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Acting out dissent; imaginary lives the performance strategies of My barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater

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Acting out dissent; imaginary lives the performance strategies of My barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater

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Acting Out Dissent; Imaginary Lives
The Performance Strategies of My Barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater

Toro Castaño

A Thesis Presented to the
Faculty of the USC Graduate School
University of Southern California
(Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere)
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts
May 2014
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ..................................................................................................... Page 4

Abstract ....................................................................................................................... Page 5

Chapter 1 Overview .................................................................................................... Page 6

Chapter 2 Introduction to PoLAAT ............................................................................ Page 9

Chapter 3 Critical Play and Gaming Models ............................................................ Page 23

Chapter 4 Theoretical Informants ............................................................................. Page 33

Chapter 5 PoLAAT Instantiations and Sites ............................................................ Page 38

Chapter 6 Critical Analysis and Conclusion ............................................................ Page 50

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DEDICATION

To my partner, artist Madison Webb.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Any work such as this would not have been realized without generous support. I would like to
express my deepest gratitude to John Tain for the unwavering encouragement and tremendous
support—you went above and beyond when it mattered most. Thank you for allowing me to set
my own terms while bringing clarity to my ideas and for instilling confidence in my writing.

My sincere indebtedness to the artists who provided a wealth of knowledge and their valuable
insights, thank you Alex, Malik, and Jade. A special thank you to curator Leah Abir for your
generosity and expertise.

My appreciation also goes to the incomparable resources and helpful individuals:

Noura Wedell – for your frank appraisals and for showing us that collective knowledge
production is the true meaning of praxis.

Rita Gonzalez – I’m humbled by the respect you afforded me. Our meeting was key to
understanding the artists practice and I will be eternally grateful to you.

Karen Moss – the instructor, who responded to every request for help with a plethora of
suggestions, going out of your way always.

Rhea Anastas – for stewarding us through this intensive process of growth and showing us the
artist-centric way of writing.

Connie Butler – for asking the questions that needed to be asked and for deep consideration of
what and who is included in our work.

A.L. Steiner – for the respect you afforded and the encouragement, showing me that authenticity
matters.

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Abstract
This thesis introduces readers to the interdisciplinary performance collective My
Barbarian, consisting of artists Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The primary
focus of this thesis is the body of work, the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT). The
project was conceived as a pedagogical model and codification of My Barbarian’s larger
performance strategy as a way for the artists to experiment with group expansion and contraction
by inviting participants to join the group in producing performances. PoLAAT performances
have often been characterized in terms typically associated with musical theater, camp, and
kitsch. While these terms are not incorrect, this thesis will articulate how these are part of a
highly sophisticated performance strategy informed by the artists’ engagement with a history of
experimental theater projects such as the Living Theater, the antiteater, and Theater of the
Oppressed. By framing the practice using critical gaming theory this thesis articulates how My
Barbarian utilize concepts such as critical play to show how play operates and how it engages
willing participants through the model. Analysis of the portability of the model shows the
challenges incurred when PoLAAT has been performed outside of the US with non-native
English speakers, as was the case in Italy, Israel, and Egypt. Additionally, analysis will articulate
how environmental factors test or inhibit the model’s adaptability in sites as diverse as Egypt,
with its large Muslim population, and Los Angeles, where PoLAAT occurred within a classroom
setting. Finally, the thesis will demonstrate how economic conditions affecting the art world
have produced My Barbarian’s unique form of political imaginaries through use of creative
enactment to produce what some theorists have identified as metamodern art, or art produced
after the moments of modernity and post-modernity have passed.

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Chapter 1
Introduction to My Barbarian

In this initial chapter readers will be introduced to the performance collective, My
Barbarian. Their vast experimentation with form will be characterized along with the training
and educational background of the current core members. Their evolution from art band to
internationally recognized performance collective will be traced along with their experimentation
with expansion and contraction of group size. A brief survey of their body of work including
object-based production is included. The Post-Living Ante-Action Theater is included in the
survey of their work and will be discussed in detail in the subsequent chapter.
The interdisciplinary performance collective My Barbarian, consisting of artists Malik
Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, draws from informants as heterogeneous as pop
culture, history, mythology and countless factors ranging from site specificity to institutional
commissions, to produce their body of performance, installation, and time based media works.
My Barbarian was founded in Los Angeles in the year 2000. Each of the members of My
Barbarian brings a unique set of understandings about art to their practice and they use those
techniques unconventionally, and the richness of the collective is achieved through their highly
fluid and rapid collaborative approach. Within My Barbarian, members both play to their
strengths as well as what is practically functional. Although any member of the troupe can and
has fulfilled each of the roles within the collective, areas in which the members have particular
expertise become their responsibility. “In terms of hard and fast determinants, there's a lot of blur
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at the edges, whatever is necessary at any given moment can be taken over by any member of the
group.”
1

Gaines received training in performance studies and was mentored in Augusto Boal’s
technique, while Gordon received the set of techniques that comprises Boal’s Theater of the
Oppressed practice and she is a certified practitioner, and Segade received studio training and
has created and continues to produce a body of performance and video. Together, all three of the
members have advanced theater training. The three core members began working together on
theatrical projects before officially forming as My Barbarian. Their first embodiment of My
Barbarian occurred around 2000 as an art band that performed in provisional DIY spaces for
rock venue audiences.
2
These unseated audiences typically actively engaged with the band and
there was lots of room for improvisation and direct interaction. These performances were
constructed very quickly with openness to experimentation that has remained a hallmark of the
My Barbarian’s practice today. Over the years this trial and error plus artistic intuition has
honed a kind of machine or idea factory that actualizes conceptual or aesthetic propositions that
have theoretical informants that comment about topics ranging from the condition of artistic
production to emancipatory practices informed by feminism and queer theory.
3

Among their many performances, in 2008 they created Hystera-Theater, a live
performance that occurred inside shipping crates at Art Basel Miami Beach. The original work
was based on Luce Irigaray’s feminist interpretation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, where the
cave is perceived as a womb. The site-specific work performed inside a shipping container
draped entirely in red utilized masks, costumes, music, film, and live interaction with viewers.

1
Alexandro Segade interview by Toro Castaño, New York, NY, November, 9, 2013
2
Fraser, Andrea. "Bomb." BOMB Magazine — My Barbarian by Andrea Fraser. Accessed
December 21, 2013. http://bombmagazine.org/article/7320/my-barbarian.
3
Segade interview.
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The Golden Age, was originally performed at De Appel, Amsterdam, in 2007. Documentation of
the performance was used in creating the two channel video installation for the New Museum,
New York. Also in 2008, the trio collaborated with artist Lara Schnitger to animate her fabric
and wire constructed sculptures. The artists brought these structures to life by wearing and
performing in them. The performance was documented and created a video with original score
and music by My Barbarian. In 2008, during a residency at the New Museum, My Barbarian
developed the Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT), a pedagogical project for working
with groups of people through creative engagement with the history of experimental theater. In
2009, they produced The Night Epi$ode, for Participant, Inc., New York. The set of televisual
videos inspired by TV shows such as Rod Serling’s Night Gallery linked “narratives of
supernatural anxiety with tales of middle class collapse.”
4
In 2010 they created the site specific
body of work Ecos de los Ecos del los Ecos, at Museo Experimental El Eco, Mexico City,
Mexico. The collaborative work involved producing on site with local artists. Drawing upon
local history and utilizing video production technology such as green screen, they produced a
series of videos and installations. In 2012 the body of work, The Broke People’s Baroque
Peoples’ Theater was conceived. The work engaged with questions of economic inequity,
artistic patronage, and a culture of excess. Various instantiations used costume, sculpture, and
maquettes to produce video work and gallery installation exhibitions. Their most current work,
Universal Declaration of Infantile Anxiety Situations Reflected in the Creative Impulse, was
performed in Los Angeles at the Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects in 2013. The
performance will also be staged for the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

4
Malik, Gaines, Gordon Jade, and Segade Alexandro. "The Night Epi$ode - My Barbarian." The
Night Epi$ode - My Barbarian. Accessed February 21, 2014. http://www.mybarbarian.com/The-
Night-Epi-ode.

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Chapter 2
Introduction to Post-Living Ante-Action Theater

This chapter introduces in more detail the body of work knows as Post-Living Ante-
Action Theater (PoLAAT). A discussion on their performance strategy demonstrates the artists’
direct embrace of Brechtian theater politics and a turn towards the dramatic arts and theater in
their performance strategy. Specific sites and instantiations are noted. The origin of the title and
its informants within experimental theater are also discussed. The structure of PoLAAT and its
functionality and the individual roles of the artists round out the discussion. Subsequent chapters
will offer detailed nuanced discussion of the artists’ use of play and playfulness and the
mechanical structures that animate PoLAAT including critical gaming theory.
PoLAAT is a series of five acting type workshops, conducted with up to twenty
participants and running as long as two weeks and as short as two days, and at the end, there is a
final public recital. PoLAAT's central form is organized and animated around a set of five
principles, each informed by theories of critical thought (fig. 1). These principles are:
Estrangement, Indistinction, Suspension of Beliefs, Mandate to Participate and Inspirational
Critique. Each principle corresponds to an individual workshop, and these occur in successive
order, 1 through 5. The series of workshops comprise the central form of the practice. Songs
associated with each principle form a kind of spine that threads the workshops together. Within
the workshops, participants are led through series of acting style exercises.
My Barbarian was offered a residency at the New Museum. This commission
presented the opportunity for the artists to consider the production of work amidst a landscape of
contemporary art, which increasingly privileged participatory forms that included strong social
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components. The commission also allowed the artists to play with a temporary expansion and
contraction of My Barbarian, by creating work with other artists, performers, and participants.
The residency produced the performance, Post-Living Ante-Action Theater’s Post-Paradise,
Sorry-Again.
5
Shortly after this initial instantiation, the artists travelled to Italy where they
staged, Post-Living Ante-Action Theater’s Post-Paradise, Never Say Sorry Again. This was
performed at Galleria Civica di Arte Contemporaneo, Trento. The same year, Post-Living Ante-
Action Theater’s Eleven Human Senses was performed at the Townhouse Gallery’s Rawabet
Theatre, Cairo. The following year, PoLAAT was staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art,
Miami, and at El Matadero and the festival ARCO in Madrid. In 2010, PoLAAT occurred at the
American Repertory Theater, Harvard University, Cambridge. In 2012, My Barbarian received a
Creative Capital grant to make Post-Living Ante-Action Theater’s Together Forever? at the
contemporary art festival Yaffo 23 in Jerusalem. The same year Post-Living Ante-Action
Theater’s Post-Paradise, Sorry-Again occurred at CalArts School of Theater, with recitals
occurring at REDCAT, Los Angeles.
The larger aesthetic proposition of PoLAAT is derived from an engagement with
experimental and utopian theater of the 1960s and 1970s, theater companies that sought to
eschew traditional theatrical production for direct connection with audiences, the politicization of
said audiences, and the direct address of social ills plaguing society. Specifically, the name Post-
Living Ante-Action Theater is a humorous reference to three utopian experimental theater
projects: Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s antiteater which formed out of the collapse of the action
theater, and Judith Malina and Julian Beck’s Living Theater. The practitioners of the Living
Theater viewed their dramaturgy as one of the many forms of revolution fomenting the larger

