RAT rat is...

[gaby <gaby@ratconference.com>]

Hey there all,

Who's coming to Philly in June?  Your fellow ratties there are ready and
eager to house you - a formal announcement to follow shortly...

Erik sent a great new rat statement to the PhilaRat list that I wanted to
forward here.

Look forward to seeing you!
Gaby


"rat is an anarchic association of theater artists committed to sharing work
and ways of working outside market and political conventions of development.

We are anarchic: unregulated and unstructured, collecting no dues, electing
no officers, maintaining no centralized calendar, lawless.

We are an association: communicating by all means, but most real in live
encounters - believing that the performing arts are corporal mercies, caring
for bodies in space through acts of hospitality. We struggle at the same
time to understand love as a rounded dramaturgy, not sentimental. Fellowship
is rooted in the common ground of craft, not free-traded on the plane of
emotional commerce. We don't have to work like each other, like each other's
work, or even like each other. We work with and for each other.

We share work and ways of working: by requiring each other's labor and
expertise, stepping past advertising and news. We cast each other, co-write,
seize each other's resources, make problems with each other.

We are outside the market on the theory that every use of a dollar
represents a failure of hospitality. Money is morally neutral but
imaginatively stunted; we promote barter and unmediated exchanges of goods
and services. We look for alternatives to conventional script and
organizational development (catharsis models as defined by Boal) in the
belief that the myth of perfectible efficiency endorses stasis, thing ness,
and unjust concentrations of wealth (wealth as variously defined).

"rat" because: every city has them; because build the new in the shell of
the old; cunning; unlovely, ineradicable. Ana acronymic: radical alternative
theater, room and transportation, race against time.

A rat meet is any size; any one can call one together; whoever comes, is (as
per Alternate Roots); whatever resources there are, as long as they are
shared, are sufficient. Every effort is made to provide food and shelter.
The content of the meetings tends to be satisfied by the fact of their
happening; meetings "happen" when bread is broken.

This is the Big Cheap Theater - mutual, tawdry, unstoppable, kenotic,
present, grace-full, as much an ethical as an esthetic enterprise. We old
the right to fail, to scatter, to let go, to re-form improbably, to
infiltrate, interdict, self-contradict, disavow the principles set down
here, to make space when all space was thought collapsed, to make that space
habitable by infusing a portable, repeatable sense of home: residence at
tempo.

Write your own damn manifesto."




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