The Risk of Listening

* As part of New Performance Festival
A Wells Group production
With Tao Wells (Wellington)

“Politics; a giant reality TV show. Don’t you think we need a theatre that shows us this?”

Using his actors to create the script by writing down every utterance or thought they have, Tao Wells collects their verbatim, slicing and dicing to create an entirely new script with alternating scenes. Only on the night of the performance do the actors come together to read this remixed version for the first time.

‘I have taken the elements of theatre and shifted them slightly... The original notion of the arts doing a good deed in purging dangerous emotions from a populace is reversed. I uncover these emotions, but I ask the audience to take responsibility for them, till the wheels of the theatre fall off.’ - Tao Wells

Tao Wells calls himself a Community Conceptualist, Conceptual Abstract Expressionist or A Public Relation Specialist (take your pick). His 2010 work, The Beneficiary’s Office saw government ministries privately persecuting and publicly slandering Wells for exercising free speech.

In The Beneficiary’s Office, Wells pushed out some of the possibilities of public debate around such central issues as the nature of work. In 2011 he met with American author, editor and critic Chris Kraus to discuss the gaping hole of the ‘Public Intellectual’ and the fraud perpetuated by our leading academic artists.

“This felt like art should, as an event and an experience. Immersive, alive, challenging... veering from hilarity to disbelief to other things. Unusual, and probably not for everyone.” - undulatingungulate

Immerse yourself in a 9 day genre-blurring festival...www.npfestival.co.nz

Event listed by Elephant99

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