5
The title references two late 1960s era theatrical productions, the Living Theatre’s Paradise
Now (1968) and the antiteater’s critical response that play, Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (1969).
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societal revolution to come. The company’s members were interested in performance at the outer
limits. To this end an actor, may have spent the entire night talking to a single audience member.
For them it was about potential; potential was the ultimate. Largely significant and arguably
most influential for My Barbarian’s practice was their production of Paradise Now. The most
apparent connection is in the titles of the first and second instantiations where they directly
incorporate the name, paradise now, building on it to textually articulate the projects goals. The
production, Paradise Now, which featured lots of nudity, was presented in Happening-like
fashion.
6
Its aesthetic preference for the seemingly mystical and archaic appeared to be informed
by German expressionistic art, which was informed by a fascination with the archaic medieval
and the mystical. The performance led the audience through a series of ritualistic
improvisations, using group encounters with Kabbalistic and Hindu texts to conjure a lived
experience.
7
Performances took on a trancelike state seeming to express a collective longing for
revolutionary utopia between actors and audience.
8

The Action Theater (Taking a directorial role, Fassbinder formed antiteater out of the
collapse of Action Theater) started after members saw the Living Theatre perform in Munich,
reinterpreting the collective ethos as a means of addressing their own cultural moment in West
Germany.
910
Pre-Paradise, Sorry Now (1969) was antiteater’s response to that work: a series of

6
Living Theatre sought to awaken the “creator spirit” among audience members by taking
advantage of the unique way of conveyance, of direct audience confrontation. The members
sought to rail against the implications of a society increasingly blanketed by mass media turning
consumers into slaves to images parading before them on broadcast TV. Similarly, these themes
of criticality towards a highly mediated life and resistance are topics central to My Barbarian’s
work and POLAAT.
7
Segade interview.
8
Militz, Klaus Ulrich. Personal Experience and the Media: Media Interplay in Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's Work for Theatre, Cinema and Television. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang, 2006. 60.
9
Segade interview.
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randomly sequenced scenes of bourgeois life intersected with readings from the diary of a child
murderer.
11
Fassbinder’s use of ritual is similar and very different from the Living Theater.
Whereas typically rituals are about heightening human emotion, under Fassbinder they were
intended to sever any sense of self. Characters in antiteater plays worked deliberately through
repetition of most mechanical action to anonymize themselves to the point where they were like
automatons. They were social commentaries about the repeated practice of same behaviors and
how this repeated practice locked people into an almost pathological state, and the way patterns
of behavior are circulated uncritically.
12
Fassbinder wanted to confront the audience about their
own contribution to a questionable social climate. It's almost a morality play about the
audience’s own internalization of dubious social norms.
13
PoLAAT’s production is similarly
interested in politicizing their content as well as those who choose to work with them by
encouraging the enactment of resistance through playful use of critical texts and theory. Both
theatrical companies were dependent upon collectivity as a mode of production, a model for

10
By the late 1960s theatrical production in Germany began to represent a kind of moderate
complacency of acceptability. Both the “established left” and more “authoritarian left” of the
German Communist Party did not challenge America's role in the Vietnam war or the growing
Western hegemony in Germany. Attracted by what he termed, “intensive theater,” Fassbinder
joined a theater troupe known first as the Action-Theater and later the antiteater. Under the
direction of Fassbinder the company would produce important vehicles for political awareness
with the proceeds going to leftists organizations. New works by Fassbinder and his peers were
important vehicles for political awareness well into the 1960s and 1970s.
11
Segade, February 4, 2010, discussion of PoLAAT name origin, "Post-Living Ante-Action
Theater." Post-Living Ante-Action Theater Weblog.
Accessed February 21, 2014. http://polaat.wordpress.com/2010/02/.
12
Militz, Klaus Ulrich. Personal Experience and the Media: Media Interplay in Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's Work for Theatre, Cinema and Television. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang, 2006. 84.
13
Militz, Klaus Ulrich. Personal Experience and the Media: Media Interplay in Rainer Werner
Fassbinder's Work for Theatre, Cinema and Television. Frankfurt Am Main: P. Lang, 2006. 84.
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action, but while the Living Theatre sought radical liberation, antiteater performed radical
critique.
14

PoLAAT is a codification of My Barbarian’s performance strategy. Gordon usually leads
the singing of the song Estrangement. The songs lyrics encourage participants to draw a
perforated line around ones body, metaphorically separating ones self from an activity or setting.
Adapt the alienation effect continue the lyrics, encouraging us to consider how criticality might
allow us to look outside ourselves and consider more consciously our actions and the forces
operating on our bodies (fig. 2). The lyrics remind us that the principle of Estrangement also
incorporates elements of camp, a strategy for acknowledging the social ills of one’s world
through humorous enactment and mocking, we know the world is this way and together we laugh
at it in an ironic displacement. Or we might choose to invoke queer theorist José Esteban
Muñoz’s disidentification, a strategy for actively refuting structures, choosing instead to disrupt
the performance of gender and other governing structures and opting to deliberately subvert them
thus disidentifying with them.
The song Indistinction asks participants to use their bodies and actions to represent what
it might be like to “set two contradictory formal and institutional distinctions in oppositional
motion (fig. 2).” Performers sing about doing two things at once such as, “singing love songs and
paying taxes (fig. 2).” Indistinction evokes Pierre Bourdieu’s considerations of refinement and
taste. It is a kind of inside joke informed by My Barbarian’s performance strategy and PoLAAT
and the experience of doing theatrical performance as art as well as doing theater in an institution
such as a museum as well as doing performance art as theater and all the conflicts inherent in this

14
Segade, February 4, 2010, discussion of PoLAAT origin, “What is the PoLAAT?” Post-Living
Ante-Action Theater Weblog.
Accessed February 21, 2014. http://polaat.wordpress.com/2010/02/.
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kind of classification.
15
Distinction is also something that is difficult to locate, and as
performance strategy allows the trio to do things that “short circuit” each other as a means to
produce fresh thinking and hopefully new understandings (Segade).
Suspension of Beliefs references the Living Theater’s “attempt to levitate a person in the
performance of their 1965 play Frankenstein.
16
” The name is a metaphysical pun playing on the
notion of allowing one's belief system to simply float around in the air next to other belief
systems and to be viewed from above and below. By framing and contextualizing in relation to
others a critical distancing allows us to understand how belief is produced and supported.
Suspension is also about creating group cohesion and the promotion of bonding. This is achieved
mostly in the workshops by games that promote expressive communication without much verbal
dialog, utilizing the body as a messaging site.
The song Mandate to Participate is sung together as a large group that ideally includes
the audience. Informed by Antonio Negri’s theory of the masses, it speaks about and encourages
direct participation by spectators.
17
Using the staple of experimental theater, the trope of nudity,
the cast actively engages the audience, encouraging them to stand up and join the performance.
Mandate to Participate is very much a product of the initial PoLAAT instantiation at the New
Museum. In 2008 Barack Obama had just been elected President, having received the largest
percentage of the popular vote for a Democrat in nearly half a century. Mandate, while coming
to be about the opening up of the stage and the reversal of traditional theater hierarchy, was
initially informed by a progressive reexamination of democracy. These kind of multivalent and

15
Segade interview.
16
Segade, February 4, 2010, discussion of Living Theater reference to Principle III Suspension
of Beliefs. “The 5 Principles of PoLAAT.” Post-Living Ante-Action Theater Weblog. Accessed
February 21, 2014. http://polaat.wordpress.com/2010/02/.
17
Negri is co-author along with Michael Hardt of the book, Multitude: War and Democracy in
the Age of Empire. It was published in 2004, the second installment of a trilogy.
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evolving meanings are very much in keeping with the intention of the artists and the mutability
of PoLAAT’s collective meaning making.
The fifth principle and final song, Inspirational Critique, is related to institutional
critique but espouses critique practiced as an affirming process. It is significant that all of the
artists trained in the studio and workshop system, where harsh critique can be a staple of the
graduate experience. Gaines received a PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles in
2011. Gordon received a BA at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2008. While Segade
received studio training while pursuing an MFA the University of California, Los Angeles in
2009. Artists Mary Kelly and Andrea Fraser taught in the graduate fine arts department while
Segade was at UCLA and he credits them with shaping his experience within the program.
18

Fraser emerged from a history of institutional critique as artistic practice and it continues to be a
part of her work. Kelly contributed extensively to the discourse on feminist art practice. It is
likely transmission occurred and one only need observe My Barbarian’s practice to see this. It is
present in their body of work and is a staple and principle of PoLAAT. Inspirational Critique is
the maternal critique. The stage directions for the performance of this principle include the
notation, “negative scene” An argument or fight between cast members is staged. The lyrics,
“Help me grow and I’ll return the favor/Face me criticality but full of positivity (fig. 2) speak to
the notion of critique as a form of self care in which we ask our peers for direction and what we
need. The next stanza includes the stage direction, “positive scene.” The arguing cast members
make up with one another. Brother, cousin, teacher, lover, mama are all invoked, asking for their
help. A chorus of call and response ensues, try not to be dismissive, defensive and try to
sympathize. Each request is preceded with, “I could love you,” repeated over and over again.

18
Segade interview.
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The cast and participants begin to hug members of the audience. This is the maternal critique and
it continues to be explored in My Barbarian’s practice outside of PoLAAT in works like My
Barbarian: The Mother and Other Plays produced for the 2014 Whitney Biennial. This idea is
something that appears in their body of work, including PoLAAT, again and again. In addition to
the affirming nature of the critique, there is the implication of forgiveness, which manifests in
the performance strategy of PoLAAT as permission to make mistakes, permission to forget one’s
lines, and permission to misstep on stage. It’s progress, not the demanding perfection of
paternalism.
The arsenal of exercises have been adapted from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the
Oppressed games or gamesercises, a portmanteau combining the playful aspects of the games
with theatrical acting exercises. These exercises, while initially pre-selected by the artists, may
be augmented and the number of exercises may be decreased or increased for any number of
factors ranging from temporal to group dynamics. TO games are classified by their risk
engagement and within the arsenal of games each corresponds to a unique purpose. General
games selectively engage a few or all senses while polysemic games help to spatially represent
power dynamics. Games are useful in particular where language barriers exist due to their
physical and experiential nature. The initial level intention of the exercises is to inform and
familiarize participants of the underlying critiques associated with each principle. The stated goal
of the workshops are for participants to learn and build on their understandings of the terms
through group work involving acting exercises intended to illustrate, achieve, and animate
expanded definitions through somatic figurative representation, known as the creation of images
in the Boalian sense. Image creation derived from such a context is comprised of a system of
signs in which the signs are produced using the physical bodies of the participants. Sinalectic
Castaño 17
systems of meaning are non-fixed and as such often personal in nature and can be challenging to
“read.” The intention is to use the body to create a figurative representation of a concept or
event. Once these images have been fixed, they may then be animated to produce a scenic
dynamization that communicates a message comprised of several signs in motion, like a
miniature scene in the theatrical sense. Boal’s principle of a gamecercise can be seen in this
PoLAAT documentary video at the 16-second mark. In this video excerpt from Egypt
participants play the game “Columbian hypnosis,”
19
which is considered a general game suitable
to warming up. In the game one participant holds their hand palm forward, between 20 and 40
centimeters away from the face of the other actor who is “hypnotized” and must keep his face
constantly at the same distance even as it moves.
20
The game illustrates the notion of the exertion
of power over another. Participants control the entire body and movements of their partner(s)
while the slightest movement of a finger causes them to move. Other games are intended to
promote group building or participation. In this video excerpt from a “levitation workshop” in
Los Angeles, participants work together to lift one another into the air using just their
fingertips.
21
In other scenes participants must trust that others will brace them as they fall
backward and forward, eyes closed, tightly encircled by the group.
If participants require additional time to translate language (where English is not the
native language) and form understanding of concepts, additional workshops may be added to
achieve this. The final workshop is a public recital involving a performance in which participants
demonstrate an accretion of the understanding they have achieved through the cycles. The fifth

