Performing Labour: Labour and Performance in Look Left Look Right’s Above and Beyond

  • Adam Alston (Speaker)

Activity: Participating in or organising an eventParticipation in conference

Description

This paper will consider performing labour in Look Left Look Right’s Above and Beyond, a one-on-one theatre performance created for Corinthia London, a five star hotel, as part of an ‘Artist in Residence’ programme. In this performance, audience members took on the role of staff members within this fully-functioning hotel, participating alongside performers playing hotel guests and staff, as well as ‘actual’ hotel guests and staff. Three modes of performing labour will be examined, including the participation of audiences role-playing as staff, theatre workers role-playing as staff and hotel staff who perform care and attentiveness. The aesthetics of performing labour will be explored alongside the social relations that are set up through these three modes, culminating in an identification and evaluation of the bourgeois qualities of revealing labour as labour.

Questions of Aesthetics and Participation, University of Hull
Period18 Sept 2013
Event typeOther
Sponsor

Keywords

  • Look Left Look Right
  • Above and Beyond
  • Corinthia London
  • one-on-one theatre
  • audience participation
  • performing labour
  • labour and performance