In 2011, Vancouver-based company Theatre Replacement, in production with Berlin-based group Rimini Protokoll, staged 100% Vancouver (21–2 January) at the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival. The show, populated by one hundred Vancouver residents who had – with help from Theatre Replacement – ‘cast’ each other for the role of Vancouverite, was a statistical portrait of the city based on Canada's 2006 mandatory long-form census. No one who performed as a percentile at Simon Fraser University (SFU) Woodward's Fei and Milton Wong Experimental Theatre, located in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, was there on the basis of artistic merit. They were there because they met the production's demographic prerequisites for participation: age, marital status, neighbourhood, mother tongue, ethnicity or nationality, and place of birth. Each person onstage represented 1 per cent of the city's population. In journalist George Pendle's programme note for the show he writes, ‘Since Vancouver's population is roughly 646,385, each person in 100% Vancouver thus represents 6,464 people.’Footnote 2
Theatre Replacement used the 2006 census in tandem with what Rimini Protokoll calls ‘statistical chain reaction’. The artistic team selected the first percentile, an ‘expert’ connected in someway to statistics; that person, according to 100% Vancouver dramaturge Tim Carlson, was invited ‘to ask a friend, colleague, or family member to be the next person in the chain’.Footnote 3 Carlson, who oversaw the chain casting, stated that Theatre Replacement had to intervene on several occasions – and ‘break the chain’ – in order to ensure full and ‘accurate’ representation, fulfilling the show's own criteria. In restaging an image of the city through the rubric of statistics, Carlson reveals how statistics take on lives of their own. They are what first percentile Patti Wotherspoon calls the ‘numbers made human’.Footnote 4
The 100% casting call was typical of how Rimini Protokoll – the team of Helgard Haug, Daniel Wetzel, and Stefan Kaegi – have worked with non-professional actors or what they call ‘experts of the everyday’. Here, expertise does not lie in acting technique but in the ability to be ‘common’ or representative of the general population, or some ordinary aspect of it, like age or ethnicity. German theatre scholar Meg Mumford notes that all three directors have a ‘marked interest’ in ‘engaging people and phenomena from the contemporary world that do not often feature within the realm of professional theatre and/or are insufficiently known within the public realm’.Footnote 5
The 100% Vancouver participants form a line from youngest to oldest. Image courtesy of Theatre Replacement. Photographer Tim Matheson.
The 100% Vancouver participants divide the stage between ‘female’ and ‘male’. A transgendered percentile bravely stakes the middle ground between gender divides. Image courtesy of Theatre Replacement. Photographer Tim Matheson.
In 100% Vancouver, the result is a production that is irreducibly local and also completely repeatable. What audiences witnessed in Vancouver – the circular set, the microphones positioned downstage for percentiles to tell their stories, the display of personal objects by each participant – can be, and has been, replicated on stages in Melbourne, San Diego, Athens, Dresden, London and Toyko. As of December 2013, the show has been staged in seventeen cities in North America, Europe, Australia and Asia. Every production is composed of locals who engage in onstage polls, questions and what can only be described as group choreography: percentiles moving from one side of the stage to the other to indicate which statistical data they ‘belong’ to or represent. In 100% Vancouver, percentiles formed lines that ranged from youngest to oldest, male and female, and more slippery distinctions like ‘have’/‘have not’, and ‘me’/‘not me’. It is a transnational theatre product that would seem to borrow from the same strategies of consumption that make it possible to buy a can of Coca-Cola or watch The Lion King musical in any major city around the world. That is, it is reproducible (same set, same casting procedures), it claims to represent everyone and it claims to be (for) everyone (the statistical portrait onstage captures and expresses the needs and hopes of the local public offstage). However, the marked difference between one show and the next is that an Athenian cannot easily stand in for a Vancouverite. City after city, 100% shows us what cannot be duplicated: the lived experiences of residents, the histories of place, the local cultures and the material contingencies that are specific to each urban centre.
