Leader: Paolo Gruni
Location: Room 7-425, 7th Floor – John Molson Building, 1450 Rue Guy
Concordia University
In-Person Session
Capitalist Realism is the all-encompassing, colonizing, infinitely plastic and adaptable conception of reality intertwined with systemic injustice (Fisher, 2009). By ‘post-realist perception’, I mean an embodied sense of being-in-the-world corrosively leaking through and magnifying the cracks of Capitalist Realism. Perception can be cultivated via performative praxis that engages the embodied consciousness in its wholeness, intersubjectivity, and relational embeddedness in the world (Zarrilli, 2019). Perception can also be conceived as a spiritually activist aesthetic practice when fostered via writing and performance to transform human cognition and relation to others, the self, and the world(s) (Li, 2021). Post-realist perception is, therefore, a practical, embodied, ongoing, ever-renewing, poetic project/process of creative re-definition (ambiguation) of reality.
This workshop explores strategies to access post-realist perception by manifesting dream-knowledge into reality (Shawanda, 2020). The approach developed primarily from my Grotowskian theatre background and is informed by Indigenous epistemology and studies on expanded consciousness. In the first section of the workshop, the participants will undertake a physical and vocal warm-up highlighting the intersubjective and relational nature of vocality and embodiment. The second activity will combine rhythmical exercises, social dreaming as inspired by Gordon Lawrence (2018), and performative writing. In conclusion, the ensemble will engage in a collective creative experiment.
NOTE: The work requires physical engagement, but each participant can adapt their effort to their possibilities.
Paulo Gruni
Paolo Gruni is a theatre artist who trained and worked internationally. Gruni’s current interdisciplinary research combines Western laboratory theatre techniques with Indigenous epistemology and studies on expanded consciousness to develop performative practices, pedagogies, and artistic outcomes pursuing post-anthropocentric, post-capitalist, and post-colonial conceptions of creative agency.