Fire in The Theater — A Host of People

Fire in The Theater!

Fire in The Theater! is an intimate performance on and around a large table investigating the freeness of speech — past, present, and future. Below is a script sample from the beginning of the show and a gallery of select images.

The audience enters to find a large table. They take their seats. There is soft, pleasant music playing – a dinner party vibe, if a little on the bright side.

After a time, the music fades and the five performers enter in a single line dancing the Free Speech Hustle. They dance silently around the entire table, depositing themselves, one by one, at intervals as they travel. It is a quiet mystery which changes the molecular composition of the room.

After they have completed their journey, they stand, still silent, and breathe with the audience. In time they share this Invocation:

In the absence of silence, we find ourselves speaking.
As we gather here today as interdependent beings, embedded in ecosystems of which we are a part, we call upon the powerful force of storytelling.
We ask humbly:
What is it to enter?
What is it to enter into dialogue?
What is it to speak?
What is it to speak freely?
What power comes with speech?
We humbly ask, in our speaking here tonight, for a sense of togetherness that does not obscure the past nor negate the traumas, collective and individual, with which we entered this space.
Keeping in mind always that communicating personal experience can save the world, we seek to speak with radical honesty as well as to listen in a way that honors the thoughts and the speech of others. We seek to recognize that we need not—indeed cannot—say everything.
It isn’t necessary to say Everything, in service of saying something.
We recognize also that our bodies are always already speaking
We are thankful for the togetherness that storytelling brings—for its opportunities as well as its challenges. May we be together, on this day and in this space, in a way that creates curiosity about speech. And about how free it can be. And about for whom it can be free. And about the the World Wide Web.
We come here in order to think about — to name — or try to name what it is and what it is not.
We come here skeptical—about what is and is not possible in dialogue that happens on (or in) that web.
We come here not knowing how much, or how little, we know about it. About how little, or how much, dialogue happens therein.
We understand, though, that there, in that web, be dragons….
dragons knowable only via dives, well-intentioned and not, down rabbit holes.
We are gathered here, at the precipice of another kind of rabbit hole.
And gathering is special – it is a unique way of being in the world.
Gathering can feel awkward. It can be dangerous.
Gathering, collecting, grasping, clasping.
Gathering is intimate, it is alienating, it is an act of love
and sometimes hate
We are so much more, in numbers, in force, in voice because
We are gathered here.