The show's dramaturgy, simultaneously local and site-specific and abstract and placeless, chips away at the polarity between the local and the global. Unlike McTheatre productions, a term used to describe megamusicals like Cats or Les Misérables, the 100% series does not view the local with indifference.Footnote 6 It is a key characteristic of the show. Most productions begin by featuring the percentiles. All one hundred participants take turns stating their name and most significant object, which they bring with them onstage. When I first watched 100% Vancouver I was moved by the sheer variety of objects and people paraded on set; by the kids and old people holding family photos and clutching fuzzy blankets. These were ‘real’ people. This was Vancouver. I experienced 100% as a ‘local’ production, a direct channel to the city and not a Rimini Protokoll export.
In this article, I set out to understand how a show that feels so local can be part of a global project and a transposable dramaturgy that is designed to be tented anywhere. I explore this seeming paradox in 100% Vancouver because it self-consciously shared the stage with a corporate sponsor connected to the globalizing force of finance capitalism. That sponsor, credit union Vancity, played a visible role in the show's development and audience talkback. I propose that this transparent redistribution of artistic capital to companies that deal in finance capital is not a capitulation to the market. Rather, it is a social relationship with the market that puts a spotlight on the shared and overlapping contexts between art and finance. The implications that this relationship holds for contemporary performance are complex because political resistance to and artistic autonomy vis-à-vis an anti-globalization, anti-capitalist agenda is not at the core of the 100% series or of the Vancouver production. In fact, 100% Vancouver stands out for inserting itself squarely within a discourse on the redistribution of capital. My aim in analysing this production is to show how it both manifests a city and a nation vulnerable to government cutbacks and inept policy decisions, and contributes to a political economy that shows art to be essential to urban development and economic growth. 100% Vancouver demonstrates how contemporary citizen-led performance is the battleground for declining and dominant visions of governmentality ranging from welfare government to finance capitalism.
In order to elaborate on this conflict between care and capital, this article begins by outlining a vision of government that is today largely out of circulation in Canada: the welfare of the population. In the lead-up to and during the PuSh Festival, the aggressive budget cuts to the British Columbia Arts Council by the provincial Liberal government and the scrapping of Statistics Canada's mandatory long-form census by the federal Conservative government remained topics of public protest and debate. Art and statistics coalesced in 100% Vancouver to show a steadily decreasing government interest with the welfare and management of Canada's population. Vancity accepted PuSh's pitch to act as a presenting sponsor of the 125th-anniversary series to celebrate Vancouver's municipal incorporation. This sponsorship handily accomplished Vancity's own ‘social performance’Footnote 7 of values-based banking through 100%'s creative display of community.
From Vancity, I move on to examine a social performance of care and capital that required no solicitation from PuSh: the city of Vancouver. The city has funded the festival from its inception and, since the British Columbia Arts Council cuts, the municipality has increased its funding to PuSh and its overall funding of arts and culture.Footnote 8 In fact, the presence of the city and of the mayor Gregor Robertson in showcases like the 125th-anniversary series was as pronounced as that of Vancity. Robertson, who attended 100% Vancouver, was warmly applauded by the audience before the show and this affirmation was carried forward in the ‘Greatest Vancouverite’ scene, where he was endearingly referenced. At the same time that this incontestable link between art and city was being performed, PuSh was restructuring its revenue model. One of its key priorities was to increase private donations and corporate sponsorship in order to ‘achieve financial sustainability’.Footnote 9 While drafted well ahead of the provincial cuts, the PuSh business plan anticipates the pressure on cultural institutions to increasingly financialize how they produce art. In 100% Vancouver this financialization of art is compounded by the status of the show as a booster to civic pride in which the municipality features not as an arm’s-length funder but as a visible sponsor of the arts.Footnote 10
The final vision of care and capital that I engage with draws attention to the dramaturgy of the 100% series and its adaptability to multiple capitals and art markets. The presentation of stories and the sharing of things in 100% always occur against a minimalist set design that looks nothing like Vancouver or any of the other cities in the series. This abstract design magnifies the significance of the people and things onstage, who are now indexical of the entire city. This combined use of authenticity and abstraction shares commonalities with what playwright and theatre scholar Dan Rebellato, in his assessment of plays by the likes of Sarah Kane and Martin Crimp, calls ‘site-unspecific theatre’, or theatre that is resistant to global capital. The difference, however, between the postdramatic works Rebellato cites and the 100% series is that the latter is not concerned with resistance but with developing a self-conscious relationship with the global flows of cities’ cultural and economic capital. 100% Vancouver provides a context for discussing what it means to make art in a city that, on the one hand, sees such art as crucial to its circuits of capital and, on the other, must ‘make a case’ for the arts to a nation that would rather leave it to the fortunes of a hungry, disinvested market.
