The performance hangout is a hybrid social and theatrical concept combining pop music, dance, sculpture and “hanging out” across different 'live' media including streaming online, whatsapp and in IRL.

 

It’s the absolute non-event for the attention economy of surveillance theatres, ‘click bait’ users and precariat ‘scrollers’; where focus lies on the spectacles of internet communities, open-source productions, synchronised swimming, and what boybands get up to offstage, in your dreams.

 

Drawing on combined methods of “live fictioning”, altered duration, non-accumulative choreography and “being together”, the performance hangout imagines an alternate space-time– a future imaginary set against a culture of high performance anxiety, corporate engagement imperatives and the global rise in populism tt asks: what kind of art and life might be imagined beyond such agendas? (What would this look like? What would this entail?): without losing the fantasy of unity and erotics, or the communal luxury of time beyond work and leisure.

 

Concept and direction: Owen G. Parry

Guest contributors:

 

Julia Bardsley (Lecturer in Performance, Queen Mary, University of London)

 

Glyn Davies (Chancellor’s Fellow and Reader, School of Design, University of Edinburgh)

 

Eirini Kartsaki (Lecturer in Theatre & Performance, East 15, University of Essex)

 

Katie Hawthorn (Music Journalist and PhD Candidate in English, University of Edinburgh)

 

Ben Fletcher-Watson, (IASH, University of Edinburgh)

 

Guy Stevenson (Postdoctoral fellow at IASH, University of Edinburgh)