Reading Troupe #01

How can we dislocate and relocate the qualities of intelligence? How can we begin to re-align the boundaries, stretching out ideas to points of rupture, generating something altogether unexpected, surprising and new? What if we call upon the many knowings inscribed in our flesh, our bones, our central nervous systems, organs, joints, limbs? How can an idea be swallowed and allowed to move through us and transform us?
Emma Wolf Haugh

Within Emma Wolf Haugh’s READING TROUPE series of performative workshops, the “readers” are invited to participate in an active embodiment of knowledge dissemination and production. This collaborative practice is an attempt to collectively enter the body of a chosen text through gesture rather than verbal language and slip between the words and into its arteries, veins, finding its pulse through the bodies of the “readers”/ participants. The READING TROUPE # 01 unfolded over the course of two days in a set of games of physical and verbal misbehaving, exercises in imaginative dissonance and techniques of becoming and inhabiting a text, which were recorded through reflexive documentation strategies. Located between reading group and theatre rehearsal applying techniques by Augusto Boal, this intensive workshop encouraged each participant to become a critical agent who performs what might be living within the text Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmapornographic Era by philosopher Beatriz Preciado (2013).

Participants: Ulrike Gerhardt, Stephanie Hanna, Elaine W. Ho, Suza Husse, Andrea Liu, Doireann O’Malley, Henrik Mayer, Lorenzo Sandoval
Facilitator: Emma Wolf Haugh

Editors: Emma Wolf Haugh and Suza Husse

The publication comprising MANUAL and DOCUMENTATION is published on the occasion of Emma Wolf Haugh’s contribution to the project dissident desire, Chapter 1: Exercises in Critical Bodybuilding curated by Susanne Husse and Lorenzo Sandoval at District / October 24 – December 7, 2013. The materials of the publication were generated during the workshop READING TROUPE #01.Physical Education. Exercises In Embodying Discourse by the artist on November 2 – 3, 2013.

Language: English

The pdf version of the zine can be downloaded below.

Team – Concept and editing: Emma Wolf Haugh and Suza Husse; Texts by: Manual: Emma Wolf Haugh and Augusto Boal (5), Keith Johnstone (4; 5), Beatriz Preciado (Cover), dictionary.com and The Oxford English Dictionary (1); Documentation: the participants (interview 1-12; notes 2; scripts 3; 6; 12), Elaine Ho (11); Images: the participants (Cover; 2; 5; 7-8; 9-10; 12), Lorenzo Sandoval (6), Miryana Todorova (4; 14); Graphic design: Emma Wolf Haugh; Risograph print: Pieterjan Grandry

© District Kunst- und Kulturförderung, Emma Wolf Haugh, authors and participants, 2013.