19
Video excerpts from “The Eleven Human Senses,” Cairo workshop of Post-Living Ante-
Action Theater, http://vimeo.com/25762757
20
Boal, Augusto. Games for Actors and Non-actors. London: Routledge, 1992. 51.
21
“Post-Living Ante-Action Theater: Levitation Workshop,” Vimeo video, 7:38, posted by “My
Barbarian,” 2009, https://vimeo.com/26130421.
Castaño 18
and final principle, Inspirational Critique, involves interaction with the audience. The
participant’s goal in the final workshop/recital is to teach the principles and encourage the
spectators to leave their seats and participate in the performance. The model was always intended
to be something that had a certain portability that could be given over to participants, and this
occurs to a greater and lesser extent both within the workshops and final performance. The
artists’ role, while somewhat adaptable, can be viewed as one of facilitation or direction in
nature, helping to see that the process is more productive for all involved. This production aspect
will be explored later in the thesis.
Gaines has the most familiarity and training in music: he understands it and writes it the
best, so he’s often the one who has that responsibility for coordinating the musical aspects of a
PoLAAT performance and working with the performers who have musical ability.
22
Gordon is
the best at costuming, so for many years that often fell under her leadership. That has since
become a lot more flexible as other groups members have learned to use sewing machines.
23

Gordon also has the most training in applied theatre; given that that’s a huge part of the model
she has traditionally enjoyed a larger role in running the workshops, though Gaines and Segade
have conducted workshops in her absence, or by themselves, as was the case in Los Angeles and
Philadelphia. Generally, Segade will look after documentation and recording associated with
PoLAAT performances. Scriptwriting is also typically supervised or produced by Segade, though
with regard to PoLAAT the ideal structure is not scripted but instead a collectively produced
loose textual narrative will structure the recital aspect.
24
This may in some cases manifest as
something as rudimentary as a Power Point presentation (intended for the participants and

22
Segade interview.
23
Segade interview.
24
In unique circumstances like the performance in Los Angeles, which will be discussed at
length later, Segade quickly produced a physical script for the cast of actor participants.
Castaño 19
audience to follow along with the performance). It bears repeating that in this practice and in
PoLAAT there are no solute boundaries and there is a tendency towards collectivity and as such
other members have written material and members of the participant group can and have
generated their own scripted material.
25
While it is a fact that each of the members has different
competencies, the group is committed to never foreclosing on the possibility of shifting roles,
which, in addition to group cohesion, keeps content very fresh. If participants express initiative
around certain aspects of the production they may be permitted to take on a leadership role.
Ultimately the three members have final say over what is included in the final performance but
often there is attrition and very little is not included. This control is less about authorship and
more about taking responsibility for the participant group, feeling what the groups reaction to a
particular piece is and determining whether or not that feels like something people are
comfortable with.
26

Being commissioned by the New Museum’s then director of education Eunjie Joo and the
education department informed the way the artists chose to respond to the site and this accounts
for the scholastic look and feel and pedagogical structure of PoLAAT. The performance was set
in a large beige auditorium and the overt neutrality fed the way the aesthetic considerations of
the emerging structure emerged. The process for including participants was conducted partially
by open call. The artists actively pursued four other participants.
27
An open call has remained a
feature of subsequent PoLAAT performances. The conditions of New York were unique to any
PoLAAT participant group. Those that participated were comprised of the artists’ peers from the

25
It is important to make the distinction between a physical script and the notion of scripted
material. Here scripted material refers to the performance of lines or skits that have been pre-
determined and produced within the initial workshopping process.
26
Segade interview.
27
Segade interview.
Castaño 20
performance and art community, and in several cases had worked with the My Barbarian.
Participants like photographer Rosalie Knox, musician and private investigator Giles Miller, and
performance artist Daniel McDonald had enjoyed past collaborations with My Barbarian and
they were enthusiastic in their willingness to support the project.
28

My Barbarian and their various projects all have an aspect of pedagogy to them as the
artists seek to define their terms as they go, and they are apt to do this in the copious amounts of
writing they produce as part of the practice. While the practice unfolds they actively engage in
theorizing it. With PoLAAT, this resulted in copious manifesto like documents, some exceeding
fifty pages, as Segade sought to articulate PoLAAT. Forms of political experimentation get
recycled into aesthetic form. Aestheticization of experimental theater by the artists and PoLAAT
served two functions. Making use of the form of experimental theater models like those active in
the late 1960s and 1970s made the facilitated the goals of fluid and temporary expansion and
contraction of My Barbarian, while still allowing the artists to retain authorial positionality. This
is where the idea for the initial performance of Post-Living Ante-Action Theater (PoLAAT) was
developed, but it was not conceived as a serial performance but developed into such a structure
while the artists were forming the structure itself in New York. Experimental theatrical models
have not always fulfilled their more utopian desires and in some cases are perceived to have
failed and become subsumed by the very market forces proponents sought to critique. The artists
are using them within PoLAAT’s form by recycling them as aesthetic models rather than
political models. While the artists of My Barbarian may not always hold a firm belief in their
political efficaciousness, they are not cynical about the form’s political potential either. Potential
here is a significant term in that it speaks to the aspirational formation and enactment of political

28
Jade Gordon, interview by Toro Castaño, Los Angeles, CA, October 23, 2013.
Castaño 21
imaginaries. Plato’s cave allegory (370 BC) states that behind the visible world is another
dimension of truth, accessible solely through abstraction and differentiation. What would this so
called Theory of Ideas be without the experience of play? One must act “as-if.” One must be
seduced by the artificial to wake from the dream, which before experienced as playful appeared
in the first place to be reality.
29
Central to this understanding is Friedrich Schiller’s play-theory,
found in his Letters upon the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). Through a close study of
Immanuel Kant’s (1788) “Critique of Practical Reason,” Schiller developed an idea of play often
found in the field of anthropological theory. According to Schiller, play oscillates between two
fundamental human drives: the “sensual drive” and the “formal drive.” This speculative
movement between the two drives leads to a Balance of Reality,” with the goal to set man free
and to cultivate him. His theory provides a deep understanding of the play dialectic.
30

For the members of My Barbarian the form of PoLAAT, that of experimental theater company is
an aestheticization of these older forms of political experimentation. They invoke these political
forms not for any belief in resurrecting them. Within PoLAAT these forms are recycled into
aesthetic form as an affirmational practice, or a type of positivist philosophy in which stating
one’s goals or desires is a concrete step in the process of their actualization. In this regard, it is a
kind of hopefulness and hope externalized.
While there’s room for spontaneity and chance there’s not a way to predict how the
conditions of each site and the stakes for the participants will inform and or shape the various
constituent workshops that form PoLAAT. There is no guarantee the participants will accept the
terms being presented. So, the artists invoke these political forms not for any belief in

29
Rafinski, Adam, and Markus Zielke. "DiGRA." DiGRA. 2013. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/defragging-the-magic-circle-from-experience-
design-to-reality-design/.
30
Rafinski, 2.
Castaño 22
resurrecting them, but as a proposition for planting seeds that have the potential, the hope, of
producing a kind of futurity comprised of a political imaginary. This political imaginary is
affirmational and the act of acting it out is the affirmation. To quote POLAAT blog: “Perhaps it
is the case that theater has died. Yet in its post-living state theater can be used to pre-perform the
action of the future by traveling through the past. The plays selected by PoLAAT present an
unresolved relationship to the history evoked and enacted through these texts”.
31
My Barbarian
are masters of the hyper genre invoking an excess of narrative as a tactic for confronting their
own complex relationship to fantasies of modernism and PoLAAT is a public proposition and
invitation for anyone who’ll accept to consider these legacies and what we can do with them in
current conditions and emancipatory desires. PoLAAT is a model created through the use of
theatrical techniques. The model is also a lab for not only the participants but also for the artists
who direct and facilitate the experience by assessing the workshops at the end of each day in the
cycle. The use of play models also opens the practice up to interpretations and assessments that
help the artists to interpret the operation of the mechanics of PoLAAT’s constitutive parts and to
adjust as necessary. This assessment doesn’t always mean that the artists will be able to “correct”
the process through implementation of specific TO gamescercises. Say perhaps the group was
experiencing interpersonal mechanics that were disruptive to the larger process, the use of higher
stakes games or group building games is a potential response that could be implemented.

31
Alexandro, Segade. "Post-Living Ante-Action Theater." PostLiving AnteAction Theater.
January 27, 2011. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://polaat.wordpress.com/category/uncategorized/.

Castaño 23
Chapter 3
Critical play and the use of critical gaming models

The notion of critical play is introduced in this section. Historical theories of play frame
the discussion for the role of play in the production of human culture. Here PoLAAT is
examined at the micro level, seeking to articulate the structures that allow the model to operate.
PoLAAT is theorized as a kind of model similar to a game and introducing briefly critical
gaming theory supports the discussion. A look at key informants derived from the canon of
dramatic arts concludes the discussion. Subsequent sections discuss PoLAAT instantations and
sites in specific terms.
In considering PoLAAT and its portability across intercultural boundaries and the models
ability to work with both trained and untrained performers it will be helpful to invoke two
interrelated concept, these are “serious play” and “critical gaming models.” Both have a direct
significance in the model of PoLAAT and the artists draw on the theorization of play by Dutch
historian Johann Huizinga, an early theorist whose writings contributed to the contemporary
body of study known as critical gaming studies. Huizinga offered that it was through play that
human culture was formed, and that play was the engine behind many objects of culture from the
secular festival to the religious, and from interpersonal to larger scale contestation. It is in the
somewhat limited scope of viewing play only in terms of contestation that modern theorists and
My Barbarian depart, instead choosing to impose a much more elaborate and sophisticated
structure and purpose which is highly productive with regard to cultural objects created by
humans. In the case of PoLAAT there is the art object, the performance that the artists working
with participants create, but there is also a larger potential and resonance that these performance
Castaño 24
objects offer and that is the potentially larger impact and offering to culture.
Play is not only restricted to humans, even animals play. Play has its own contained
meaning and its own expressive value superior to biological functions (nutrition, reproduction,
self preservation) yet just as vital.
32
In most non-human animals play occurs almost entirely
among the young of the species and seems clearly to serve the function of skill learning and
practice.
33
Humans have inherited the basic youthful play characteristics of our animal ancestors,
but in the course of our biological and cultural evolution we have elaborated upon these traits
and created new functions.
34
But play in humans is not confined to our childhood years; it merely
comes to serve more complex functions beyond modeling social skill sets. It’s not difficult to
ascribe evolutionary biological imperatives for the play impulse. Play promotes cooperation and
in turn suppresses aggression by providing symbolic structures for modeling human relations. In
our culture today, play and humor are still highly useful forces for defeating aggression,
dominance, and hierarchy, though we don't use them as effectively as hunter-gatherers did.
35
The
unique relationship of play to humanity lies in its role within culture, the expression of what it
means to be alive and to be human, and specifically in the production of culture. It achieves this
by virtue of its labile nature.
36
Play is creative and also representative which is what makes it
such a useful tactic for both pedagogy and simulation.

