Riot Pilot

We have a man in a box.

2006-07-18T15:52:00.000Z

Ready for Friday.

Come and find out what happened to Dad.

HOW TO RIOT

2006-06-30T14:27:00.000Z

go here for instructions on how to riot.

Tell your friends immediately, learn it with them.

get good.

Invite a boy.

Invite a girl.

Why not.

Take part in the World's First Remotely Choreographed Riot.

Fucking hell! That's pretty exciting.

ZEITGEIST!

2006-06-26T18:07:00.000Z

We seem to be doing the right thing... At least so they say over at LiFT,,,

'What's so great about this next generation of performance', he says, 'is that it is so participatory and so engaged with eliminating those old definitions. And it's moving us all into a more interesting situation where every one of us is a citizen'. For theatre, says Sellars, read democracy. 'Democracy is a participatory activity. It's not a spectator activity. The media has conspired to create a spectator state, and that's really unhealthy. So if we can create a stronger sense of participation and a greater diversity of voices, that's democratically engaging'.

Our goal, says Sellars, must be to use those voices, that participation, to explore 'how we want to live and what kinds of priorities we want to see in our community. Because theatre can serve as a hypothetical test case for what might happen, for what you want to try out and see how far you can take'. Does he see such explorations as his artistic responsibility? 'The shows I make', he says, 'are because of what I feel as a citizen, not what I feel as an artist'.

and there's more >>>>>>>>>>

'This is the chief challenge of everyone running an artistic operation today,' says Klaic. 'Whether you run a festival or a company, a debating club or the ICA, it's the same challenge to explore how the local can reinforce understanding and appreciation of work that comes from far away and vice versa.

To Klaic, the buzz-phrase is 'intercultural competence': the capacity for mutual understanding between individuals and organisations from different cultures. He calls for 'more awareness on the part of those who run cultural organisations that their core business is the enhancement of intercultural competence. You need intercultural competence in most cities in Europe. You need it in all multicultural environments. You need it in London, in your everyday life. You need it if you try to be a European.'

ROBOTS : : International Theatre Artists

ps.... i know who started the riot

Other rioters in the news

2006-06-23T16:20:00.000Z

this has got riots in it too. and it looks a bit like one.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN? An interested party writes...

2006-06-23T11:06:00.000Z

"yeah but how are we meant to interact with it? it's interesting but it's opaque. it feels like a game we're not part of. or is that just me?"

Hooray. A comment follows.

Thanks for these images...

2006-06-23T10:16:00.000Z

...whoever you are. That's the spirit.

Send us more: riotpilot@googlemail.com

riot dance 2

2006-06-23T09:01:00.000Z

learn this

2006-06-23T08:59:00.000Z

7: I think the police are taking this really, really hard.

2006-06-21T21:25:00.000Z

And I don't really know what the best thing to do is.

They're basically... well...

I came out of my place and saw them in a car going past the end of Morning Lane. I thought it had to be a coincidence; they have some dignity. I'd always thought.

But then I saw them walking down Mare Street. One of them was eating an ice cream. Tum te tum. I rode past them with a frown, making the impenetrable face as if I were weighing some bad news.

I rode up to Church Street to meet Shy in the Spence; I drank a mocha, I read the paper. And they they walked past; I hid my face.

And then I saw them on the corner of the High Street waiting at the lights, on a pair of bicycles.

The police are taking it really, really hard. What should I do?

Should I call them? Or sit it out? Or what?

6: It's the police. They emailed.

2006-06-21T12:04:00.000Z

FUCK YOU.

Look at this. This is what you're throwing away.

We used to have SUCH A GOOD FUCKING TIME. this is ME AND YOU.

AND if YOu want to concentrate on just thebad shit, then that[s up to you we guess, we suppose we should have expected it

LOOK. This is us having FUN, DO YOU REMEMBER This day?

We waited for you all morning and afterwards we watched it back on tv, we were on TV, there was smoke from the grills in the air. we walked all the way along the canal back to victoria park. we sat on the lock and saw otters and threw stones at the swans. it was one of the best days of our life.

but you've FUCKED IT UP NOW, so FUCK YOU, and don't be fucking surprised if the next time we meet, well I'm not going to say, fuck you, you've broken our fucking heart, we really really hope you find it hard to look at these pictures. we hope you;ll be crying as hard as we are, but you haven't got a heart have you? you don't fucking have tear glands

fuck you

5: The police: SORRY SORRY SORRY

2006-06-21T10:09:00.000Z

oh shit we're so sorry, we didn't mean that, we lost our temper, we're really trying, you have to understand that this is so, so hard for us, you're not calling us back, we know we fucked up and now when you don't want to know us any more we have to deal with that too, we mean, the way we reacted to your not wanting to call us; we deserve it, oh fuck, please? can you just..?

tch

ah

uuuuuuuuuh!

