(no)work(no)shops

interference archive

During September and October of 2018, Huge Sillytoe offered a series of (no)work(no)shops within the Brooklyn-based library of dissident culture Interference Archive. The series was entitled ‘Interference, Absurdity, Performance, and Political Change‘ and involved four sessions exploring participants’ definitions of ‘the absurd’ and ‘the political’ through discussion and improvisation and the collective devising of a culminating street intervention. Here, outside of the courthouse in downtown Brooklyn, one participant frantically asked for directions to a library using a map of Shanghai, another blew snippets of automatic poetry out of a snorkel, another invited passersby to doodle on a set of hard-boiled eggs, whilst another interviewed observers on a tape that constantly erased itself concerning their perception of the political implications of what they were seeing.

escuela de teatro político

Huge Sillytoe was a student at the Escuela de Teatro Político in Buenos Aires throughout 2017. During this time, as part of the popular education model of the project, Huge also offered classes concerning the history and actuality of transgressive avant-garde performance as a political act. As a final project the participants of these sessions developed a street performance entitled ‘El Huevonazo’. Here a penguin arrived to the Plaza de Mayo, the central square of Buenos Aires, carrying an enormous egg and wandering around as if lost. Suddenly the penguin fell, and the giant egg shattered on the ground, exposing hundreds of smaller eggs that were hidden inside it and that began to roll in all directions around the plaza. From nowhere these smaller eggs were pounced upon by an oversized eye, a cat wearing boxing gloves, an immaculate dame, and a spoon. These creatures then invited the public to play games with the smaller eggs, throwing, kicking, and biting them until they too broke and a slither of poetry – written collectively by the group during earlier sessions – emerged from within. These slithers were then read aloud, from whispers to shrieks, and gifted to those who had participated in or observed the performance to carry and pass on to another person in another part of the city.

Huge Sillytoe is interested in developing (no)work(no)shops and other collective embodied (de)constructions of knowledge/power with schools, universities, farms, workers unions, care homes, prisoner support services, theatres, galleries, factories, neighbourhood assemblies, hospitals, community centres, and other terrorist organizations. Please get in touch if you would like to explore together how to undo everyday oppressions through counternormative performance!