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- Title
Post-Relational Paranoid Play in Reactor's Big Lizard's Big Idea Project.
- Authors
Oliver, Daniel
- Abstract
This article emerges from my work as a performer and guest collaborator in Big Lizard's Big Idea (2009-10), a participatory art project devised by the UK collective 'Reactor'. I examine the entwining of playfulness with paranoia in BLBI, employing a psychoanalytic understanding of 'play' developed by Donald Winnicott and the Lacanian dissection of contemporary modes of 'enjoyment' developed and supplemented by Slavoj Žižek (Winnicott 51-70; Žižek, Lacan 103-04). Reactor, through their unabashed Disney-esque character 'Big Lizard', simultaneously invites us to play and intervene in our playfulness, providing an uneasy relationship with our experience of the motivations, claims, stakes, characters, and purposes behind the invitation. I demonstrate that this paranoid experience intervenes in some recent discussions around participation and social engagement in theatre and performance. In conclusion, I argue that the multi-layered, complex and playful paranoia facilitated by Reactor might give us insights into our own complicity in the structures in which we are embedded.
- Subjects
ARTISTIC collaboration; BIG Lizard's Big Idea (Theatrical production); ENTERTAINERS; PARANOIA (Film); MOTIVATION (Psychology); PERFORMANCE evaluation
- Publication
Platform (17510171), 2013, Vol 7, Issue 2, p32
- ISSN
1751-0171
- Publication type
Article