100% Vancouver and vancity
The audience attending the pre-show panel on Saturday 22 January 2011 had arrived early to SFU Woodward's to hear the production team speak about 100% Vancouver. This talkback was called ‘A Vancity Community Conversation’ and it featured Amiel Gladstone, director; Tim Carlson, dramaturge; Donna Soares, casting assistant and regular Theatre Replacement performer; percentiles number 1 and number 60, respectively Patti Wotherspoon and David Wong; and Am Johal, community coordinator at the Vancity Office of Community Engagement in the SFU Woodward's Cultural Unit.Footnote 11 The panel also featured Vancity chief executive officer Tamara Vrooman.
Percentiles move from stage left to right answering questions in connection to ‘Me/Not Me’, including ‘Who has lived in only one Vancouver neighbourhood?’ ‘Who has lived in more than five neigborhoods?’ ‘Who lives in the greatest city in the world?’ ‘Who was born in Vancouver?’ Image courtesy of Theatre Replacement. Photographer Tim Matheson.
Each panelist contextualized the production from his or her point of view: Carlson spoke about the nature of devising questions that would create an ‘interesting portrait’ of the city; Soares spoke of stepping into strangers’ homes and being the recipient of acts of hospitality; and first percentile Wotherspoon spoke of the complexities of living in what she called ‘a fragmented city’.Footnote 12 Vancity CEO Vrooman had yet to see the production but she characterized both 100% and Vancity as ‘sharing a common passion for the city’. Her comments connected the unique social formation devised in 100% Vancouver to the corporate objectives of the credit union. Interpellating the audience as Vancity clients, she spoke about the necessity to ‘connect with our members’, ‘to understand how they express themselves, and find out what they value’. In her words, ‘the more we understand them, and the context of their lives, the better we engage our members’. 100% Vancouver served as a valuable resource to the credit union because it could claim that the show enacted Vancity's own community performance.
As a members-based, non-profit, non-shareholder institution with branches in Vancouver, the lower mainland of the province of British Columbia, and Vancouver Island, Vancity markets itself as a ‘values-based’ business in which social responsibility is at the core of the credit union's corporate agenda. Gloss the bank's website and you will find community initiatives connected to affordable housing, the environment and Aboriginal communities that the government of Canada has been working very hard to either undercut or ignore. The presence of the credit union at the festival made them appear more concerned for Vancouverites than the markedly absent provincial government. At events like 100% Vancouver, a corporate scenography of support and care was visibly in play. This visibility was demonstrated not only at the talkback, but throughout the site of performance, where Vancity banners, and employees wearing bright red company blazers, could be seen throughout the lobby and theatre. This production of corporate values did not censor experimentation in 100% Vancouver; as I will discuss later, the rhetoric of bank marketing was part of the process and code of significations in the show. Vancity attached the cultural performance onstage to the corporation's ‘values-based’ impact within metropolitan Vancouver, framing the participation in 100% as a positive indicator of the credit union's own social performance.
The whole of the 125th anniversary series for which Vancity acted as presenting sponsor was, to quote Tim Carlson, a means to ‘coalesce resources’ in an underfunded theatre and performance scene.Footnote 13 That meant producing a festival environment where narratives of ‘the city’ and Vancity could intersect. For example, Vancity used Vancouver's 125th anniversary to celebrate its own longevity, since 2011 marked sixty-five years of doing business. Ads marking this ‘joint anniversary’ were prominently displayed throughout PuSh Festival venues:
Many happy returns.
