version 1.0 - manifesto (2001)

1. The performance work must be inclusive, recognising and respecting the independent aesthetic practices of the members. Process must allow members the space to actively maintain their individual practice.
   
   
2. Process and product cannot be prescriptive, and thus close down possibilities for future evolution. Nothing can ever be too finished. A tension between completion and improvisation needs to maintained- this is site of intervention and agency for all participants in the performance act, collaborators and witnesses.
   
   
3. Our work remains critical of the production model of the traditional theatre. We do not cast actors to perform roles, but instead creatively engage with people to manifest presences whose complexity, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies provide the core of the work and ground it firmly in the human scale.
   
   
4. Functionally, we are anarchists. We have too many options to choose from. We are time expensive. We probe and explore through action democratic processes. Through collaboration we enact democracy-writ-small, embracing the in-built flaws and difficulties of this mode of association. We would posit that the true radical-ness of democracy lies in the impossibility of final completion, but we unfortunately rarely reach a final agreement on anything. Accordingly, our work is never complete, but continually in process. Our collaboration, like any democracy, is constantly in negotiation of the terms of its operation and it’s very existence.
   
   
5. The group has no single identity, and to impose one would be to misrepresent the subject entirely. In performance there is an aura (for want of a better word) generated by our collective presence here in this now, this very tense present. But this is as intangible as the minutely detailed, bewilderingly complex, mind-numbingly boring and unbelievably stupid actions that constitute a collaborative endeavour. We reserve the right to adopt identities tactically, for short durations and for specific purposes.
   
   
6. We need to identify strategies to uphold this rhetoric and maintain a commitment to process, and to do this without destroying those qualities that give the work its sense of alive-ness. We require generous agendas. We need to maintain a constructive and critical dialogue at all times throughout the work, and constantly question why we are here, in this place. With complacency this work is already over, this delicate space of respectful struggle violently erased.
   
   
7. We believe that performance is an important forum for critical investigations of social practice. These are difficult times, and we cannot claim the moral high ground. We are compromised, by necessity, by choice and by accident. We test the limits of our bodies and the limits of our language to speak and act about our times. We believe that for performance to represent a society that is multiple it requires multiple voices. We value dialogue. We like challenges and surprises. We need company.
   
   
   

-- Version 1.0 - Micro Lecture by David Williams - MORE
-- Commandments: on Writing and Version 1.0 - MORE