Excerpt 1: Chandelier and Potted Palm

It was clear to me rather early that if people say, ‘We are the people,’ then that turns very quickly into ‘We are one people,’ and that turns just as quickly into: ‘You shall have no other peoples before me.’ And then I came to understand very well why Brecht was so distrustful of the word ‘people’ [Volk]. - Heiner Muller

What consolidates an audience into a mob? What triggers an ordinary theatergoer to commit violent censure? Artists throughout history have faced down, fled from and been destroyed by hostile audiences. Muller remarked that if he wrote a scene that mocked the GDR, he wrote it for the terrible silence where there should have been laughter. Today, and especially as American artists, the thought that our artwork sparks such a dramatic reaction is dulled by our nation’s proclivity to repackage subversion as one more marketing strategy. We argue that the silencing mob still thrives under all our skins. As artists, we have the opportunity to use this negativity to our advantage, as a useful symbol.

Excerpt 2: The Actor's last stand

THE GENTLEMEN’S GENTLEMEN performance project examines the voice within all of us which says "no" to our most powerful ideas. Our internal audience, we hasten to add, is not limited to the pathology of the artist. We have discovered, in our project’s most recent iteration in Gent, Belgium, that the forces of normalization are culturally and geographically specific. Our Belgian-American team made fascinating connections to current Nationalistic trends that even now threaten Belgian’s unique and precious heterogeneity. We find links between nations that trouble us as much as they inspire our work. In each city we land in, we immediately gather a team of interested players and adapt our script to their notion of what makes an audience "terrifying".

Our preview

In our imagination, The Gentlemen’s Gentlemen is like a fantastic theatre, nearly infinite in its physical dimensions. Its farthest seats are “hidden by impenetrable fog” where “primitive snake motifs” ornament the walls. In real time-space, THE GENTLEMEN’S GENTLEMEN is a traveling show on a hand built, two-platform, wooden stage. On the top stage, an actor and actress deliver excerpts from a small town musical, “Earlville on the Erie Canal,” as their rivalry becomes violent. The bottom stage is a refuge from the audience, and possibly an escape. The text of our play, co-written by Getnick and Kidder, details the coming of a killer audience, one that cyclically riots, murders the actors and feeds the theater. The ending of the play and fate of the characters is determined by the cast. In this way, the project is augmented by the people that we work with.

In each city that we visit, we invite a local cast of artists, actors, builders, and musicians to perform “The Gentlemen’s Gentlemen” play in front of a live audience for four nights. At the finale of these performances, we ask the assembled audience to riot against our play. For the duration of our residency we videotape footage of our actors, sets and audiences. This footage is edited into a film and then projected during future performances across the globe.