For 125 years, Vancouver has been building communities.
For 65 years, we’ve been joining in.
In celebration of both birthdays, we’re proud to be the Presenting Sponsor of the 125 Anniversary Series of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival.
When you do business with us, your community profits too.Footnote 14
This ad also shared the acknowledgements page in the PuSh programme with welcome statements by the Canadian prime minister, the cabinet minister for heritage, the premier of the province of British Columbia, and the mayor of Vancouver. This combined welcome put Vancity on the same footing as the government and showed it to have as much a stake in the provision of arts and culture as the different levels of government.
The art (or lack thereof) of federal government
Both Vancity and 100% Vancouver have a way of relating to rhetorics of care and community and discourses of infrastructural provision that simulate a now retrograde art of governance in Canada. They mimic, through performance and marketing, community-focused and socially responsible models of state welfare that play a powerful role in Canada's popular imagination but an increasingly marginal role in Canada's provincial and federal systems of governance. Since 2006, the federal Conservative Party, under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, has held three successive minority and majority governments. Harper continued an economic policy initiated by Brian Mulroney in the 1980s and ossified by the long-standing Liberal governments of Jean Chretien and then Paul Martin in the 1990s and 2000s of offloading responsibility for providing social services to provinces. Many provinces further downloaded services to municipalities, who then made them the responsibility of individuals. The resulting social inequality means that Canada is today one of a handful of wealthy post-industrial democratic nations, and one of the only G8 nations with no national housing strategy, no national transport strategy and no national daycare policy.Footnote 15 An economy rich in energy and natural resources meant that the scale of the 2008 market crash was relatively contained compared to the US and Europe.Footnote 16 Neoliberal governance in Canada has not surfaced, as it has for example in the UK and other parts of the European Union, as a series of radical and highly visible austerity measures. In fact, it has tried very hard not to make a spectacle of itself. Canadians often encounter neoliberal techniques of governance in retrospect, well after the decision, the regulation or the omnibus bill has already passed.
The list is too long to rehearse here, with the most contentious funding cuts and cancellations reserved for evidence-based scientific research on global climate change.Footnote 17 But science is not, and has not, been the only target.Footnote 18 On the basis that it was ‘coercive’, ‘intrusive’ and ‘expensive’, the Harper government abolished the mandatory long-form census in 2010, replacing it with a voluntary short-form census called the National Household Survey.Footnote 19 This led to the resignation, and unprecedented politicization, of the federal government's chief statistician, Munir Sheikh, who publicly objected to the voluntary survey, arguing that it could not substitute for the data collected in the mandatory census. Public debate followed as a response to the government's decision, sparking a national controversy about the very dry matter of statistics and a need for accurate data collection.Footnote 20 The results of the 2011 survey appear to confirm what Sheikh and other economists had predicted – the data is unreliable and the remote, marginalized communities, those giving ‘small-area data involving small populations’, stand to lose the most.Footnote 21
The Harper government's commitment to aggregating incomplete and erroneous data puts it in a league with larger ‘citizenship shifts’ around the globe that ‘emphasiz[e] the individual's responsibility to achieve citizenship’.Footnote 22 This shift is summed up in the words of former Industry Minister Tony Clement: ‘My position is we are standing on the side of those Canadians who have an objection to divulging very personal information to an arm of government and are subsequently threatened with jail time when they do not do so’.Footnote 23 No one, for the record, has ever been jailed for refusing to fill out the census, but members of the Tory government did not hasten to correct themselves on this point. Rights, as Clements articulates them here, are neither universal nor collective, but private, individual and self-managed. If this shift from the mandatory census to the voluntary survey is relevant it is because the neoliberal individual, not the population, appears to be ‘the end of government’.Footnote 24 This signals a turning point that 100% Vancouver encapsulates by staging the very data that the government has made clear is no longer its purpose.
