My Little Enlightenment Plays (2016-2019)
Texts, videos, performance, lecture performance, installation, collaboration
MY LITTLE ENLIGHTENMENT PLAYS is a multimedia project centred around three experimental theatre pieces: 1. Don Carlos, or, Royal Jelly; 2. Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers; 3. Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings — all of which present imaginary tête-a-têtes with Enlightenment thinkers, writers, and scientists.
A solo exhibition at [SPACE] Mare Street (June-July 2019) showed a selection of videos, sound pieces, texts, performance props and costumes from the last three years of this multidisciplinary project - together in one installation for the first time—as a layered world that allowed for the work(s) to be seen in a new light, as traces of past events, future scores and performing objects. Each element in a performance visualises, embodies or translates the text into another medium — which is itself a queer-feminist and oblique translation of Enlightenment texts and ideas. For this, Sophie Seita invited artists who work in other media to create sculptures, projections, music, and clothes that functioned as her props, costumes, and sets. (See individual pages for each play for more detailed descriptions and names of all collaborators).
The project as a whole asks how a dialogue with Enlightenment figures can positively mobilise aspects of that era politically and aesthetically (tolerance, hospitality, a diverse utopia), while critiquing others (progress, fraternity, imperialism). Highlighting the Enlightenment’s relevance to our contemporary artistic and political preoccupation with ‘values’ and ‘truth’, the exhibition tests knowledge, universality, rationality, certain forms of empiricism, individuality and progress, asking: for what and whom? How and how far? In a time of ‘alternative facts’, how can we salvage the speculative in creative work and follow its utopian promise towards imaginative ways of producing and distributing knowledge? What would a new feminist, queer, and welcoming ‘Republic of Letters’ look like today?
My Little Enlightenment Plays blends this reworking of historical material (astronomy, astrology, Mesmer’s energy healing, salon culture), with contemporary queer affect theory, the (pseudo-)psychology of colour-symbolism and Bauhaus-style abstract costumes and experimental dance. Translating and challenging the Enlightenment’s opposition of sentiment and rationality, the exhibition harnesses the experimental spirit of things that don’t quite work and are thus exactly aligned or fizzingly oblique, toying with current assumptions about seriousness, identity, obscurity, form and fun, and showing that deliberate artifice can be an affective space and vivid presence in which the audience can dwell and be held.
Exhibition:
[ SPACE ] Mare Street, London (2019)
Install shots:
Laura Cobb, 2019
Publication:
My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar Press, 2020).
Funded by:
Arts and Humanities Impact Fund (2019); Public Engagement Starter Grant; University of Cambridge (2017-2018); Vice-Chancellor’s Public Engagement Award, University of Cambridge (2018); Art Night 2018; Lambeth City Council; Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (2018); Research Fund, Queens’ College (2018); Judith E. Wilson Grant (2017); Cambridge Humanities Research Grant (2017).