Daniel Kok
PIIGS is a European cheerleading team assembling as a force to cheer for a landscape in crisis. Widespread unemployment, austerity measures and increased euroskepticism have made it imperative for the PIIGS to speak.
PIIGS is a body of different voices. We have different reasons to cheer. We cheer to find the reason to cheer. We cheer because we want to be cheered. We are cheered and so we cheer.
EVERYONE WILL BE HAPPY IN THE END.
Initiated By Daniel Kok
Collaborating Artists Jorge Gonçalves, Sheena McGrandles, Luigi Coppola, Elpida Orfanidou, Diego Agulló
Video Hiroko Tanahashi
Costume Dusan Pejcic
Dramaturgy Peter Stamer, Pierre Rubio
Co-producers Maxim Gorki Theater, WorkspaceBrussels [Life Long Burning], Nationales Performance Netz
Supported By PACT Zollverein
Statements on Collaboration, Community, Collectivity & Cheering
I think about my research on collaborative practices in PIIGS through a particular distinction: one between thinking about the collaborative project as a community or as a collective.
A community answers to a role model and is based on sameness or an underlying agreement that is inevitable in any group. My own observation is that in Europe especially, no matter how people have grown increasingly skeptical of ideology, there remains a lingering desire to form and belong to communities. Notions of solidarity, togetherness and oneness are approached with ambivalence. A common denominator is perhaps still necessary especially since we wish to avoid fulfilling only individual objectives. Yet, a common denominator is not necessarily the same as a common objective, but a common problem or a common desire to assemble. It is possible for different and divergent points of view to share a desire to assemble, to transform and be transformed together. Because we assemble, we believe we can arrive at a higher point of transformation.
A group can also look at itself as a collective, which is based on singularities and differences simultaneously (assemblage). The collective is itself a commons, already a common resource. The collective is an amalgamation of parts, without needing to form a whole. A collective looks for something between Self-above-Community (liberalism) and Community-above-Self (confucianism, communism). The collective performs the collectivism by putting it into practice and performance in public.
This is important for the PIIGS cheerleading team, because we are dealing with the European project and European (political, economic) questions as if they were inseparable from our artistic creation. Simply put, Europe is seen as a paradox - a singular concept that tries to hold and protect the diverse differences within it.
As such, the PIIGS European cheerleading team is only a team insofar as we true: space for the individual is accomplished only by fulfilling the group. The PIIGS cheerleading team has to be a unified body with different voices - a polyhedric body. Similarly, PIIGS cannot be clear with what it says or what it wants from the audience, since it rejects conforming to a specific ideology or a coherent set of ethics.
For PIIGS, cheering is an injunction that affirms the collectivism of difference. We ask the public/audience “What is our common desire?” but do not (or cannot) answer this question. Although our cheer is a provocation for change, we concern ourselves only with the provocation itself rather than the change or what happens afterwards. We are interested in performing relational politics that are in crisis so that a change might be imminent. Inasmuch that we are interested in performing the arbitration of the relationship between the individual and the collective, we pay attention to the speech acts that call for the recursivity of that arbitration.
Marx said that he was not a Marxist. He was not interested in a revolution per se but a society in permanent revolution (constant negotiation). In his utopia, every member of society is an active agent; and to not practice the permanent revolution is to negate the essence of being human.
The PIIGS European cheerleading team has set for ourselves this lofty goal despite knowing that we are more likely to fail, or at best, bring the theatre to a micro-revolution that lasts but an hour. Yet, it is not the nature of cheerleaders to doubt themselves.
We insist that EVERYONE WILL BE HAPPY IN THE END.