‘I had to ask him questions about farm machinery’
My name is Patricia Morris. I worked on the 2006 Census in my neighborhood, the Downtown Eastside. The data was collected differently in our neighborhood. There was no mail-in form allowed. Each one all had to be filled out in person, and I went door-to-door to gather the information . . . Lots of places I went into were unbelievable – single-room-occupancy [SRO] buildings that were dark with rats running around. Sometimes we needed flashlights to fill in the forms. Lots of times we couldn't get into a building so we’d have to talk with the manager because lots of people weren't allowed visitors. I did one long-form with a man while a party was going on. I was alone and just tried to get it over with as fast as possible. They were getting drunk and laughing and making snide remarks throughout. I had to ask him questions about farm machinery, I mean how could you not joke about that? It was fascinating – a Third-World experience in this very neighborhood, which has high-end condos next to SROs, sitting on the line between the East and West side.Footnote 25
Standing in a spotlight downstage, Patricia Morris, local author and percentile 69 in 100% Vancouver, addressed the audience about her work in 2006 as a census taker. She details how her experience of gathering data became a precarious, even vulnerable event. It is a context that does not fit easily into the census controversy. On the one hand, Morris reveals how some respondents found it more logical to deride the census than answer it in earnest because of the inapplicability of some of the questions. On the other hand, her work, in going door to door, literally shines a light on marginalized segments of the population. The evidence accumulated from her visits to SROs makes the government, and the arm’s-length organizations connected to it, aware of pressing issues about its population. But if those issues are not evidenced then the danger is that the government does not necessarily have to assess them or act on them.
Following Morris's address, percentiles posed a series of group questions to each other onstage in connection with statistical surveys and issues of privacy. (The participants ‘answered’ by raising or not raising their hands.) One question was, ‘Who cares about the long-form census?’Footnote 26 The dramaturgy of the 100% series is flexible enough to make room for issues specific to a city or nation, such as the census controversy, but the production also limited the issue to a show of hands. It is difficult to know whether questions like this were intended to mirror the limitations of the census itself, or simply to reveal the constraints of working with a large ‘non-expert’ cast and a transposable dramaturgy that can reproduce particular effects, such as authenticity, but cannot necessarily intervene in debates in a sustained way.Footnote 27
The more efficacious intervention, by far, was Morris's brief moment of testimony. Throughout the production there were many such moments by percentiles who not only posed questions but also shared stories that had emerged out of their initial interviews with the casting team. Those interviews, for me, symbolized a type of qualitative census, summarized in the 100% Vancouver script as anecdotes, and performed for the audience. This citizen-led performance is a stage for a vision of government that may be in decline at the provincial and federal levels but remains a part of Canada's popular imagination, where public debate is a need and an aspiration of the population.
Greatest Vancouverite
Morris's onstage testimony attests to the connection the percentiles formed with Theatre Replacement in the making of a temporary community. In interviews, Gladstone and Carlson discussed how they and members of the casting team got ‘emotionally invested’ in the lives of the percentiles.Footnote 28 This led them to start posing ‘more and more personal questions about religion, death, illness . . . questions that don't get asked on a census form’. What they did not anticipate was the audience's own affective, often weepy, response to the production. Carlson said, ‘I was hugely surprised by how many people, basically everyone, approached me afterwards and told me they cried during the show’. The feeling of watching someone you know onstage is magnified in the 100% series because the people we are watching are claiming to be ‘us’ and ‘the city’ in which we live.