When considering common notions of “serious play,” our ideas about the superficial
nature of “play” reveal our assumptions about “play,” that it must be the opposite of seriousness.

32
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. London Etc.: : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. 78.
33
"Play as Preparation for Learning and Life: An Interview with Peter Gray." American Journal
of Play 5, no. 3 (Spring, 2013): 271-292.
34
Gray, 281.
35
Gray, 281.
36
Huizinga, 86.
Castaño 25
Play is to be fun, low risk, frivolous, superficial, even childish.”
37
In his book, Homo Ludens, the
study of play and the formation of culture, Dutch historian and theorist Johann Huizinga
advocated for his theories of play as a response to a Dutch Protestant work ethic. The German
sociologist Max Weber has written about the connection between the foundation of the capitalist
system and the Protestant work ethic. It can be argued that concepts as simplistic as good and
bad, deserving and undeserving are the underpinnings of belief that construct this system. At a
very basic level, through critical play it is possible to challenge these beliefs and to move beyond
them to something more positivistic and holistic, viewing the larger structure of society, which is
impacted by culture. Huizinga advocated for play as something vital that must be protected. He
believed play was structured in such a way that it was as if it were occurring within a sphere
separated from daily life, as if within a “magic circle,” impenetrable by life. While his magic
circle theory is easily contested when viewed through a contemporary lens, it nonetheless offers
an opportunity to understand how play functions within the production of culture.
38

Play is an elaborate social construction within culture that not only operates as a social
function but as a source for the production of culture itself by way of its connection to aesthetics.
Play like aesthetics can be said to contain the desire to order things. Play and games both have
rules. Anyone who has played with someone who cheats knows this spoils the fun. Inherent in
rules are tension, connected to poise and balance. Tension means uncertainty and chance and is
productive. As Huizinga has theorized, play has distinct features. All play is necessarily
voluntary and as such is a kind of embodied freedom from the structure of mental and social

37
Chang, Edmond. "Serious Play Conference: Post-Mortem." Critical Gaming Project UW.
September 12, 2011. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://depts.washington.edu/critgame/project/serious-play-conference-post-mortem/.
38
Huizinga, 5.
Castaño 26
life.
39
Moving beyond Huizinga’s contestation perspective, recent theories of play cite
neurobiological imperatives, which suggests play has a higher function beyond simulated contest
or war.
A game can be said to be a form of structured playing, usually taken up for enjoyment
and containing these key components: rules, challenge, and interaction. Games are a universal
part of human experience and present in all cultures. The impulse to play games is a basic
impulse homo sapiens have had since 3500 B.C.E. Games, like other cultural artifacts, reify
hegemonic assumptions about the world, especially in the deep structure of their rules and
mechanics. As with any product of mass culture, this feature allows games to be used either as a
technology of social critique or social reproduction.
40
Since the late 1990s and early 2000s, there
has been an interest in theorizing and studying what is referred to as critical gaming or more
simplistically, the ways humans engage in serious play within digital game models. Historically,
game studies has had its foundation in economic studies. Traditional models included the study
of chance and probability. These models are limiting though given the highly sophisticated
nature of modern computer games. The sophistication lays not only at a programmatic level but
also in the ways these models function for users or players. Critical game studies today resemble
more and more a visual culture model encompassing the various lenses of the humanities and
more and more as of late the biological and neurobiological sciences. These models are very
useful both for direct comparison of the mechanics that comprise PoLAAT as well as the
PoLAAT model itself, as a means to understand how it is the model has intercultural portability
and how it engages participants. If games are models then it will be helpful in understanding the

39
Huizinga, 7.
40
Crocco, Francesco. "Critical Gaming Pedagogy." Project MUSE. 2011. Accessed February 21,
2014. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/radical_teacher/summary/v091/91.crocco.html. 25.

Castaño 27
ways play operates within PoLAAT. PoLAAT is itself a kind of model which participants can
interact with, play with, play act through, experimenting and trying on for size positions of
criticality and questioning. The theatrical staging of “playing” along with PoLAAT and
developing a theatrical production combines physical texts taken from popular culture, art
history, and specific sites and combines them with imagination to produce and demonstrate and
represent new understandings. These imagined narratives need not necessarily wed to reality but
are useful because they allow a projection for other ways of being and living. “Otherwise put,
the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways
of living and models of action within existing reality.”
41
“Art was intended to prepare and
announce the future world: today it is modeling possible universes.”
42

In his examination of language games, Ludwig Wittgenstein underlines the resistance and
alterity (or otherness) of the artwork through the experience of play. Stating: It is
impossible to find an endpoint in play, in which all options are utilized and the game as
game would end. On the contrary, the constant reopening of opportunities and challenges
in play, in particular of art, is continuing to fascinate and challenge us. Art becomes
more than art, it becomes an experimental field of ideas, creativity and responsibility: a
research practice. We welcomed the opportunity to test the ontological limits of game
design through our methodology, and to present our artistic research practice as a
guideline in approximating.
43

Play is a concept accessed by critical gaming models as a critical force that animates the
models. Put simplistically, games are systems that allow us to model structures found in the real
world or to produce models of fantasy worlds we imagine. PoLAAT is a model similar to a
game, in that mirrors the real world and its conditions as well as a politically imagined world
invoked through enactment and role-playing. Similar to critical games, the societal structures
and constructs modeled within PoLAAT’s structure allow for a kind of critical play in which

41
Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Dijon: Les Presses Du Réel, 2009. 13.
42
Bourriaud, 13.
43
Rafinksi, 17.
Castaño 28
participants may choose to act out dissent or to project and to play act or try on as it were other
ways of being outside of the ways we as subjects are interpolated. This is all done within the
context of a game so the consequential risks are mitigated. When masked or ensconced within
play, certain activities can be viewed as something less challenging than something like political
organizing, or defiance, or exceeding ones expected role in a family or in an office. The key to
these structures is the concept of play and it is a highly generative force among the three artists’
creative process, it through their playful interaction with one another that many of their ideas are
generated and within PoLAAT as well. It is through the creative use of game-like models that
PoLAAT takes its shape as a hybrid form of theatrical pedagogical performance art that is
dependent on participation or similar to a game. It requires players. Within PoLAAT you have
the initial structure of the five consecutive workshops. The artists act as facilitators (but also
players) who explain the rules as well as act as guides to help participants adhere to them. If
participants are resistant to participate or in the extreme, deliberately defy the rules, the model
while adaptable can only accommodate so much and just as in a game when someone cheats it
contributes to a negative experience and/or breakdown of the game. Related to Marx’s interstice,
this form of art practice is very much a product of advanced capitalism, which has managed to
capture desire as its primary engine. Participatory art forms that allow spectators to participate in
the making of the work or comprise a significant aspect of the works creation, while congruently
responding to these factors, are the key engine and in the case in PoLAAT. It is quite simply the
invitation to play and now more than ever this invitation is vital.
PoLAAT is about serendipitous opportunities to engage in serious play with other
participants who have expressed an interest in participation and a willingness to contribute to the
process. PoLAAT is also a pedagogical artistic model for working with groups that utilizes
Castaño 29
serious play as structuring and animating element. A certain amount of willing suspension of
disbelief or what children would refer to as “make-believe” breaks into the reality and creates the
friction play needs for meaning.
44
Play and games require one another and play holds the
potential to merge art and life, fiction and reality, form and content.
45
This is why the PoLAAT
model is able to operate under various conditions and possesses a built-in adaptability that
accommodates participants given one key factor is present, willingness or a desire to engage with
the model. Without consensual participation, play does not occur and this has been the case in
several sites PoLAAT has been performed and will be discussed later.
I would like to offer a final argument for the use of gaming models to understand
PoLAAT’s dynamics and this is a commentary on the act of art making itself. The very nature
and potential of artistic innovation involves playfulness. Bourriaud in his discussion on relational
forms of art he was viewing in the mid 1990s, described artistic activity like that located within
the modern canon of art history this way: artistic activity is a game, whose forms, patterns, and
functions develop and evolve according to a social context; it is not an immutable essence.
46

Bourriaud inscribed the processes of modernity to contemporary art practice, modernity
with its tendentious nature to promote the notion of telos, described the way ideological swings
formed on the basis of philosophical, cultural and social presuppositions informed art practice
which sought to contest what Guy Debord would characterize as the approaching society of the
spectacle or capital accumulated to such an extent it took on a representational form.
47

44
Rafinski, Adam, and Markus Zielke. Defragging the Magic Circle: From Experience Design
to Reality Design. Proceedings of DiGRA 2013: DeFragging Game Studies., Karlsruhe
University of Arts and Design, Germany. 17. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/paper_423.pdf.
45
Rafinksi, 2.
46
Bourriaud, 12.
47
Bourriaud, 12.
Castaño 30
Describing contemporary art practice and connecting it to what was called avant garde practice
of its day Bourriaud writes: It is evident that today’s artist is carrying on this fight, by coming up
with perceptive, experimental, critical and participatory models, bearing in the direction
indicated by Enlightenment philosophers Proudhon, Marx, the Dadaist, and Mondrian.
48

My Barbarian’s practice of producing works that engage in criticality shares its origins
with previous avant gardes of the early 20th century, who also created work that sought to
respond to systemic and economic conditions, the same conditions that are very much manifest
in their advanced forms today. The history of artistic collectivism has a direct relationship to
capitalism and globalization. The negative aspects of collectivism related to commodity fetish,
sought to create passive audiences. The general mechanization of social functions gradually
reduces the relational space along with this the opportunities for exchanges and pleasure with
others.
49

Bourriaud in his attempts to characterize a new ism coined the term relational aesthetics,
the emphasis being placed on the notion of a personal encounter in which one person related to
another through the art process, “art is a state of encounter.”
50
For Bourriaud, the material
conditions of relational art form both an experiential context in which artist and viewer have a
meaningful exchange beyond the context of “what is called art by commodity.”
51
He goes on to
cite the “constructed situations” created by groups like the Situationists as belonging to this
game, this game being the production of work that is one step ahead of appropriation by market
forces. Bourriaud characterizes a newly emerging art practice, in which the possibility for
interaction was present, as an interstice, referencing the Marxist term in which certain contexts

48
Bourriaud, 12.
49
Bourriaud, 14.
50
Bourriaud, 14.
51
Bourriaud, 19.
Castaño 31
that existed within our system eluded the capitalist economic context by being removed from the
law of profit.
52
The PoLAAT model, being constituted of many parts, contains such a space, a
space of possibility and real encounter but also contains the potential to be the representative art
object, likely this would manifest as documentation, which might be presented in an art gallery
and presumably acquired by an institution or a collector. From the 1990s to the early 2000s the
form of art practice, social practice, which privileges social interaction, sought to contest this
passivity and interject some idealism to the cynical position. Our highly mediated world has
produced a contemporary gestalt that may be characterized as an “informed naivety and a
pragmatic idealism.”
53
This modern positionality is inspired by modern naiveté yet informed by
postmodern skepticism. Metamodernism consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility
and My Barbarian’s larger body of work also commits to the impossible possibility of
engagement and change through art that promotes dialog and critical thinking.
54

