This COLLECTIVE READING is stretched out over two evenings – we highly encourage you to take part in both, but it is also possible to join just one evening. These two collective reading sessions are facilitated by Solveig Gade, will be focusing on two texts by Silvia Federici and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, respectively.

On January 24, we will engage with an excerpt from Federici’s book, Caliban and the Witch. The book is a history of the body in the transition to capitalism. Moving from the peasant revolts of the late Middle Ages through the European witch-hunts, the rise of scientific rationalism and the colonisation of the Americas, it investigates the capitalist rationalization of social reproduction. In addition, the book surveys how the disciplining of the female body and the feminization and devaluation of reproductive labor was – and to this day remains – a crucial component of capitalism.

At a moment in time, when the hierarchic, patriarchal power relations and conditions under which we work and produce amongst other performance and theatre, are increasingly being questioned, Federici’s feminist reading of the historical link between the triumphal progression of capitalism and the transformation of (unruly) bodies into submissive, reproductive machines seems an important and inspiring partner to think with.

In the collective reading session, we will discuss key insights from a chapter from the book and link them to a contemporary performance context. An important question will be how to imagine and exercise practices of solidarity within our present condition(s).

On February 21st, we will discuss a chapter from Bellacasa’s book, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. The book explores the significance of care as an ethical and political obligation for thinking in the more than human worlds. Expanding agency beyond the human, the book asks how our understanding of care must change if we accept that care is not only something humans do or are in need of.

Question of care and the relation between human and more-than-human actors constitute important issues in contemporary performance and beyond. Bellaca’s invitation to push the concept of care beyond the human subject as well as her focus on how tending to non-linear temporalities may be seen as a practice of caring can be a stimulating point of departure for discussing practices of care in performance.

In the collective reading session, we will discuss key insights from a chapter from the book and link them to a contemporary performance context. An important question will be the relation between, non-linear (and lengthy) temporalities and dramaturgies of care.

ABOUT SOLVEIG GADE:
Solveig Gade, PhD, is a dramaturge and Associate Professor at The Department of Theatre and Performance Studies at The University of Copenhagen. She has published on political engagement and experimental dramaturgies in contemporary theatre and performance in journals such as TDR, Performance Research, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, Nordic Theatre Studies, Peripepti, K&K and Passage. She is Co-PI of the Velux-funded collective research project Oikos: Crisis and Care in the 21st Century. Since 2019, she has been a member of the artistic board at the Betty Nansen Theatre.

ABOUT COLLECTIVE READING
Collective Reading is a format where we read together. We invite an artist or teacher to open up and play with the way we read: What happens when we read collectively, embodied or guided? Is it possible to find another way to read and engage with texts than we have previously done?