FUUUUUUCK

we're sorry. PLEASE CALL. Please.

4: I'm turning my phone off when I go to bed. It's the police.

2006-06-21T10:06:00.000Z

Hey. Um, listen. We fucked up. OK? We'll say it again. WE REALLY FUCKED UP. SORRY. Jesus fucking... WE'RE SORRY. Just fucking call us back! Can we not... talk about this? We feel really... look, we've told you, we're really, really... hey, you know what, fuck off. Fuck you.

3: The police callled again...

2006-06-20T07:58:00.000Z

OK. OK. We understand, um, completely, why you wouldn't want to call us back. We... really do. Please please please understand that we're not normally like this, we've really been... look, this has been difficult for us, and we should have done better. We just want to know if we should stop... texting and calling altogether, or if... um... hey hey, let's just... can we talk? Let's just talk. Call us back. It's cool if you don't want to, but... hey, you know where we are. Bye. Bye bye. Big big kiss.

2: The police phoned back!

2006-06-19T14:30:00.000Z

Hey. Look, we just thought... we had to call you back and say, um, we're really sorry. Really, really sorry. We fucked up. We really, really fucked up, and we're so, so sorry. We hope this doesn't mean we can't, um, you know... look, what are you doing this week? Call us back. Big kiss.

1: In other news...

2006-06-16T10:37:00.000Z

...the police apologised for kicking open a front door in New Forest and for shooting in the shoulder, apparently without warning, one of the two brothers who lived there, before dragging both out of the house for hours of interrogation.

Apparently it was a mistake. They thought the brothers were terrorists with a chemical weapon concealed in the house.

Sorry! the police said, It was a mistake!

Our bad! :(

Essential Information for Rioters

2006-06-07T17:39:00.000Z

I made this when I was in prison.

2006-06-06T19:07:00.000Z

Alcohol

2006-06-06T10:29:00.000Z

Alcohol plays a significant part in the suburban or residential riot. It might be outside a Kentucky Fried Chicken shop, as in Exeter, where the Police Station is evacuated to a road on a hill off the High Street. Houses nearby usually have gardens which might contain rusted white goods, a pram or a kennel. Now, this kind of riot's pretty pointless, for all the shouting and breaking things.

Seeing something through from beginning to end doesn’t make it worthwhile. Sorry about that.

Pain is not an index of purpose.

Just because you were in there from the first beer downed to the last dustbin thrown at the police doesn't make it worth the bother in the first place.

I made a ship in a bottle when I was in prison. What were you thinking?

On the way the things in the world have something against it

2006-06-06T10:13:00.000Z

It’s kind of inevitable. As far as we can tell, everything in the world has something against it and there are basically two kinds of malice: ‘good’, let’s call it, and ‘bad’.

In the days of the riot, as today, the ‘good’ stuff bore itself with dignity since it wasn’t human. It was the predator’s malice for all the protein it chases over the scorched grass from drift to riverbank and copse, vicious from gizzards to pelt because sometimes lunch escapes those with manners and, like death, beautiful things generally don’t bother with napkins even when they’ve got brains on their chin.

There's still the bad stuff, which can't bear itself at all. It's a skin disease cureable only by the touch of a king.

King existed. Imagine the photograph of a young man from Graham Road; he’s looking directly at the camera with absolutely no expression on his face, which is running with tears. After much practice this young man, King, made his name with the scratch of a sparkplug and a greengrocer’s wide-nibbed marker pen across the whole region. He was famous for it. He made his name on the omnibus.

Under the ground.

In the bomb shelter.

In the police station.

Trying to conjure himself everywhere, he pared himself slice by slice ink-deep anywhere the capital was smooth until we couldn't see him anywhere, and we really, really miss him.

News: Phelim McDermott dons his balaclava and links arms with us

2006-05-31T11:23:00.000Z

We are holding a workshop to discover what you feel about how and where you live, and who controls that by asking questions like: "Who do YOU want to listen to you?" Happily someone with great experience in helping you [and us] to understand that will facilitate the workshop.

Who is Phelim McDermott?

—He is, or rather, is partly,Improbable

Where and when will it be?

—At the Hackney Empire on Mare Street on Monday 3 July.

What’s it for and what will it be like?