Enter the interstitial or third way of art making. The PoLAAT model consciously
occupies both positions, allowing the model to maintain the integrity of the potential for
encounter by individual participants while still remaining institution friendly, which allows the
model to function and operate in the first place. This labor should not merely be understood as
re-appropriation; it should be interpreted as re-signification.
55
The direct political import of such
a gesture lays beyond the overt mission of critical pedagogy and institutional and cultural
critique but the method is also the message, to allow participants and viewers to have fun while

52
Bourriaud, 16.
53
Knudsen, 5.
54
Knudsen, Stephen. "Beyond Postmodernism. Putting a Face on Metamodernism Without the
Easy Clichés." ARTPULSE MAGAZINE RSS. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://artpulsemagazine.com/beyond-postmodernism-putting-a-face-on-metamodernism-without-
the-easy-cliches.
55
Knudsen, 12.
Castaño 32
engaging in serious play. Ultimately to engage in serious play is to imagine the impact of our
choices and in this way the structure allows for serious play encounters.
When framed as an artistic practice, using the signs of the art system as tools for art
making and offering to viewers/participants a personalized experience and an opportunity to
engage in critical pedagogy, self development and collective self development is the potential. It
is critical theory for daily life. Therein is the power of play as a force and model with which to
activate artistic production. The implication is that a participant helps to complete the artistic
production by helping to create the imaginary play world. Using the magic circle concept helps
us to illustrate a concept of space, a space that has been demarcated beforehand, either literally as
in the case of a playground or symbolically as in a leisure period. In the case of PoLAAT the
demarcated space is symbolic.

Castaño 33
Chapter 4
My Barbarian’s Theoretical Informants

This section offers a deeper examination of the theoretical informants operating within
PoLAAT. In particular Brecht’s theories of alienation and learning plays are cited while specific
examples illustrate how these operate within the form and the performance structure. Augusto
Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed is also brought into discussion as a key informant to the
structure of PoLAAT. Subsequent chapters offer detail on the sites PoLAAT has been performed
and the challenges incurred by the model.
A ubiquitous informant of My Barbarian’s performance strategy is German playwright
Bertolt Brecht. His theories not only inform all aspects of My Barbarian’s practice but they
operate within PoLAAT in ways significant to the body of work. In order to articulate these
connections it will be helpful to first contextualize the horizon of Brechtian theater practice
historically. Brecht was a seminal figure in the development of political theater theories and
practices.
56
Working in the 1920s, a class-conscious Brecht sought to create a mode of theatrical
production that performed an intervention on bourgeois theater and that challenged Aristotlean
assumptions of theater which at best sought to socialize audiences in accepted modes of behavior
and at worst produced cathartic experiences that allowed audiences to purge themselves of
discomforting feelings and responsibility for social conditions, leaving them within the physical

56
He was a director, playwright, manager, critic, and poet. Brecht had a desire to address new
social and political realities in postwar Germany. He was heavily informed by reading Marx in
the 1920s and consequently he worked to construct a scientific Marxist theater. He created
theatrical production that was based on reason as opposed to empathy to raise consciousness and
social conscience and to question the ideology that shapes behavior (Martin, 1). Brecht’s
significant theories are a triad composed around actors, playwrights, and what he termed
spectators or audience.
Castaño 34
and imagined space of the theater. Brecht’s methods, which incorporated the scientific
knowledge of the era, sought to “develop practices and theories and show how acting could
consciously make spectators critical observers and active participants in the creation of
meaning.”
57
Class consciousness is a central Marxist idea but it is also a reference to the
consciousness raising groups of the Women’s movement in the 1970s, in which groups of
women came together to discuss emancipation and liberation, personalizing the discussion,
understanding how the structures in society operate on individuals and ones self. There is some
direct parity in POLAAT structure and here it isn’t simply aestheticized but fully functional and
animating similar processes. Brecht defended the need to innovate, experiment, and produce new
aesthetic forms. He argued that since the apparatus of aesthetic production was not yet controlled
by artists and did not work for the general good, revolutionary artists should strive to change the
apparatus. One had to develop “the means of pleasure into an object of instruction, and to
convert certain institutions from places of entertainment into organs of mass communication.”
58

Brecht’s art thus aimed at a radical pedagogy that would provide political education, cultivate
political instincts, and provoke revolutionary political practice.
Brecht’s best known theory of Verfremdungseffekt, translated as alienation theory,
describes a distancing technique used by actors intended to disrupt sentimental identification
with the characters.
59

Brecht wanted his spectators to work through examples, to participate in

57
Martin, Carol, and Henry Bial. Brecht Sourcebook. London: Routledge, 2000.
58
Borja-Villel, Manuel J., Bernard Blistène, and Yann Chateigné. A Theater without Theater.
Barcelona: Museu D'Art Contemporani De Barcelona, 2007.
59
Examples of such techniques might manifest as captions that offer social or critical
commentary, these might be projected onto a screen or wall. Actors breaking the so called fourth
wall and interacting with spectators is another feature. Another aspect involves making the
apparatus of the play or staging completely visible so as to annunciate its constructed and false
nature. PoLAAT’s performance strategy explicitly operates utilizing alienation theory for the
same aims that Brecht sought.
Castaño 35
an active process of critical thought that would provide insights into the workings of society, and
to see the need for and to implement radical social change.
60
Alienation theory operates most
overtly in PoLAAT within the final workshop and recital performance. At this final series in the
workshop cycle, participants have defined the terms of the five principles for themselves and
come to their own understandings. This process will have generated the shows content and
produced skits that comprise the roughly 90 minute performances. It is in these performances
where direct engagement with spectators occurs. It is an explicit feature of the Mandate to
participate. Mandate to participate, which speaks of the multitude of group formation and
themes of participatory democracy deliberately, blurs the distinction between audience and
performer seeking to merge them into one and the same entity. The lyrics to the Mandate to
Participate song state:
Theater can be a model
For the forms we hope to create
Act out dissent and affirmation
Reconfigure the event as a process
Invert the hierarchical stage
61

This is a direct citation of Brecht’s alienation theory, which advocated for the opening up of the
theater and turning it into an open system, thus disrupting the hierarchical structure of the stage
where performer and spectator reverse their roles. This citation is a metaphorical commentary on
the expectation that audiences remain passive receptacles to the ethical or cathartic message of
the play. In PoLAAT performances the performers literally leave the stage and physically enter
into the space of the audience. In this excerpt from the New York performance of Mandate to
Participate, a chorus and flurry of activity erupt and around the 3 minute 30 second mark.

60
Giles, Steve, and Rodney Livingstone. Bertolt Brecht: Centenary Essays. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
1998. 8.
61
PoLAAT lyrics courtesy of the artists.
Castaño 36
Gordon directly addresses a man seated in the front row, "take your glasses off!" The chorus
continues to jump around and run thru the aisles.
62

PoLAAT performances utilize a screen and Power Point projection. Song lyrics also
function as instructions for both performers and spectators and are projected behind the stage to
facilitate this. Participants or actors engage spectators in direct address, going so far as to
encourage them to become part of the show by inserting their participation and bodies into the
action. At all aspects there is a deliberate choice to make the apparatus of the production
completely visible. In a PoLAAT production the structure of the production is turned inside out
and made visible for all too see. The use of Power Point backdrops in which the principles are
projected is the equivalent of having stage directions, typically provided only to cast members,
printed in an audience program. This projection in addition to acting as both cue for performers
as well as stage direction, frames the performance in an overt way for spectators. If the songs and
the humorous acting and image theater aren’t fully legible, the text on screen reinforces and
directly cites the critical theory or concept being animated.
There is another Brechtian theory that is significant to PoLAAT and that is the
Lehrstück.
63
Brecht's disregard for bourgeois German society and his interest in Marxist and

62
Gaines, Malik, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade. "PoLAAT: Mandate to Participate."
Vimeo. Accessed December 21, 2013. https://vimeo.com/11401657.
63
In the 1920s Brecht began serious study of Marxism while attempting to write a play on the
grain market During the late 1920s, Brecht became increasingly interested in both the Marxist
theory of society and the dialectical method of analyzing society and history (Kellner, Douglas.
"Illuminations: Kellner." Illuminations: Kellner. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell3.htm.
). Brecht was drawn towards the dialectics challenging of seemingly naturalized universal
concepts, attributing them instead to historical time and conditions. The Marxist dialectic is a
critical dialectic that aims at the critique and transformation of the existing bourgeois order in
Germany in the 1920s (Korsch, "Why I Am a Marxist": 64-65). The Marxist dialectic integrates
critical theory with revolutionary practice intended to emancipate the working class and
construct socialism (Kellner).
Castaño 37
Socialist ideology and revolution lead him to produce this type of play. Translated as Learning
Plays, these models paralleled his work in Epic Theater and for Brecht they represented a
separate model for the promotion of societal revolution by communists/socialists. Within the
Lehrstück there is to be no established hierarchy in the production of the learning plays; rather
there is to be democratic participation in coproduction.
64

