At This Stage in the Game
Project in development
100 people meet in an arena.
Among them: policemen, sex workers, religious leaders, students, farmers, humanitarian aid workers, babies, refugees, landlords, celebrities, sports teams, military personnel, artists and those who cannot be identified so easily.
Uprooted from their normal contexts, and meeting each other for the first time, together we will summon a sports spectacle where civilisations are shaped and destroyed over and over like a never-ending game.
Floodlights. Colossal screens. A camera to find you in the crowd.
Anthems. Mascots. The beat of a drum. The voice of a commentator shrieking and urgent.
This is a competition – each group inventing their visions of the world for the crowd.
Structures are built high, then collapsed, shattered or blown up by the next team.
A panorama of bodies, moving together, jostling for power and space. They arrive, and depart, carrying unspoken embodied histories, in choreographies both pedestrian, and gladiatorial.
Until eventually – breathtakingly – all the players must work together, bodies close and cooperative, to piece together a new monument for the collective. Will they succeed? Can this happen?
It’s some task, but this is the game.
Imagining a form between participation, architecture & a sports spectacle, we want to respond to the polarisation we are witnessing around the world. In this context of relational breakdown, we want to look more closely at the people we share our streets with.
We ask ourselves: What ideas do we have of each other? Can we tolerate dialogue or are some things out of the question? What offends you? What affects you? What do you want to protect? If you built the world in your image, what would you need to destroy first?
100 people assemble on stage: teams of policemen, sex workers, religious leaders, students, farmers, humanitarian aid workers, babies, celebrities, conspiracy theorists, sports teams, military personnel & artists.
In a sports spectacle, we see people who live in this city negotiate the beauty & the difficulty of living alongside each other at this moment in history. We will conjure the aesthetic world of an arena, a striking framework to assess our relationships to one another – with its authoritarian undertones, ability to create ecstasy & how sports reduces complex ideas to binaries.
We want to understand how a ruling order is deposed & reformed according to the vision of the incumbent players. On this theatrical pitch, one after another, each team builds a structure that somehow speaks to their ideas or role in society. Working with the same materials, & under time pressure, each team must destroy the structure built by the previous team.
Toddlers build 20 sandcastles on stage.
Police officers destroy sandcastles & erect a fence.
25 eleven year old girls destroy the fence & build a shelter.
A team of people in their 80s collapse the shelter & slowly piece together a table from the relics.
1 unidentified person sets fire to the table & makes a trench from the rubble.
7 sex workers flatten the trench and make a parliament.
Until eventually, all the players must work together to find a new order from the ruins: we watch them discuss, vote for & collectively negotiate a new way of building space.
People are initially assembled through social-specific identities; however, the work actively destabilises these categories to make clear that each group contains multitudes. Each group reveals internal contradiction, dissent and competing strategies, refusing to act as a unified bloc.
As the performance unfolds, systems attempt to organise people into coherent structures — and those structures break down under pressure. The mechanics of dialogue are made visible on stage: how positions harden, shift, collapse or coexist.
In this way, the work does not stage consensus, but exposes the difficulty, and necessity, of negotiating coexistence across potentially irreconcilable positions.
What ideas do we have about each other?
This project was originally developed as part of Factory International’s inaugural Artist Takeover, and these images document an experiment at scale we staged after one week of development at Aviva Studios in Manchester.
Original Artist Takeover Team: Craig McCorquodale, Jennifer Jackson, Rosie Elnile and Milla Clarke.