Agora #1: Rehearsing the Revolution: storytelling for common ground dialogues

2022.02.07, 13:00–15:30

Imagine Earth without us, humans. What does the planet look like?

This event is the first of a series related to the “Narratopias Collective Practices” project

Petra Ardai is a theatre-director, lecturer and scenario writer. She is the artistic director of the Amsterdam and Budapest based art collective SPACE. Together with poet Jorgen Unom Gario, and UX designer Esther Verhamme, they have organized an immersive collaborative storytelling based on the method of the Rehearsing the Revolution. Together, we will invent a radical change, a (re)evolution and reflect on the experience.

“We believe that changes start from the inside and are convinced that co-creative art experiences can cultivate cultural shifts, make fundamental changes and collaborations possible even under circumstances when nothing else seems to work anymore.”

Imagine Earth without us, humans. What does the planet look like? How do nature, organic and synthetic entities develop and regenerate without us? What happens to the traces and the memory of mankind? What if after a few million years the conditions become optimal and a new species in the lineage of humans occur? How does this offspring relate to other sentient beings and the surrounding? Can Earth teach the descendent to become kin?

The project Rehearsing the Revolution was launched in 2020 in collaboration with partners from Hungary, Cyprus, and the Netherlands.

This workshop will be facilitated by Jorgen Unom Gario (instant poetry) Petra Ardai (storytelling), Esther Verhamme (online storytelling) and Stella de Kort (illustration), with the help of U+’s team.

About SPACE:

SPACE creates interactive documentary performances and immersive visionary storytelling in diverse media. The projects are always culture-specific and the participants or spectators are the main protagonists. The storytelling balances on the border of fiction and reality and dissects complex social issues like migration, polarisation, inequality, ownership, and colonisation through the politics of the personal. What if that would happen to you? What would you do in that situation? – is what the makers ask themselves and the audience. SPACE proposes that in the safe space of the imagination we can learn to express our fears and dreams and (re)connect to ourselves and each other. We can get a grip on reality by playing with fiction.