Civility might appear the last and least likely term to mobilise attention in the non-conformist realm of performance. But this call for contributions, prompted by discussions that took place as part of the symposium \u2018Civic Centre: Reclaiming the Right to Performance\u2019 recognises an expanded political vocabulary in recent work drawing on a set of previously discredited terms (see http:\/\/\/www.civiccentre.org). The concept of \u2018friends and enemies\u2019 proposed by Carl Schmitt as the founding antithetical relationship of the political, \u2018fidelity to the event\u2019 in the philosophy and writing on theatre of Alain Badiou, agencies of \u2018welcome and intimacy\u2019 in Alphonso Lingis\u2019s sensual locating of human-animal action, Doreen Massey\u2019s conception of the \u2018stranger\u2019 within and outside the city, and Richard Sennett\u2019s engagement with terms such as \u2018respect\u2019 and \u2018civility\u2019 since he wrote \u2018The Fall of Public Man\u2019 thirty years ago, are part of this register. These writers point, at the very least, to an alternative way of conceiving of the much abused and banal \u2018Other\u2019 of identity theory and its attendant critical concept of \u2018difference\u2019 that once promised so much but seem to have delivered little beyond academic promotion. But do these categories resonate in the performance field?
\nPerformance is unlikely to conceive of civility in its essentialist mode of \u2018manners\u2019 (though a deconstruction of Ancien Regime customs of public formal display would be more than welcome) but rather is more likely to detect its interest in the term\u2019s fruity overtones: the \u2018sly civility\u2019 that Homi Bhabha locates at the heart of the modern colonising imagination, the uncivil wars inherent in performance interventions that contest the suffocating normative frame of civility challenging its whiff of legality, politics of restraint, accommodation to difference and rule-following, through to the inherent Janus-faced duplicity of the theatrical mode such as Edward Albee\u2019s stage direction in his Tony award winning play \u2018The Goat\u2019: \u2018There is chaos behind the civility, of course\u2019.
\nThis \u2018of course\u2019 might serve as an invitation to ask why and what is at stake in the politics and performance of civility? Is civility, as Sennett once proposed, simply the capacity not to make oneself a burden to others? That would, at a stroke, characterise theatre as one of the more uncivil arts. Or might we expand the implications of the term with Rustom Bharucha who asks: \u2018Why should the civility of theatre be immune to the political threats faced in the larger public sphere? What makes the theatre so special when other sites of social interaction in the public sphere are under attack? Should the civil be immunised against the contamination of the political? What if the civil is infected in its own right?\u2019
\nThese questions pertaining to the operations of theatre and its institutional contexts might be equally addressed to the liberal humanist obsequies of the expanded field of performance: the grace notes of musical appreciation, the courtesies of choreography, the host and guest niceties of installation and site- specific work. It is not that civility always brings with it an inevitable dark-side of the intemperate and intolerant (stupid!). Nor that it is bound to its \u2018other\u2019 (witness the studied anarchic and rude that groups such as the Wooster Group and Forced Entertainment have done so much to return to the civil realm, why else do they bow to us after we have endured all those apparent insults?). But rather how to hold on to the botched concept of civility for long enough to see the myriad ways current performance (from the lyrical \u2018In Yer Face Theatre\u2019 to the pestilential Gwynneth Paltrow\u2019s Oscar acceptance speech, from the charming Stuart Brisley to the demonic Forster and Heighes) while protesting its radical qualifications continues to construct conditions for its polite perpetuation. That might be a question worth exploring (if you please \u2013 but if you can\u2019t be arsed, don\u2019t bother!).
\nTo mix with papers developed from ideas originally presented at \u2018Civic Centre\u2019 and axioms from artists and academics we are looking for responses to the above concerns particularly from performance makers, artists. individuals and groups who suspect that performance experience is not sufficiently caught in the circulating simplifications of empathy and alienation, investment and boredom, nice and nasty and recognise civility as an unlikely circuit- breaker.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Editorial
\nNicholas Ridout
\npp. 1 – 1
\nReclaiming the Right to Performance
\nRustom Bharucha
\npp. 3 – 17
\nDon’t Take it Personally
\nPaul Rae
\npp. 18 – 24
\nThe Uncertainties of Dialogue
\nNeera Chandhoke
\npp. 25 – 29
\nA Theatre of Civility
\nSally Doughty, Michael Mangan
\npp. 30 – 40
\nSpit Not in the Fire – the Art of Manners [artist’s pages]
\nSimon Bayly
\npp. 41 – 44
\nLove Junkies
\nAlphonso Lingis
\npp. 45 – 53
\nChronic Fatigue
\nSteven Connor
\npp. 54 – 58
\nThe Thing with Feathers
\nDavid Williams
\npp. 59 – 65
\nPerforming Hospitals
\nJeb Weisman
\npp. 66 – 70
\nThe Democracy Machine
\nAlan Read
\npp. 71 – 85
\nFifteen Theses on Contemporary Art
\nAlain Badiou
\npp. 86 – 86
\nTheatre and Politics
\nJanelle Reinelt
\npp. 87 – 94
\nImpurity and the Postcolonial Subject
\nAlan Filewod
\npp. 95 – 98
\nThinking out of Time
\nAdrian Kear
\npp. 99 – 110
\nEthics of Voice: Interview with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi
\nJoe Kelleher
\npp. 111 – 115
\nThe Strangers Beyond the Gates
\nDoreen Massey
\npp. 116 – 122
\nThe Stranger Within
\nJan Cohen-Cruz
\npp. 123 – 125
\nUrban Refuge, Voluntary Community
\nNigel Rapport
\npp. 126 – 133
\nPerformance and Civility
\nPeter Harrop
\npp. 134 – 138
\nNotes on Contributors
\npp. 139 – 141
\nDVD Contents
\npp. 142 – 142<\/p>\n\n\n