Capitalist Duets and The Decision Between Us

Fabien Maltais-Bayda has written a review of CAPITALIST DUETS, a recent performance art event presented at The Theatre Centre in Toronto (24-26 November), in which 7 pairs of artists simultaneously present their work in a single theatre space. The article appears in Esse, an outstanding magazine of contemporary art that comes out of Montréal. Drawing on my argument in The Decision Between Us, regarding separation as ontological, Maltais-Bayda argues that by assembling 7 separate two-person performances in a single shared space, CAPITALIST DUETS, not only addresses the affects and tensions generated by neoliberalism’s individualizing rationality, it also stages “separation” as the spacing of the ethical and a partaking in existence as always shared. In the final paragraph, he writes:

Indeed, to see CAPITALIST DUETS as a composite of so many separate elements is to understand that each relies on the others for their definition and delineation. Put simply, one of seven simultaneous duets would not be one of seven without the other six. We might understand the performance, then, as an exercise in composing with reciprocal separation, reminding us that even in economies intent on shoring up our identification as individual agents duking it out for our own self-interest, the space between us marks less our independence than, as Ricco astutely puts it, our “coexistence.”

A graduate of the University of Toronto’s graduate program in Dance, Theatre and Performance, Maltais-Bayda writes on contemporary art, performance and dance. I want to thank him for his reading of my work, both here and in a recent extended interview  with performance artists Francesco-Fernando Granados and Johanna Householder: “Performance Art in a Precarious Time” (MOMUS, 12 January 2017).