The compass in our hands promises us North, promises us a path. It brings together action (promise), aesthetics (form), and ethics (value). The responsibility for the path and for charting it circles back to us – to our commitment to one another and to the world.
Within rhizomatic thought, which lacks a north, we might ask: what happens when direction is lost? What remains when the North disappears?
As a coordinate, the promise of North raises further questions: where do we arrive when we get to the north? What happens when we get there? Is that “the end”? As such, it is a concept that invites retraction and divergence.
This year’s conference will engage with the promise the compass grants us, and with the radical questions it leads us to.
The School of Visual Theater’s Performance Conference was founded as a space that questions, inquires, and investigates the performative issues of the present, and celebrates the richness and uniqueness of their expressions.
We are accustomed to thinking of a school as “a place of learning.” Yet now, in its thirteenth year, in this present moment, the conference signals to us that a school is first and foremost a state. To be in it is to be in a state. The conference partakes in this special state, within which the possibilities to learn, to act, and to create something new are expanded. The conference produces unexpected connections between sensory perception and the granting of meaning. The study and the art that unfold within it are born from the uniqueness of this state that enables their making.