Theatre scholar Michael McKinnie pinpoints how, historically, ‘cultural institutions’ have contributed to ‘creating a sense of civic well being’ in citizens that, more recently, have been scripted as an economic benefit to cities.Footnote 29 The strong fellowship that citizens have with their cities through art is the basis on which PuSh makes its argument for acting as an essential cultural service to the city. Executive Director Norman Armour describes how the festival ‘enjoys a reputation for being a community animator’ and was key to events such as the 2010 Cultural Olympiad and Vancouver's 125th anniversary in 2011.Footnote 30
The municipality and the mayor hitched their posts to PuSh and other art and cultural organizations in the face of aggressive government cuts to the arts. From 2009 to 2013, provincial funding for the arts under the Liberal government declined by an astonishing 43 per cent, from $47.675 million to $20.9 million.Footnote 31 The year 100% Vancouver was produced, funding at the provincial level remained the lowest in Canada, with arts and culture spending totalling $6.54 per capita. The advocacy group Stop BC Arts Cuts maintains that this falls well short of other provinces, which average $26 per capita.Footnote 32 Many municipalities in BC, including Vancouver, did not follow the route of the province and have maintained their commitment to arts and culture.Footnote 33 This civic support was crystallized by Mayor Robertson's attendance of 100% Vancouver. Robertson was publicly acknowledged by PuSh and applauded by the audience before the show. His civic presence was further reinforced onstage when Robertson appeared in a scene called ‘Greatest Vancouverite’ as a literal stage sign. Percentiles formed lines under five signs: David Suzuki (celebrated environmentalist), Gregor Robertson (two-term mayor), Joy Kogawa (poet and novelist), Trevor Linden (former Vancouver Canucks hockey player), and ‘Me’ (percentiles could nominate themselves). It was no doubt a charming moment, but it also speaks to the conditions of cultural production in which artists and producers must demonstrate (and celebrate) the incontestable link between art and the pulse of the city.Footnote 34
Percentiles form lines categorizing themselves in terms of ‘amount of money spent yesterday’. Image courtesy of Theatre Replacement. Photographer Tim Matheson.
100% Vancouver played with the currencies of the popular imagination by populating the stage with percentiles supporting leftist leaders and beloved local artists and athletes. What preceded this scene of symbolic currency, however, was a display that dealt with real currency. Directly before ‘Greatest Vancouverite’, percentiles formed five lines indicating the ‘amount of money we spent yesterday’: $0, $1–5, $5–30, $30–100, $100+. The transformation of signifiers, and the mutability expressed between money spent and greatest Vancouverite, demonstrates how 100% Vancouver trafficked across public and private sectors, appealing to a vision of Canada that still ‘cares’ about carbon emissions and poetry and a vision concerned with ‘everyday’ economics and capital.
Gathering market intelligence: ‘a relevant question is a relevant question’
It is a strange thing to consider the corporate donor in the creation of the piece but, basically, I think a relevant question is a relevant question. And one of the questions that VanCity is dealing with in their corporate strategy – in considering, ‘what kind of credit union do we want to be?’ – is ‘how do we redefine wealth?’ . . . [N]ext to New York, this is the most expensive city in the world. We talk about wealth and access to property all the time, it's an ongoing theme. So asking people [100% Vancouver participants] in initial interviews, ‘how do you define wealth?’, is an interesting question. If it would have been, do you prefer the Travel Points card to the Enviro Visa?, that would have been less relevant for our purposes.
100% Vancouver dramaturge Tim Carlson
Many of the answers to the question Carlson devised about wealth were recorded in 100% Vancouver's unique commemorative programme. In collaboration with Fillip, the contemporary Vancouver-based art journal, PuSh and Theatre Replacement published a box of postcards containing photographic portraits of all one hundred participants. On the back of each portrait were answers to the census questions on age, marital status and ethnicity, but also an additional set of questions devised by Theatre Replacement. As the casting team made their way into homes across Vancouver they asked participants, ‘What is the most significant object you possess and what is its significance?’ ‘What do you see when you look out your kitchen window?’ ‘What would you like to ask 100 people?’ ‘How do you define wealth?’ The answers to this last question consistently emphasized quality of life, family connections and intangible experiences. Percentile 82, Paul Chan: ‘My health, my family's health, and happiness’; percentile 98, Randy Tait: ‘It's not money. It's richness in knowledge, wisdom’; percentile 40, Emerald Asuncion: ‘Not just money. You can be rich in many ways in life . . .’; percentile 34, Lyndon Surjik: ‘Good friends, a loving supportive family, and good health’.
