ABSTRACT
Reflecting on my collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, in this chapter I explore the potential of an active and resistant – rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a participatory performance-based practice. 1 With reference to Open City's recent work, I examine how the performance of stillness in the public realm might produce an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour, whilst simultaneously creating a space into which to imagine – or even produce – the experience of something new or different. The act of stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to – or refusal of – societal norms; a wilful attempt to rupture or divert the trajectory of the dominant hegemonic social order. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of habitual events, whilst illuminating temporal gaps and fissures within which alternative, even unexpected possibilities – for life – might emerge. Collective stillness thus has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol but instead newly forming through the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City –might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual's capacity to act. Furthermore, this chapter addresses how the collective performance of stillness might intervene in and challenge how the public realm is activated and navigated, through the creation of new social assemblages for rehearsing and testing alternative – critical, political and ethical – formulations of community, produced in and through the act of participation itself.
