie. instead, we’d rather practice knowing that what we already know is a lie. the True and the Good are not here, not yet, no matter how badly the guardians of culture want to stage them. or WAIT: they are here, hiding deep in the cracks and crevices of our everyday experience. they are in the impulses and fantasies, the shivers and visions we have always been taught to repress, to ignore, because they make no sense, because they’re a waste of time, because no one will buy them, because they don’t fit together to make up an identity. because there is nowhere in this world they belong.
except here.
we want to use theater to nurture the desire for something else that emerges between the jagged edges of this world. when we say we are “champions of weird desire,” this is what we mean. trying to make our way down into the raw hope hidden at the heart of our lives, hanging on to the tiniest threads of longing, of pleasure, of wonder, of sick and giddy humor to get us there. we have to value above all that which we don’t know how to value.
this means that—as artists—we give up on being right. as people, we are trying to do the right things. in our shows, we try to do the wrong things, to unsettle the normality that holds us prisoner. in our shows, actually, we try to reimagine what it means to be “people”: for instance, actors play multiple roles; so do designers. metamorphosis helps us resist the kind of knowledge that keeps us fixed in place along with our world.
we want a way past the certainty of what we are, and what we can be.
this is our rigorous pursuit of weirdness. now show us yours.
love,
minor theater
july 25, 2020