What is remarkable about the question of wealth, as well as the act of collecting answers from everyday experts, is how much it shared with both PuSh's marketing and audience development strategy and Vancity's social-performance objectives. One of PuSh's key priorities, outlined in its 2009–2011 Business Plan, was to ‘[i]ncrease contributed revenue’ by ‘building meaningful relationships with its donors and sponsors’.Footnote 35 In a section on ‘Future Development’ and ‘Budget’, the plan notes, ‘PuSh's base of support needs to grow in order to achieve financial sustainability. Without increased earned revenue and financial support from the private sector, the PuSh Festival will not be sustainable’.Footnote 36 The festival's stated priority to increase revenue through its audience base and sponsors necessitates gathering ‘deeper intelligence about existing and potential PuSh patrons . . . and potential PuSh donors’.Footnote 37 This strategy points to how cultural institutions are now also in the business of making segments of the population their object of attention in order to generate capital. PuSh not only exemplifies the pressures of financial motives placed on arts organizations, but also shows how these motives homogenize different sectors so that the objective of capturing market intelligence appears very much akin to Vancity's own stated priority in the sponsored Community Conversation ‘to understand how they [bank clients] express themselves, and find out what they value’.
A production like 100% Vancouver is implicated in these financial pressures and priorities, but it is hard to say how much of the ‘data’ performed onstage was particularly useful to marketers about audience purchasing patterns, for example. Too much of it was too idiosyncratic to pass off as hard evidence. Questions like ‘Who has moved to Vancouver to escape, to start their lives over again or to reinvent themselves?’ or ‘Who knows the names of their great-grandparents?’Footnote 38 are not useful to PuSh's economic growth. If the questions reveal anything, it is Theatre Replacement's genuine interest in, and care for, the group of participants they had assembled. And yet, in writing this, I do not think that 100% Vancouver somehow escaped the financialization of art. After all, both the city and the mayor of Vancouver, and Vancity's corporate strategy of redefining the terms of wealth, were woven into the show's unique concept of community. It remains hard to shake just how vulnerable this show was to its sponsor and to the political economies of making art in Vancouver.
Abstraction and site-unspecific theatre in the 100% series
‘24 Hours in Vancouver’. Scenes from both 4 p.m. and 4 a.m. Image courtesy of Theatre Replacement. Photographer Tim Matheson.
The affirmative links made between art, finance and the city in theatre programmes and business plans were not the only places performing the realities of ‘getting by’ in the city. In the scene ‘24 Hours in Vancouver’, for example, all one hundred participants restaged the cycle of a typical day in Vancouver. Occupying a single spot onstage they mimed getting up, taking the SkyTrain to work or school, typing at desks, commuting home and making dinner. These material realities were mimed out in close proximity to one another, so we witnessed a collectivity of daily practices rendered through the bodies of participants. As audiences, we witnessed this twenty-four-hour cycle unfolding and could potentially identify with the dreaming, commuting and typing as our own embodied practices.
This stage moment is defined in equal parts by the specificity of people's daily lives and the abstraction of those lives into a collective text about the city. Abstraction is continually deployed in the 100% series: from the ‘statistical chain reaction’, to the choreographed formation of statistics onstage, to the set design. The circular set on the stage floor, matched overhead by a circular screen that projects questions, numbers, images of the planet and a live feed of the percentiles, bears no resemblance to Vancouver, or any city for that matter. Apart from the percentiles onstage there is no scenographic indication that we are, for example, watching Vancouver or Berlin or Toyko. And it is that deliberate lack of signification that, in part, enables the reproducibility of the production in multiple cities. ‘24 hours in Vancouver’, or any city, can be repeated across all 100% productions because it does not require a particular percentile, only direction, about how to portray and condense one's day for the stage.
Writing about postdramatic theatre, Rebellato describes how globalization has produced a set of stark binaries in contemporary performance. On one side of the extreme are the McTheatres, the megamusicals which Rebellato convincingly compares to fast-food franchise systems like McDonalds to show how everything from the sets to the stars are ‘endlessly replaceable’ and replicable.Footnote 39 On the other side of this extreme are site-specific art and theatre, which have traditionally sought to oppose the genericity of consumer culture through ‘geographical and cultural specificity’.Footnote 40 Rebellato argues that this opposition to the global (often simply on the grounds that it is not local) limits site-specificity's fight against globalization to the valorization of the particular and local. Provocatively, the artistic antidote Rebellato offers to globalization is postdramatic theatre because it situates the local and the global as dialectical rather than oppositional modalities; this flexibility offers the best possible resistance to global capital.
