ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS
(An invitation to actively imagine worlds, probe at cataclysms, and rehearse futures.)
[work-in-progress, 31/12/21, midday]
[Playa de San Juan - Alicante, Spain]
[Playa de San Juan - Alicante, Spain]
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ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS was due to be presented at the Forum for Global Challenges on 3rd and 4th May 2022 , at ICI (Birmingham, UK). Though COVID-19 stopped me from performing, you can access the academic poster that accompanied the piece here.
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ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS is a highly interactive performance-installation where everything is built, shaped, destroyed, explained, rebuilt and resolved by human hands, the audience's hands. The piece invites participants to actively imagine worlds, probe at cataclysms, and rehearse futures; giving them agency to the point of being truly collaborative, as each individual to co-authors their own experience and takes the reins of their own narrative(s). Using a ritual logic, the experience follows a simple three-part structure: |
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1. Build a world: The participants are invited to build a world upon a square table covered with sand using a variety of small objects, detritus, scraps and domestic refuse (materials are sourced locally, giving the work an idiosyncratic aesthetic with each iteration). This opening section encourages participants to enter a child-like state of mind through world-building. It is the power and freedom of this playful energy the work tries to harness in the third and final section.
2. Cataclysm ensues: Participants imagine and play out a cataclysm onto that world, a sudden disaster or violent event of a specific socio-political, environmental, cosmic and/or fantastical nature. During this section participants can let their personal apocalyptic concerns and visions run wild, as they enact destructive and fundamentally transformative changes upon the world they have just created.
3. Tomorrow's tomorrows: Participants are challenged to imagine and play out what might happen next, after the catastrophe, once the dust has settled; indeed, to imagine and rehearse the new beginnings beyond the ‘end’. It is in this section that the work becomes truly generative and constructive. Participants are driven by the playful energy harnessed since the first section and, responding to the catastrophic situation they have created in the previous section, have to deliberately engage in lateral thinking to consider a way forward to alternative futures.
Since participants have autonomy and agency over their choices, the performer begins by simply facilitating their experience in a practical capacity (i.e. helping to world-build according to the participants' instructions, or clearing objects from the table when necessary). After each of section has been completed, the performer invites the participant(s) to step back and observe the world-situation they have created; and through a process of gentle Socratic questioning, encourages them to narrativize their choices and reflect upon them critically.
2. Cataclysm ensues: Participants imagine and play out a cataclysm onto that world, a sudden disaster or violent event of a specific socio-political, environmental, cosmic and/or fantastical nature. During this section participants can let their personal apocalyptic concerns and visions run wild, as they enact destructive and fundamentally transformative changes upon the world they have just created.
3. Tomorrow's tomorrows: Participants are challenged to imagine and play out what might happen next, after the catastrophe, once the dust has settled; indeed, to imagine and rehearse the new beginnings beyond the ‘end’. It is in this section that the work becomes truly generative and constructive. Participants are driven by the playful energy harnessed since the first section and, responding to the catastrophic situation they have created in the previous section, have to deliberately engage in lateral thinking to consider a way forward to alternative futures.
Since participants have autonomy and agency over their choices, the performer begins by simply facilitating their experience in a practical capacity (i.e. helping to world-build according to the participants' instructions, or clearing objects from the table when necessary). After each of section has been completed, the performer invites the participant(s) to step back and observe the world-situation they have created; and through a process of gentle Socratic questioning, encourages them to narrativize their choices and reflect upon them critically.
Recorded by Guillermo Alcalá-Santaella (Marallavi Films) and edited by Pablo Pakula.
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ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS is soundtracked by three loop-tracks with distinct musical and emotional textures, one for each of the different parts that make up the experience. These tracks have been edited by Pablo Pakula using, looping, and overlaying fragments of a number of existing compositions: Wagner's prelude to Das Rheingold, Hanan Townshend's 'Opening Credits', 'Believing no.1 and no.2' and 'The Child' for the film The Book of Vision, Ligeti's Requiem and Lux Aeterna, and finally the Velvet Underground and Nico's 'All Tomorrow's Parties' in an instrumental version by the band and another by Vitamin String Quartet. The tracks, with their repetitive and obsessive nature, operate like a sort of mantra, hoping to induce a reflective state in the audience and opening up a meditative space where they can dwell on the big questions raised by the work. The tracks are an outcome of the ongoing Practice Research project 'Radio Loop', which explores looping techniques as a means to investigate the affective power of repetition. 