64
Kellner.
Castaño 38
Chapter 5
PoLAAT Instantiations and Sites

Here discussion will center on individual sites in which PoLAAT has occurred.
Challenges ranging from the intercultural aspects to local customs and language barriers are
discussed, along with the types of participants and audiences who participated. The conclusion
then offers critical analysis of the conditions that led My Barbarian’s practice to take a turn
towards the theatrical as well as the global conditions that supported this turn.
The first and all subsequent instantiations of PoLAAT have been institutional
commissions. PoLAAT’s first inception in New York would account for its tone and structure,
which would variously be strengthened and challenged by its intercultural and institutional
contexts. It is difficult to know which components to isolate and evaluate as well as which rubric
to use to evaluate the strengths and challenges of the hybrid model. In some performances, such
as Jerusalem, the workshops were bogged down by argumentative discussion of the terms of
definitions, while their final performances were highly successful. In other sites the performance
seemed to be constrained and challenged while the workshops were very productive. Some sites
were constrained by their institutional configuration, such as the performance that occurred as
part of a Calarts theater class at REDCAT in Los Angeles. The PoLAAT model did not function
within this setting and the troupe were forced to adopt traditional theater tactics to elicit an
absolutely perfect final performance. The political and cultural climate of sites such as Cairo
constrained the artists and resulted in the masking of significant elements of PoLAAT’s
structure. Song lyrics can and have been adapted regionally for purposes of comprehension or
participant security.
Castaño 39
Still in other regions, such as the Italian Alps, the expectations for the ways participants
would contribute were different from those understandings of the practice held by the
participants. Each of these experiences tested the model and produced different results in
different aspects of the performances. In some cases the model allows for the experience of the
participants to be their own, independent of the feelings of the artists. In cases where aspects of
the performances were conducted in Hebrew or Arabic, such as was the case in Jerusalem and
Cairo, the content wasn’t even legible to the artists. However each of these performances
required an adjustment to the model in order to produce an experience, a final performance, and
a finished art object the artists could feel comfortable with.
Post-Living Ante-Action Theater; Post-Paradise, Never Say Sorry Again was performed
at Galleria Civica, Trento, July, 2008 The commission for Trento, Italy arrived while My
Barbarian were performing in New York. The planning and implementation became a way of
understanding how PoLAAT could be performed both internationally and inter-culturally. When
PoLAAT has been performed in non-English speaking sites, translation of the principles and text
becomes a huge part of the workshops and subsequently very few texts were offered. The Italians
were only given Living Theater poems written by Julian Beck. The principles and their
theoretical concepts not only needed to be translated but understood, so this meant there was a
lot of questioning and stepping back followed by discussion. PoLAAT workshops were
structured this way to allow for groups to collectively produce understandings of the terms. In
Italy the extra discussion produced extra content and as a result the show was substantially
longer than the typical 90 minutes and seemed to go on for hours.
Participants were found by a gallery call and were enthusiastic and young, some were
educated while a few had some performance experience. Trento is a small scenic mountain town
Castaño 40
and for the few weeks the artists were there, PoLAAT became the focal point for everyone who
participated. In porting something to another cultural context there is a risk that the work and its
meaning may be received differently than anticipated. While the members of My Barbarian were
interested in the significance of this Italian Alps mountain town’s history and its relationship to
national politics and the Marxist Leninist paramilitary organization the Brigate Rosse, who
formerly resided, there the participants were more interested in the utopian aspects of PoLAAT.
As Gordon recalled, “because we were in the Italian Alps which is just beautiful and everyone
was happy it was really easy to just go into the character of hippy theater performers with no
critical distance, no irony, and I even…we all kind of got sucked into it…we're gonna wear
flowers on our head.”
65
In this video excerpt from the sponsoring Italian gallery of a performance
of PoLAAT by the artists, the three members play up the notion of their identity as liberated
California artists: “we come from California where the rich are…leftists.”
66
I cite this example
as an illustration of the ways expectations around cultural differences and around participation
by both artists and participants can augment a PoLAAT performance. The Italian participants
were not resistant to the political discussions, discussions that comprise a big aspect of PoLAAT.
But, there also wasn’t resonance with them. For the artists, approaching this particular site with
its histories created pre-set desires for what would be dealt with in the workshops. And this
wasn’t the case and this was a lesson about perceptions of national representation for the artists.
What they learned from the participants was that these young people in the Northern
mountainous region of Italy didn’t feel particularly connected to other parts of their country. In
fact they learned that many participants felt disconnected from national politics. Not everyone’s

65
Gordon, interview.
66
"Premio Internazionale Della Performance: My Barbarians," accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.undo.net/it/videopool/1193406819/1193407968

Castaño 41
really that engaged in politics regardless of what their politics might be…so the thought of
reenacting some kind of political scenario that you don't have full understanding of in the first
place isn't always so appealing to people.”
67
What did occur was that the participants responded
to what felt resonant to them. For Italian Alps dwelling, young people that turned out to be
PoLAAT’s aesthetic proposition of the more utopian forms being brought to their village by
these “liberated California artists.”
68

In documentary footage, we see participants in the workshops.
69
They clap and chant,
“PoLAAT! PoLAAT!”
70
The title slide reads: PoLAAT This will never end. Each performance is
unique and as such each performance’s final show is titled. Part of the process of workshopping
produces the content that will comprise the final performance and the content will generate the
title. In another segment two women pore over an opened newspaper during an exercise known
as “newspaper theater.” Gordon adapted the exercise from Boal. Participants separate into small
groups and are given that days newspaper with the instructions, make a scene out of an article
that you feel is an example of an unsolvable problem that resonates with you. In the Boal version
of the exercise the scene would then undergo a “forum,” a process by which all potential
outcomes are attempted. When the exercise is offered to non-English speakers they can still
create and perform their own scenes and they don’t necessarily have to be performed in English.
Potentially there is some affective quality to the performance that resonates with both the
performers and the artists but often the experience of PoLAAT is processual and as such is
unique for each person and comprehending some kind of complete narrative isn’t necessarily an

67
interview.
68
Gordon interview.
69
Gaines, Malik, Jade Gordon, and Segade Alexandro. "Post-Living Ante-Action Theater: Post-
Paradise Workshop." Vimeo. Accessed February 21, 2014. https://vimeo.com/26186025
70
Gaines, Malik, Jade Gordon, and Segade Alexandro. "Post-Living Ante-Action Theater: Post-
Paradise Workshop." Vimeo. Accessed February 21, 2014. https://vimeo.com/26186025
Castaño 42
aim or even a realistic possibility. Exercises are intended to create an awareness of others,
surroundings, and sensations but practically they have the function of preparing the body,
lowering inhibitions around performance in particular when working with untrained performers.
Songs were first translated and sung in Italian. The group rehearsed “mandate to
participate” first in Italian and then in English. This meant that translation was a two-step
process. Gaines, Gordon, and Segade composed using a piano and subsequent rehearsals added
guitar. The process is accretive and only progresses as the participants both drive and are
comfortable with the process. Song lyrics were written on paper and affixed to a bulletin board,
first in Italian with English translations underneath. Nothing is off the table per se but often the
experience level of the participants will preclude what is possible simply due to time constraints.
When PoLAAT has involved professionally trained performers many more elements such as
costuming were added. In Italy the group used construction paper to make headpieces and masks
in a costume workshop.
Post-Living Ante-Action Theater; Eleven Human Senses was performed in Cairo, Egypt
in 2008. An exhibition featuring documentation from previous performances was installed
before and during the final recital. The recital was conducted in both English and Arabic. Text
that appeared in the show’s Power Point first appeared in English followed by Arabic translation
below. Some scenes were performed by the participants entirely in Arabic and were not
translated. In both Egypt and Israel the songs were collectively translated as part of the initial
group workshops. It was a challenge to translate the songs into Arabic and Hebrew while
retaining their sense of rhythm and rhyme. Idiom and wordplay presented another challenge so
the songs were translated with the desire to retain the affect of the tunes over literalism. Working
in Egypt required the use of translators who translated from Arabic into English and vice versa.
Castaño 43
In Cairo, the PoLAAT model was challenged even before the artists arrived. The nature
of these challenges occurred due to both the politics of the site as well as intercultural issues that
occur between citizens of the West visiting a country with a large and prominent Muslim
population. Prior to their arrival in the country the members of My Barbarian were told by their
sponsoring institution’s director what they could and could not do. The artists were warned not to
talk about or even represent sexuality or nudity and politics and religion were of course
forbidden. This meant that not only the workshops, but also the final recital had to operate under
certain constraints. Typically any kind of constraint would be a topic within the workshops along
with a desire to test the limits of these conditions. However, in 2008 Egypt was under the
dictatorial leadership of Hosni Mubarak and was effectively a police state. There was real risk
not only to themselves but also to the participants by authorities who observed much of the
performance surreptitiously.
71

Cairo required the artists to adapt the PoLAAT structure, but this kind of adaptability is a
feature of the model, which accounts for its portability and ability to operate with different
groups. However, there was simply no acceptable way to translate particular core tenets of
PoLAAT, its 5 principles. In particular, principle III Suspension of Beliefs could jeopardize the
safety of the participants as it could have been interpreted as advocating for somebody to
suspend their religious beliefs. Suspension of beliefs was changed to Can you believe what you
see, masking the overt challenge to systems of belief while still suggesting in a subtle way that
there might be other possibilities for one’s life other than what we are taught to believe.
72
It’s not
such a departure given the tendency to produce an excess of narrative and theoretical
propositions in an attempt to deliberately provoke different understandings. However, given that

71
Segade, interview.
72
Gaines, interview.
Castaño 44
the environmental conditions meant real risk the model was adapted. It’s not clear whether this
adaptation produced the quiet moody quality of the final performance or if it was in fact entirely
cultural. “Islamic culture has a long tradition of language poetics and this had the effect of
grounding the workshops in the sensorial and something almost vague or more ethereal”
observed Segade.
73
Participants drove a large part of the generation of content and the final show
became much more about talking about language and feelings and about senses, about universal
things rather than anything really specific, so it moved away from the Brechtian and much more
towards classical Aristotelian theater, classical universal ideas being what make us human.
74

Participating in PoLAAT is as much a learning experience for the artists as well as
participants and spectators. Post-Living Ante-Action Theater; Eleven Human Senses, the show’s
title also traffics in subtly suggestive metaphor as a way of masking the aspects of the
performance that might be viewed as challenging Egyptian authority. Premised on an
archaeological discovery of extra human senses (as a new model for subjectivity), the title
playfully alluded to Western archaeological practices in the region but also formed a double
meaning suggesting the role of agency in reorganizing the possibilities of our lives by imagining
ways of being that exceed the frames of established ways of perceiving each other.
75
Many of the
scenes from the final performance were generated from the TO technique image theater. Images
have the capacity to be acquired instantaneously and unless purely gestural they are supra
culturally specific. This technique was very useful, requiring no translation. Many of the scenes
in the final performance were generated from TO exercises and image theater in the workshops.
Each of the individually titled final skits deals with some aspect of sensation. Contemporary

73
Segade, interview.
74
Gordon, interview.
75
Meyer, online post.
Castaño 45
Cairo is a city not unlike San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles where the city dominates
the imaginations of those who live there.
76
Some content was entirely in Arabic but one could
infer that the scene was taken from daily life in Cairo such as the experience of being in a cafe.
One participant asks the question, what is sense? She offers that it may be art, a ghost, dreams
becoming dreams, or signs.
Post-Living Ante-Action Theater: Post-Paradise, Sorry Now was performed in Los
Angeles in 2012 with two final performances at REDCAT on Saturday, April 14, 2012 and
Sunday, April 15, 2012. The performance at REDCAT occurred in conjunction with Calarts
acting students as part of a master acting course. Los Angeles presents an interesting opportunity
for understanding PoLAAT’s various constituent parts. Although they are connected they may
also operate seemingly independently, producing widely divergent experiences. The Los Angeles
PoLAAT was unique as it occurred within a traditional acting classroom. The irony of a
pedagogical project occurring within a site of pedagogy is not lost. However, no amount of
adaptability and mutability can overcome the conditions if you don’t have willing participants
who agree to engage in the kind of critical play of the workshops. Part of the experience in the
workshops also allows the artists to learn about particularities of a site and they can then shape
the direction of the workshops which in turn shapes the content that arises as the result of these
workshops and a significant part of the PoLAAT model is about a willing and free exchange of
ideas. Both the participants and the artists learn about each other through games and exercises
meant to build trust and connection. Participants may share as much or as little of themselves as
is comfortable. For the students, the games and exercises too closely resembled normative acting

