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

notes to pages 181– 3
in the interaction between many things, and as such does not rule out
business: ‘the starting point is to take any fi eld and make its principles
available and useful to people who feel outside it, or who are poor. . . . I
want to see people getting their hands on things that improve their lives.’
(Berman, interview with the author, London, 8 January 2010.) From the
beginning, Inter- Action had worked with a mixed economy: Equity (the
UK trade union for professional actors), public funding, individual
donors and liberal trusts.
77 The three actors were John Perry (Edward Lear), Phil Ryder (William
Shakespeare) and Gary Brooking (Captain Cook), members of the Inter-
Action co- operative. Shakespeare and Lear visited Los Angeles in
November 1979.
78 David Powell, telephone interview with the author, 13 May 2010.
79 Anonymous, ‘Sticking Together’, in 7- Up, fi rst edition, 1976, p. 3. When
I visited, the most recent creative task had been to make a picture of a bird
from woodworking materials.
80 Bill Harpe, All in the Games (DVD, 10 mins), undated.
81 Bill Harpe, Games for the New Years: A DIY Guide to Games for the 21st
Century, Liverpool: The Blackie/ Great Georges Community Cultural
Project, 2001. See also Chris Arnot, ‘Playmates’, Guardian, Society
supplement, 7 November 2001, p. 6.
82 Berman, interview with the author, London, 8 January 2010. Some of
Berman’s games are catalogued in Clive Barker’s Theatre Games: A New
Approach to Drama Training, London: Eyre Methuen, 1977. Barker was a
trustee of Inter- Action and taught the fi rst generation of Dogg’s Troupe
actors.
83 Berman maintains that he follows the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget,
believing that creativity is one of the brain’s genetically inherited structures.
David Powell, a former member of the Inter- Action co- operative,
describes the aims of Berman’s games method as twofold: ‘to balance the
individual’s capacity to play a role in a group effort’ with ‘ways to invent
things anew collectively’. (Powell, telephone interview with the author,
13 May 2010.) It is timely to recall that team- building via games is now a
staple component of corporate culture, even if these take place annually
rather than weekly, and rarely involve the invention of new games.
84 One of The Blackie’s long- standing team members, Sally Morris, refl ects
that if anything the performances were depressing, based on researched
statistics and ‘holding a mirror up to nature’. (Sally Morris, interview
with the author, Liverpool, 5 August 2009.)
85 In a document analysing Sanctuary, The Blackie team observe that ‘Large
scale or abstract change . . . was best achieved by unoffi cial action, and
even then by group activity rather than individual action.’ (Anonymous,
‘Sanctuary Report’ [1969], n.p., The Blackie Archive.) However, the
report also notes that the discussion following the performance was
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