—It’s for finding out what you think about this Civic Responsibility / Right to Riot Stuff and for generating material for a performance called Riot Pilot. It will be run according to the methods of World Work. Basically, World Work is a conflict resolution-orientated thing that can be used to allow antagonists to enter into some kind of engagement with some kind of awareness and it’s a useful way of thinking about performance. You can read Phelim talking about it here

What do you want to know?

— This is mine. Can I smash it up if I am ANGRY? This isn’t mine. Is it OK if I set fire to it? If you’re not obliged to LISTEN, am I obliged to keep my TEMPER? In this crowd, which of us gets to decide whether we smash the shit out anything? That sort of thing.

Who can participate?

—You can, although places will be very limited because we want to give a lot of them to people who would never, ever normally come to a workshop.

How can I participate?

—By emailing us here:

Sympathetic Magic

2006-05-30T22:57:00.000Z

It was believed—mostly by a fat priest from the south of France—that in the deep history of our species men would paint in order to fix for the future their fancy: “I am hungry; I must hunt; I make picture of oryx stuck with arrow.”

And the next evening after the dance at the embers: “Today I am fed.”

‘Collaborative magic’ was the term this fat paleontologist coined to designate the practice. It was prescient of him: he would be lynched after the liberation of France for being a blubbery, collaborating sell-out who tried to fix for the future his fancy by making pancakes for fascists.

Collaborative magic is still practiced today.

Every day the young man can't find himself, he will spray himself on a wall in order to conjure himself the next. He does it a lot.

Just because you don’t need to hunt doesn’t mean there’s any point in eating.

Just because you’re fed it doesn’t make you full of anything.

Our young men can’t get pregnant but oh, they can get fat.

A lot of effort went into these. Which one shall we torch?

2006-05-30T22:43:00.000Z

Hmm.

Tricky.

Proper riots are urban things

2006-05-30T22:36:00.000Z

Castrating pigs makes for a crap Schelling Incident. Peasants don’t spontaneously gather to burn down a barn here, torch a tractor here, lynch a dairy cow there.

No, they gather surreptitiously behind the stables at the back of the big house and prod each the other with a pitchfork, singing folk poems about the unfair distribution of the contents of the grain silo.

A Slow Man Was Killed By the Police Today

2006-05-30T22:20:00.000Z

The Schelling Incident isn't necessarily what causes a crowd to gather. But it can be when crowds gather because pre-existing discontent has been catalysed by an event that makes the continuance of current circumstances impossible.

a slow man was killed by the police today

five men took turns with a woman in the back room of supermarket selling sweet potatoes on a square with a concrete rubbish bin

in this time of hunger, the price of flour has tripled

someone threw a grenade at the funeral party. At the subsequent funeral, a pair of plain clothes policemen in a car were mistaken for the wrong kind of Christians

it was after closing time in Exeter

taxes have been doubled. Again

it's election time, and we took our traditional weapons and went to canvass support in the part of the city where they vote for the other party (we don’t have a chance of winning the election)

it’s summer, the food is bad, there aren’t any guards to take us to the yard (but actually some of us have scores to settle with people on the landing above)

we sleep on boards in these blocks hundreds of kilometres from our families and no transport to the minehead, freezing in the winter and suffocating in the summer, and today somebody lost a leg because they did not fix what we keep on fucking telling them to fix

when we went to protest, they shot at us

they were shutting down a pub, it was summer, and a samba band started to play. When the band stopped, of course we forced our way into the town hall to smash the photocopiers and the keyboards there, and we overturned the bins, and people have been trying to work out why

A Schelling Incident is not a signal that tells a person what to do.

2006-05-30T17:36:00.000Z

It is a signal that tells a person what other people will probably do.

First things first.

"A significant number of the crowd's members must expect and desire that the crowd will become riotous. That is, there has to be a critical mass of people in the crowd who are making accurate judgments, not about their own desires and intentions, but about the riotous desires and intentions of other members of the crowd." (Here: http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj14n1-13.html)

A plate glass window might break; someone might be pulled from the crowd and beaten; someone might throw a placard at the police line. These are known as 'Schelling Incidents' and they tell the riot-friendly in the not-quite-a-riot-yet that others who are equally riot-friendly are galled enough to turn the riot into a riot.

'Civil violence' is the destructive expression of public discontent. With good manners.

2006-05-30T17:05:00.000Z

Or it wouldn't be 'civil', would it?

I predict a Riot Pilot.

2006-05-22T12:51:00.000Z

Friday 21 July. Saturday 22 July. Sunday 23 July. Where you see this sign:

Hackney is alive.

But I still think we should kill something.