The Hazardous Conversation: The Practice of Intimacy in Performance at The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home

This chapter takes the form of a scripted conversation and will seek to interrogate and critically reflect on a practice of intimacy in performance developed at the Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home (The Institute). The topic of the conversation is our public performance The Hazardous Family (Hazard08) that took place in Manchester in July 2008. The conversation has been scripted for publication, written as if the reader is eavesdropping, but is based on the many conversations the Institute has had over the past four years as a family and with the numerous and varied visitors to the Institute. The stratagem of this conversation is a critique of normative familial structures. The intention here is that this critique is not only debated but also enacted through the tensions played out between the members’ viewpoints and the alacrity with which interlocutors are willing to undermine each others’ stated positions. The concept of ‘asymmetrical relations’ from feminist philosopher Iris Marion Young was a key theoretical milestone for us, as is the notion of ‘the ethics of interruption’ from feminist theorist Lisa Baraitser. What results is an at times playful, but nevertheless legitimate investigation into what intimacy in our performance practice has enabled us to do — or perhaps undo.