About the performative intervention

Force with Force Chorus is a collaborative workshop, hybrid performance, and exhibition. In the first phase collaborators devise a collective narration translating theory in Judith Butler’s The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind through personal experiences and understandings of violence. Drawing upon practice-as-research methodologies, groups engage in collective processes to resignify theory through autoethnographic and performance-making methods. Collaborators are invited to read their written reflections out loud as well as the writings from others in the group, approaching nonviolence as a technique of connecting a singular experience across multiple subjective experiences. 

During the virtual performance of the collective narration, a group of voices assemble online. Video cameras are turned off. Names are changed to the first letter of a chosen name. A profile picture is replaced with a colorful side. Similar to a Greek chorus, but without a leader, the act of sensing the porosity of words to speak to understand rather than to speak to be heard cascades subjective experiences into virtual space. Both collaborators and audience members are invited to imagine how relationships can be formed without the need to categorize and identify according to gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, or sexual orientation.