Dreams of a Fourth World: Performance After Capitalism in the Work of Javaad Alipoor and Tim Crouch

Dunne-Howrie, Joseph (2023) Dreams of a Fourth World: Performance After Capitalism in the Work of Javaad Alipoor and Tim Crouch. In: TaPRA 2023, 30 August - 1 September 2023, University of Leeds.

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Abstract

The instability of the present political juncture makes the future a difficult place to imagine. Javaad Alipoor’s intermedial performance Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (2022) frames the Internet as an analogue for a possible postcapitalist future. The dramaturgy resonates with Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s concept of the Fourth World: a ‘conceptual place’ with ‘no place for static identities, fixed nationalities, or sacred cultural traditions’ (1993). The intermedial scenography makes the political struggles that effectuate revolutionary change visible through the expression of what Alipoor calls subaltern knowledge: the experience of living in the space between the world we want to live in and the world we are forced to live in. Taking an explicitly oppositional position to technological mediation in performance, Tim Crouch’s performative evocation of virtual reality through text in Truth’s A Dog Must to Kennel (2023) acts as a memorial for collaborative acts of imagining worlds into being through live, embodied performance. This aspect of the theatrical event is described in the play as a vision of democracy that risks being effaced by digital social atomisation and the concomitant decline of communal experiences. This paper will discuss how both pieces situate digital technology as the generative material of all possible futures, utopian and dystopian alike. Despite their antipathetic ideological positions, I argue that Alipoor and Crouch narrativise a postcapitalist democracy as one characterised by transcultural interconnectivity either engendered or inhibited by digital technology, respectively. Theories of Fourth World aesthetics (de León 2021) will contextualise my analysis of the heterodox narrative of futurity Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World and Truth’s a Dog Must to Kennel claim as theatre’s cardinal social responsibility in our age of permacrisis. The conflicting visions of Alipoor and Crouch act as valuable case studies to investigate how theatre can represent a refuge from and incubator of digital democracy.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Depositing User:	Dr Joseph Dunne-Howrie
Date Deposited:	03 Oct 2023 08:48
Last Modified:	03 Oct 2023 08:48
URI:	https://bruford.repository.guildhe.ac.uk/id/eprint/50

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