76
Segade, interview.
Castaño 46
exercises and there were significantly less interested in engaging with material that they’d
perceived to have already done.
The implication of a master class is that the visiting instructors will offer new and
advanced techniques. However, the experience of working with acting students in a classroom
structure stalled the model and forced the artists to reorient the participants’ roles in traditional
theater modes using a physical script to compel their participation. The mixture of the students
paired younger and less experienced undergraduates with older experienced actors . There was a
resistance to collaboration and resistance to performing any kind of political identity, which as
discussed earlier, is a key part of PoLAAT. There is another key aspect to resisting the model
and this raises the issue, if participants have not openly engaged in discourse around the meaning
of the terms that inform the 5 principles, can they then teach them to the audience during the
final workshop or does it matter that they haven’t had a serious engagement with the material
they’re expected to pass along. Does it matter if they’ve internalized these terms before teaching
them? Does this constitute a failure of the model? They are questions with no clear answers.
In lieu of horizontalism and having an exchange they were forced to engage in traditional
top down pedagogy.
77
Segade created a script and the acting students, familiar with this
structure, simply performed their parts. For Gordon, the student/teacher relationship really
impacted the notion of collaboration and participation. Both are key for generating material for
the show. “It felt [what was being asked was] outside of what was appropriate and acceptable
within such a relationship. It felt like asking about their personal lives and that’s usually
perceived as being off-limits. Teachers shouldn’t ask students about their personal beliefs. If

77
Gordon, interview.
Castaño 47
you’re in a school setting it’s like your private life should remain private and if you’re asking for
someone's political opinion is like you're asking an inappropriate personal question.”
78

The final performance was executed perfectly, though it was presented on a traditional
stage with spectators separated by the theater architecture. As has been elaborated at great length,
the PoLAAT model works to remove these types of separations between performers and
audience. These dynamics impacted the performance tremendously and while in the end viewers
were treated to something much more akin to traditional theater. REDCAT audiences tend to be
more familiar experimentation and so they were open to accepting the allegorical and comedic
combination of texts ranging from classical Greek theater to socially conscious modern works
from the American canon of theater. For some members of My Barbarian, the challenges were
interesting to overcome and they presented opportunities to direct. While for other members the
experience was a struggle and for them the model was not malleable enough to overcome the
imposed conditions of a traditional classroom and theater setting.
Post-Living Ante-ActionTtheater: Together Forever? occurred in Israel in 2012 over a
ten-day period.
79
The decision to invite My Barbarian to perform PoLAAT in Israel came after a
sustained engagement with their work in the US. After returning to Israel, curator Leah Abir
worked with the collective to bring them to Jerusalem. Abir was interested in bringing a brand of
criticality to Israel she felt didn't exist there. She knew it would sound very weird in this context
but that was her point. The decision to accept the invitation to perform in Israel was a challenge
for My Barbarian, who hope an engagement with site politics will inform and comprise part of
the performance and also be addressed in the final recital. This of course meant addressing the

78
Gordon interview
79

Curated by: Leah Abir. Participants: Oleg Bergman, Oree Holban, Ayelet Lerman, Anisa
Ashkar, Danny Rotshtein, Daniel Yahel, Meir Tati, Mor Gur Arie, Netally Schlosser, Smadar
Levy, Rachel Lavian, Adi Avidani, Sharon Hakak, Tarma Ovadia, Yaari Shalem, Tama Ovadia.

Castaño 48
Boycott Divestment Sanction movement (BDS). The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic
and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) calls on civil society to boycott events with Israeli
institutions.
80
The nature of the boycott call is one of based on terms of participation by cultural
organizations under the BDS Movement. Under the terms of the BDS movement Western artists
as cultural workers are asked to uphold the boycott and not perform or make art in Israel in
solidarity with Palestinian people. Of course BDS is a sensitive topic in Israel, particularly when
raised by non-Israeli’s coming into the country as guests. However, all of the participants were
working international artists used to working in Europe and the US. As artists they are one of the
least effected groups with regard to impact of the BDS policy, according to curator Leah Abir.
Life in Jerusalem is almost like existing in a protective bubble. The feel of the city and its culture
are similar to the relaxed California atmosphere of Los Angeles. So the decision to accept the
invitation was the first challenge.
The performance also presented other forms of resistance that challenged the model and
resulted in some frustration for both the artists and participants. The workshops leading up the
performance were intense and filled with a lot of argumentative discussions that often eclipsed
activities the artists had planned for workshops:
Participants questioned the relationship between the artists and the group, group
members acting for the artists. Are they equal status in the group? My Barbarian
were trying to create an equal situation but they were never naïve about it. They
knew and the group knew they came in with a prepared show that was their thing,
the artists’ thing, even though they were trying to be very transparent and open
about the process, the issue of the artists’ personae within the show was a major
issue raised. If the participant artists were their own agents, they might make
decisions on their performance and choices and songs differently.
81

80
http://www.pacbi.org/
81
Leah Abir, interview by Toro Castaño, Los Angeles, CA, October 3, 2013
Castaño 49
Part of the resistance also lay in the group dynamics themselves. Those used to working
in-group settings were more flexible but the model proved challenging for solo artists used to
enjoying singular authorship in anything they created. The games and exercises adapted by the
artists for performing group work were only marginally helpful as well. A limitation of PoLAAT
is perhaps its ability to measure affect and as such to understand, with some time for reflection,
participation in PoLAAT has accomplished its aim of encouraging criticality in daily life in
particular with resistant groups. A challenging series of workshops has also produced some of
the best final recital performances, as was the case in Israel. In particular the final performance
here was the most interactive of any PoLAAT My Barbarian have done. During the final recital
the entire room of spectators were up out of their chairs participating vigorously.

Castaño 50
Chapter 6

Critical Analysis and Conclusion

Here the thesis concludes with an analysis of the economic and global conditions that
contributed to development of PoLAAT out of My Barbarian’s larger performance practice. The
practice is situated within the art historical canon. Building on this situation while
prognosticating the future progression of the canon, the discussion characterizes PoLAAT as a
new form of performance art characterized by theories of metamodernity and concludes with a
glance towards future horizons.
To say that the world’s economic conditions impacted the art world and subsequently art
practice would be both obvious and an understatement to any worker participating in this sphere
and that includes curatorial assistants and artists and many others. Contemporaneity has
produced a kind of schizophrenic cultural affect and a turn towards the cynical in the art world.
It’s not difficult to trace this development in the canon alongside the commodification of many
aspects of Western life. Modern art was nourished by internal reality, traditional art was
nourished by external reality, postmodern art is unrealistic or mock realistic.
82
In Society of the
Spectacle, Guy Debord warned of the insidious nature that capitalism’s second spirit would have.
The notion of the spectacle, capital accumulated to such an extent it forms an image, speaks to
this idea of ocularity and seeing and representation created via image. It speaks to the nature in
which desire is captured and used to form the main engine of capitalism. As consumers, we both
desire new products and feel as if we’re self actualizing behind the brands we select. If desire
forms the main engine, then abstraction of surplus value is a moot point, even currency and

82
Kuspit.
Castaño 51
finance has become virtual so as to circulate in this system of desires in which we project
ourselves onto an image. Subsumed is the once hidden fetish commodity now mediated through
the spectacle. So we relate to one another through objects and all our relationships and
interactions are mediated and potentially captured as marketing data and we have a sense of
accomplishment when we acquire objects even though we may feel inadequate or disconnected
or spiritually impoverished. The spectacle is wish fulfillment at its most ironically consummate.
Capitalism understands the deep human need to believe and trust, and brilliantly manipulates it
by giving us faith in a make-believe esthetic world populated by commodities–appearances of a
reality that never existed–signaling there is nothing left to believe in and trust.
83
But abstraction
of finance also leads to the separation of things. When the Situationists responded to these
conditions they chose to do so from a position of refusal, pondering the question of whether to
engage or disengage with such a society. Homo Spectator is socially, culturally and
economically dominant, as Guy Debord argued. For Debord it is not clear that Homo Spectator is
Homo Sapiens. In the Society of the Spectacle, we live in fantasy not in reality, and we are
unable to distinguish them.
As Debord wrote: the spectacle proclaims the predominance of appearances and asserts
that all human life, which is to say all social life, is mere appearance… it [is] a visible
negation of life… a negation of life that has invented a visual form for itself.” “It turns
reality on its head,” even as “the spectacle is real.” It establishes “the empire of modern
passivity”: the “image of the ruling economic order,” it is “beyond dispute” and
“demands. . . passive acceptance.” Where in an earlier capitalist stage, there was a
“downgrading of being into having,” the current capitalist stage “entails a generalized
shift from having to appearing: all effective ‘having’ must now derive its immediate
prestige and its ultimate raison d’être from appearances.”
84

83
Kuspit.
84
“Secrets of Success: Paradoxes and Problems of the Reproduction and Commodification of Art
In the Age of the Capitalist Spectacle.” Artnet. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/kuspit/art-and-capitalist-spectacle2-8-11.asp

Castaño 52
The horizon of performance art since the 1960s and artists creating “live art” now has
each generation of practitioners responding to new sets of conditions in the art world and beyond
as such a world cannot said to be centrally located in a single center but rather intricately
networked through globalism. In the 1960s it was related to the then emerging conceptual art. It
had a more event-based association, Allan Kaprow’s Happenings and Events are examples of
this. In the 1970s, performance art began to explicitly separate itself from the theatrical arts.
Seeking to evade the commodification of objects, artists created works that couldn’t be acquired
or collected and required the body and aura of the artists to be enacted. The end of the 1970s
increasingly saw artists inserting their bodies into the work, a direct import of identity
movements from feminism to the black arts movement. In the 1980s performance art began to be
increasingly mediated, coinciding with the development of more affordable technologies for use
in performance. Since the horizon of the year 2000, performance art has seemed to become
associated with the artist as brand. Artists began to produce long durational works and actions
that privileged some form of social interaction.
My Barbarian have created with PoLAAT and their larger body of work a hybridized
form of performance art whose key features, very little boundaries with regard to the embrace of
informants and texts, a turn towards theatricalization and theater theory, and utilizing their
hybrid model of performance, marked by pedagogy and functioning as a flexible lab for self
actualization through an engagement with critical theory, and of course the ability to work with
groups of participants. PoLAAT is performance art marked by advanced capitalism. PoLAAT
may be characterized as art produced in the era of metamodernism. Van den Akker and
Vermeulen define metamodernism as a continuous oscillation, a constant repositioning between
positions and mindsets that are evocative of the modern and of the postmodern but are ultimately
Castaño 53
suggestive of another sensibility that is neither of them: one that negotiates between a yearning
for universal truths on the one hand and relativism on the other, between hope and doubt,
sincerity and irony, knowingness and naivety, construction and deconstruction. They suggest that
the metamodern attitude longs for another future, another metanarrative, whilst acknowledging
that future or narrative might not exist, or materialize, or, if it does materialize, is inherently
problematic.
85

Just as metamodernism consciously commits itself to an impossible possibility, My
Barbarian’s larger body of work and PoLAAT also commits to the impossible possibility of
engagement and change through art that promotes dialog and critical thinking.
86
What this means
is that there has been an attempt to characterize and theorize emergent structures through
discourse that may or may not become dominant in the (not so near future).
87
Van den Akker and
Vermeulen see metamodernism as neither a residual nor an emergent structure of feeling, but the
dominant cultural logic of contemporary modernity. A key feature of metamodernity is
oscillation. While a key mechanic is performativity, it is helpful to think of oscillation as
constant movement, culturally speaking this movement occurs between a modern desire for
sense and a postmodern doubt about the sense of it all, between a modern sincerity and a
postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy and empathy and apathy.
88
This movement,
and also a sense of instability, which depending on your perspective can be viewed as either
negative or positive. For My Barbarian it is this instability that offers an interstice with which to

