If Not Democratic

If someone says your work is democratic, what does that mean to you? And what does that mean for all the works you have made that no one has ever called democratic? This text reflects on participatory performance’s relationship to political forms of organization—from democracy to autocracy. The author has chosen to supply these reflections from within the context of his own body of work and collaborations, first reflecting on what it means to adopt democracy as a form and then pondering upon alternatives as provocations, from more established ‘classical’ forms to those that might be derived from the world around us. Laced through the text’s short sections is a refrain on what the author considers to be a tension between performance’s capacity to manifest a political system and the threat of politicality as a metaphor.