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Whilst it does not make any therapeutic claims, the experience is based on sandplay therapy (called sandbox or sandtray therapy more generally). This psychotherapeutic technique was developed in the late 1950s by psychologist and Jungian analyst Dora Kalff, who combined several techniques and philosophies (including Dr Margaret Lowenfeld's 'World Technique') with the aim to bring into consciousness subconscious content through non-verbal and symbolic play, with the aim to ultimately resolve emotional issues.
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Sandplay therapy is often used with those who have suffered some form of trauma, neglect, grief, or abuse. Although it is usually associated with child psychology, it is also suited for working with adults. One of its key features is that it can bypass the verbal/linguistic plane and go beyond words or conventional reasoning patterns. Therefore, it is especially effective when there are difficulties to express certain emotions or inner conflicts, as well as to access subconscious or dissociated material.
In sandplay therapy, the client/patient chooses from a collection of toys and builds a small world in a sand tray, reflecting what is going on in their lives. The therapist observes their choices and arrangements without interruption, allowing the person to find answers within themselves. After this initial world-building, patient and therapist analyse and discuss the creations and its symbolic or metaphoric meanings. After this, the patient can choose to make changes to the world they have created in the sand. [Find out more about sandplay and its history, as well as access a bibliography from the International Society for Sandplay Therapy.] |
ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS is guided by a similar ethos of self-reflection and 'healing', although instead of being a platform to identify, work-through and process personal issues and trauma, it is designed as an experience to address, dwell on, and begin to imaginatively resolve the global challenges humanity faces: climate and environmental collapse, social inequalities, resource scarcity, the future of cities, migration... Each person, transcending their personal plane, imagines three scenarios at a global scale from their uniquely personal angle and positionality. In their interaction with the work, participants literally bring themselves to and put themselves on the table in order to tackle the big-questions humanity faces; enacting their own specific concerns, priorities, fears, hopes, and fantasies.
The work also draws on Edward de Bono’s notion of lateral thinking or ‘horizontal thinking’, a philosophical approach that cultivates an awareness of and preference for out-of-the-box, unexpected solutions to problems. It is built on the observation that we often lean towards straightforward, obvious solutions to problems, and instead encourages us to seek out more oblique, innovative answers, helping us to come up with more innovative solutions. De Bono’s four techniques for lateral thinking (awareness, random stimulation, alternatives, and alteration) are all at work at various stages of the participants’ experience.
ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS is guided by a similar ethos of self-reflection and 'healing', although instead of being a platform to identify, work-through and process personal issues and trauma, it is designed as an experience to address, dwell on, and begin to imaginatively resolve the global challenges humanity faces: climate and environmental collapse, social inequalities, resource scarcity, the future of cities, migration... Each person, transcending their personal plane, imagines three scenarios at a global scale from their uniquely personal angle and positionality. In their interaction with the work, participants literally bring themselves to and put themselves on the table in order to tackle the big-questions humanity faces; enacting their own specific concerns, priorities, fears, hopes, and fantasies.
The work also draws on Edward de Bono’s notion of lateral thinking or ‘horizontal thinking’, a philosophical approach that cultivates an awareness of and preference for out-of-the-box, unexpected solutions to problems. It is built on the observation that we often lean towards straightforward, obvious solutions to problems, and instead encourages us to seek out more oblique, innovative answers, helping us to come up with more innovative solutions. De Bono’s four techniques for lateral thinking (awareness, random stimulation, alternatives, and alteration) are all at work at various stages of the participants’ experience.
[[ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS is a companion piece to ALL WITHIN A COLLAPSING BUILDING (a septet for the apocalypse). Both works are in deliberate conversation with one another, forming a kind of diptych for the end of times.]]
[[ALL TOMORROW'S TOMORROWS is a companion piece to ALL WITHIN A COLLAPSING BUILDING (a septet for the apocalypse). Both works are in deliberate conversation with one another, forming a kind of diptych for the end of times.]]