85
Vermeulen, Timotheus, and Robin Van Den Akker. "Notes on Metamodernism | Vermeulen |
Journal of Aesthetics & Culture." Notes on Metamodernism | Vermeulen | Journal of Aesthetics
& Culture. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.aestheticsandculture.net/index.php/jac/article/view/5677/6304.
86
Knudsen, 5.
87
Editorial. "What Is Metamodernism?" Notes on Metamodernism. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://www.metamodernism.com/2010/07/15/what-is-metamodernism/.
88
Ibid.
Castaño 54
play with this instability and play on multiple meanings.
89
One should be careful not to think of
this oscillation as a balance however; “rather it is a pendulum swinging between numerous,
innumerable poles. Each time the metamodern enthusiasm swings towards fanaticism, gravity
pulls it back towards irony; the moment its irony sways towards apathy, gravity pulls it back
towards enthusiasm.”
90
Performativity is the mechanism that operates within metamodernity and
allows its characteristic oscillation and instability.
The canon has many examples of artists who created work that sought to evade economic
commodification. These conditions account for the relational and social turn in contemporary art.
Art works become about networks of relationships not bound by the traditional art objects and
therefore not able to participate in its their commodification. Social practices or social practice
art is like aesthetics of administration of social relations. We hope this active reframing will help
to reframe and rethink our own situation and the ways our relations to others may be mediated by
images. Having been produced by such an art world it makes sense that My Barbarian would
create a body of work that is, at the risk of sounding reductive, experiential. The value isn’t
necessarily in one or all the constituent parts that make up PoLAAT model. The value lies in all
of the parts and their potentiality. What’s so interesting and what My Barbarian are so good at is
positioning themselves in relation to mass culture and the artifacts and products of our capitalist
system, openly embracing them as part of their strategy but not becoming hypnotized by them.
Speaking more concretely this manifests in PoLAAT in the following ways. PoLAAT’s
form consisting of constitutive parts allows for some level of personalization of experience. It

89
Earlier in Chapter 3 the connection to Marx’s interstice concept and an analysis of capital and
art practice produced under advanced capitalism. These spaces allow for the capturing of desire
through forms of marketing. Conversely it is desire that also allows for forms of resistance
realated to enactment through performance and speech.
90
Ibid.
Castaño 55
allows for participants to mix and match as it were, their experience based on their level of
participation and how much of their own experience they choose to share. A kind of cutting up
and rearranging is performed. Pulling disparate influences in and producing excesses of genre
and narrative to make these texts our own story.
It can be argued that the art world has also embraced popular culture, but often it has
been from an ironic distance. Irony assumes two sets of ears for two sets of voices, one that stops
at surface meaning and another that insists on going well below the surface.
91
While it’s true
multivalent meanings perhaps better reflect a textured reality more akin to an artists way of
considering the world, this ironic tone that pervaded the art world beginning in the 1980s and
well into the following decade, resides so closely to cynicism as to produce a cool distancing of
affect. Prominent art critic Jerry Saltz captured the contemporary art making gestalt in, Sincerity
and Irony Hug It Out. Saltz wrote:
I'm noticing a new approach to artmaking in recent museum and gallery
shows…It’s an attitude that says, I know that the art I’m creating may seem silly,
even stupid, or that it might have been done before, but that doesn’t mean this
isn’t serious. At once knowingly self-conscious about art, unafraid, and
unashamed, these young artists not only see the distinction between earnestness
and detachment as artificial; they grasp that they can be ironic and sincere at the
same time, and they are making art from this compound-complex state of mind--
what Emerson called “alienated majesty.”
92

The members of My Barbarian are not cynics. They reference popular culture both as a
way to respond to it but also to comment on its production. Their method is like bricolage,
producing new understandings through excess of narrative and genres. The artists are masters of
the hypergenre, having explored everything from opera to country western. When My Barbarian

91
Barry. Union Seminary Quarterly Review. 3rd ed. Vol. 35. 255.
92
Salz, Jerry. "New York Magazine." NYMag.com. Accessed February 21, 2014.
http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/66277/.

Castaño 56
embrace and pull referents from TV, films, pulp literature, etc. into their work, they do so from a
sincere position of regard for these cultural objects.
PoLAAT seeks to provide participants with an authentic or unique experience through the
invitation to participate and to play and to create. The success of PoLAAT is dependent on forms
of directed crowdsourcing, participation being key to generation of personalized content.
PoLAAT allows for a kind of sociability and the ability to process and dialog about the
experience with others. PoLAAT with all its constituent parts is an imperfect vehicle. Aspects of
it have both succeeded and failed in a single instantiation. PoLAAT has an in-built portability
and mobility that allows it to travel interculturally always trying to adapt to the local.
The turn towards the theatrical has also impacted the artistic body as well. In some ways
inspirational critique is the whole psychodrama of the problems coming after institutional
critique. Inspirational Critique is related to institutional critique but critique practiced as an
affirming process. Inspirational Critique as the name suggests is about finding and locating
inspiration within criticality. Line four has the annotation: (Negative scene), indicating two or
more performers will ad lib something to the effect of, “you know [Jade], I just don’t think this is
working for me.” Line eight which with the notation: (Positive scene) indicates a kind of making
up scene between old friends who have quarreled will be “ad libbed.” As line 32 is sung,
Nowhere else to go, Everybody knows, is sung the cast and participants begin to hug members of
the audience.
PoLAAT represents for the members of My Barbarian experimentation with the
aesthetization of radical theory from the 1960s and 1970s as well as an assertion of a definitive
connection to experimental theater. In PoLAAT Gaines, Gordon, and Segade created a body of
performance art model that is both pedagogical and critical in nature, that uses play and fun, and
Castaño 57
the creative r/enactment of political imaginaries and other ways of being beyond the subject
positions we find ourselves interpolated into. This theme of queering performance art to make
these impossible worlds possible continues to be present in the bodies of work created in the
artists individual practices in the work of Segade and Gaines and very much an ethos of applied
theater, which Gordon emerges from. The extent to which PoLAAT continues to inform My
Barbarian’s larger practice is difficult to measure, in particular when boundaries are so porous.
The story of My Barbarian narrates the evolution of three peers whose initial incarnation
was that of an art band and who evolved into an internationally recognized performance
collective included in such prestigious exhibitions such as the Whitney Biennial.
Experimentation has been a staple of their practice and accounts for the development of
performance strategies and a body of performance work, PoLAAT, which allowed the artists to
work with groups of participants and audiences. The instances of each site and the challenges
presented by the portability of this medium and model have also been addressed. The creative
use of play and critical play theory as animator of the practice and the openness to informants
ranging from experimental theater to popular culture makes this performance strategy unique. It
is the global and economic conditions that make this type of performance strategy and work so
viable. By constantly citing Brecht and utilizing Boal, the artists have created a form of
performance art that responds to contemporary conditions and movements within visual culture
and art production by producing and queering notions of futurity and political imaginaries. With
the future in mind I conclude with these words paraphrased from POLAAT blog: “Perhaps it is
the case that theater has died. Yet in its post-living state theater can be used to pre-perform the
action of the future by traveling through the past…the goal in adapting these works is to look for
models of action, resistance and thought that can be used now, or, at least tomorrow, and to
Castaño 58
confront the absurdity of our own utopian fantasies.”
93
It remains to be seen how sustained the
engagement with experimental theater will remain a dominant feature of the practice. This is
evident in their current instantation, the adaptation and performance of Brecht’s play The
Mother, for the Whitney’s 2014 Biennial. As we have learned from PoLAAT, the future is
undetermined and can always be changed in the present.

93
Segade, 2011.
Castaño 59
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Castaño 60
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. London Etc.:Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949. 78.

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Castaño 61
Rafinski, Adam, and Markus Zielke. "DiGRA." DiGRA. 2013. Accessed February 21, 2014.
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again/ (accessed February 21, 2014).

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Castaño 62
Figures

Fig. 1 PoLAAT 5 Principles . February 4, 2010. Source: PoLAAT Weblog. 2010, Digital Image. Available
from: http://polaat.wordpress.com/ (accessed December 14, 2013).

Fig. 2 Fig. 1 PoLAAT Lyrics . Date unknown. Source: Courtesy of the artists. 2013.

Castaño 63

Suspension of Beliefs E, F

Suspension of beliefs
Suspen-sion if beliefs
Of beliefs
Of beliefs

Estrangement Dm, Am (A)

Draw a perforated line around your body
Act out the distance between
Yourself
and what you’re doing
With a line around your body
Adapt the Alienation Effect
Estrangement also incorporates elements of camp
And draws a perforated line around your body
An ironic displacement or disidentification
To critique the action represented
The audience it is hoped will be similarly engaged
In an active critique of the performance
And the questions it poses

Mandate to Participate C, F, G

All alone!
I am just 1 person, Together we are 2
In a group!
Of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, There’s more that we can do.
All by myself!
I have strength and purpose, We have that and more
In a group!
Of 8, 9, 10, 11, Our voice won’t be ignored.
In America!
The claim is that each person derives his rights from God
But in America!
Unfair distribution is formalized by Law
An individual!
Endowed with a body, the rest is arbitrary

Abstract (if available)

Abstract This thesis introduces readers to the interdisciplinary performance collective My Barbarian, consisting of artists Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The primary focus of this thesis is the body of work, the Post‐Living Ante‐Action Theater (PoLAAT). The project was conceived as a pedagogical model and codification of My Barbarian’s larger performance strategy as a way for the artists to experiment with group expansion and contraction by inviting participants to join the group in producing performances. PoLAAT performances have often been characterized in terms typically associated with musical theater, camp, and kitsch. While these terms are not incorrect, this thesis will articulate how these are part of a highly sophisticated performance strategy informed by the artists’ engagement with a history of experimental theater projects such as the Living Theater, the antiteater, and Theater of the Oppressed. By framing the practice using critical gaming theory this thesis articulates how My Barbarian utilize concepts such as critical play to show how play operates and how it engages willing participants through the model. Analysis of the portability of the model shows the challenges incurred when PoLAAT has been performed outside of the US with non‐native English speakers, as was the case in Italy, Israel, and Egypt. Additionally, analysis will articulate how environmental factors test or inhibit the model’s adaptability in sites as diverse as Egypt, with its large Muslim population, and Los Angeles, where PoLAAT occurred within a classroom setting. Finally, the thesis will demonstrate how economic conditions affecting the art world have produced My Barbarian’s unique form of political imaginaries through use of creative enactment to produce what some theorists have identified as metamodern art, or art produced after the moments of modernity and post‐modernity have passed.

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Asset Metadata

Creator Castaño, Toro (author)

Core Title Acting out dissent; imaginary lives the performance strategies of My barbarian’s Post-Living Ante-Action Theater

School School of Fine Arts

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere

Publication Date 04/29/2014

Defense Date 04/01/2014

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag My barbarian,OAI-PMH Harvest,political imaginaries,Post Living Ante Action Theater,queer futurity,queer performance,queer performance art,Toro Castano

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tain, John (committee chair), Butler, Connie (committee member), Steiner, A.L. (committee member)

Creator Email mcastano@usc.edu,torocastano@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-405605

Unique identifier UC11296107

Identifier etd-CastanoTor-2448.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-405605 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-CastanoTor-2448.pdf

Dmrecord 405605

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Castaño, Toro; Castano, Toro

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

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