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".