Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship - autonomous ...

artificial hells
them in the twentieth. A large educational load was carried by the cameos,
but at the same time this aimed to be ‘a joyous and creative’ mode of interactive
performance. 78 For the actors, the continuous embodiment of a
historical fi gure over two to three years placed a new spin on the idea of
durational performance.
Aside from a striking investment in the co- existence of ‘high’ and ‘low’
artistic forms, one of the most distinctive aspects of both The Blackie and
Inter- Action’s identity is a commitment to games that are co- operative
rather than competitive. Each week at The Blackie, the regular staff
continue to engage in games, all of which are seen as ‘a means to an end
rather than an end in itself’. 79 Games are understood as metaphors for social
relations and thus demonstrate the possibility of producing change. In a
recent promotional DVD about The Blackie, Bill Harpe speaks of his non-
competitive reworking of the children’s game ‘Musical Chairs’, which uses
decreasing numbers of carpet tiles rather than chairs. When the music
stops, participants leap towards one of the tiles, even if there are already
people standing on it. The point is co- operation – a balancing act – rather
than elimination. As Harpe wryly observes,
The conventional musical chairs game is a very good preparation for
unemployment, because most of the players discover that they aren’t
needed once the game gets going, they sit it out and watch. It’s an image
of a world in which a lot of people do sit out and watch, and are unemployed
or redundant. In the upside down game everyone’s involved in
the game right up to the end, everybody’s making a contribution, everyone’s
doing something. That’s an image of a different sort of society. 80
Harpe has collected over forty of these games in a publication Games for the
New Years (2001). 81 The games are given titles that spell out what is
achieved through them – almost all of which promote social harmony: ‘the
accomplishment game in which expectation promotes unity’, ‘the unison
game in which democracy is tested to its limits’, ‘the rescue game in which
becoming breathless may also become a friendly habit’.
Ed Berman talks proudly of the Inter- Action Creative Games Method, a
training ‘for people who are interested in their own or group creativity, or
in a profession that works with people’, although this remains unpublished.
82 Berman offers the following example of a game where participants
have to get from one side of a room to another, not fi rst but last; by disconnecting
the goal (the other side of the room) from the means of advancement
(speed), competition becomes co- operative, and more creative. Despite the
similarity of this example to Harpe’s upside- down musical chairs, Berman’s
approach is more analytic and less overtly value- laden, informed by his
training in Educational Psychology and an understanding of community
arts as ‘action research’. 83
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