There are many ways in which the 100% series manifests the political power Rebellato ascribes to postdramatic theatre. For example, the assertion of deliberately ‘impossible’ stage directions that mark the texts of Kane and Crimp have an analogue to casting a person as a percentile. Both direction and casting call are bound to fail and that failure of representational correspondence is precisely the point. Spectators are forced to confront what the performing body cannot hold: statistics. Moreover, the pliancy of many postdramatic works, which do not ascribe lines to characters or which combine images and lists instead of structured scenes, are also demonstrable in the 100% series. While Theatre Replacement used Rimini Protokoll's transposable production template, they also devised their own script and developed their own line of questions (again, not traditional scenes), which were specific to the percentiles they cast.
The signs onstage represent the different neighbourhoods in Vancouver. First percentile Patti Wotherspoon tells the audiences, ‘Three neighborhoods are not represented – South Cambie, Oakridge and Shaghnessey. We didn't find people with the right criteria, at the right time, in those neighbourhoods.’
And yet the 100% series also obscures its site-unspecific status. When I first watched 100% Vancouver I did not know, until I looked at the programme, that it was a Rimini Protokoll production. Moreover, while Theatre Replacement, PuSh, SFU Woodward's and Vancity were all represented at the talkback, Rimini Protokoll was not. Of course, this is probably a matter of scheduling and logistics, but I think it is notable that this show was framed as an expression of Vancouver's place patriotismFootnote 41 in the 125th-anniversary series and that it ‘spoke’ so compellingly to its citizens, its municipality and local corporate sponsor. This is at odds with how Rebellato describes site-unspecific theatre: ‘Even when you are sitting in a particular theatre on a particular night watching a particular performance of the play, it is a fundamental part of understanding the experience you are going through that you can recognize that this play can be done elsewhere and otherwise’.Footnote 42 Site-unspecific theatre does not obscure its status as a reproducible art object and theatrical experience; rather, it gains traction (among audiences, critics, artistic producers) through its global circulation in ‘creative’ capitals.
I believe that the ascendance of delegated performanceFootnote 43 has changed the imperatives of site-unspecific performance. This is a practice in which the artist hands over a part or whole of her artistic process or product to audiences, participants or ‘experts of the everyday’. In addition to the 100% series we might look to Rimini Protokoll's Annual Shareholders Meeting (ASM) (2009), in which spectators attended the Daimler general meeting in Berlin as proxy shareholders with the sole purpose of observing the event.Footnote 44 Like 100%, participants make contact with a social reality with which they already have some familiarity, in order to self-consciously inhabit and gaze at it. These productions are, by necessity, more ‘real’ than their postdramatic predecessors because they are concerned with the systems of capitalism which have become the dominant model for all non-economic sectors, including government (and artistic production, scientific research, statistical research, etc.). ASM and the 100% series do not signal a resignation to global capital but a social relationship with (and within) global capital. Both Rimini Protokoll and Theatre Replacement have created artworks and productions that engage ‘everyday’ people – spectators, children, call-centre employees and long-haul truck driversFootnote 45 – and like the systems they inhabit they form relationships with those people.
In my interview with Carlson and Gladstone the day following 100% Vancouver, they mentioned that one of the percentiles, Ramon, was out of a job and new to the country. They and some of the participants were now helping him find work. Gladstone said, ‘I care about Ramon; I care about this guy I’ve got to know. I want to help him and I think that's the overall point’. The redistributive power of delegated performance is also, in this instance, an offstage model of support and collective provision: a social performance that unfolds between people without ‘real’ capital, fighting to make art with diminished resources and trafficking visions of the city to those willing to pay for it.
