guerrilla ballet

on july 13th we participated in an act of guerrilla ballet / performed at the site of one of BP’s summer screens in opposition to the oil and gas industry’s continued greenwashing campaign through sponsorship of the arts

the action was simple – we performed the finale of Swan Lake in the centre of Trafalgar Square / many things went wrong – our soundsystem encountered too many obstacles and didn’t enter the site – and our molasses oil [to be poured over a dying swan] was confiscated before that scene could take place /

our message was not one of anger or accusation towards those who attended / rather an awareness raising intervention to spark discussion and encourage a critical stance towards BP’s sponsorship of the arts and cultural/family-friendly image whilst at the same time engaging in one of the most environmentally destructive projects on the planet – the Canadian tarsands / our flyers explained this to the audience and the performance finished with us raising banners and exiting slowly and deliberately from the event

the action gained a lot of press – some good – some critical / funnily enough – the most positive and the most negative appeared in the same online publication / in answer to the positive – written by Mark Donne – thank you – you took the message of the action which was to see our performance and use it as a starting point from which to develop your own opinions on corporate sponsorship of the arts rather than simply accepting it as something that happens /

in answer to the negative – by Nathalie Rothschild – criticisms such as yours fulfill Richard Bolton’s 25-year old prophecy that we would come to a time when we are unable to envision a non-corporate art world – and that this time would coincide with the degradation of the arts due to the vested interests of its patrons / we are not arguing that corporate funding simply be replaced with government funding – the state’s vested interests can be as domineering and repressive as those of a corporation – although with a ‘democratically’ elected government one can hope that arts funding might represent a wider variety of creative voices than that of a commissioning corporation with a more singular agenda /  one could also argue that at least with governmental funding in this country  the decision of what to fund was usually left to other artists – rather than a PR savvy researcher who knows what art investment would portray their company most favourably / in stating that we simply haven’t thought that far ahead I would argue that you actually didn’t consider the action we presented – was not our ballet performance a non-corporate work of ‘art’?

what we are proposing is not that one method of funding be replaced with another but that we consider the idea that it is funding sources that actually dictate what we perceive to be ‘art’ in that the only ‘art’ presented to the public is that which has been deemed ‘art’ by the powers that be – corporations and governments / what we want is that our culture represents the aesthetic needs of the people / this may well have space for artistic heritage in which we remember bygone masters of their profession – but it would also have space for new and emerging artists and most importantly for the Beuysian ‘expanded conception of art’ /

my refusal to engage fully with the issue of specific funding sources and where is the money is not a naive escape from reality but a belief in the idea that whilst we will conceive of an alternative not by intellectualising the problem and being put off action by the impossibility of imagining alternatives / rather that it might be possible to develop alternatives by focusing instead on the creative aspect and the aesthetic that we as citizens wish to see in our culture / in doing so we might create a space in which alternatives can be imagined – alternatives that arise out of the necessity / you might pour scorn on this idea – but in return I can only say that I am unhappy living in a society that allows external agencies to cleanse themselves of misdemeanors in some kind of sponsorship catharsis

and there we have it – fallen into a trap of focusing on the negative media rather than using the action itself as a medium to generate and stimulate further actions and projects / but it felt as though this issue of ‘well if they don’t fund it nobody will’ is rarely addressed and those activists that take part in art not oil actions

(the project went ahead with the help from many other organisations and individuals – including Artist Project Earth, UK Tarsands Network, Platform, Rising Tide and others)

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