The National Theatre

by Emily Roysdon

----- Original Message -----

From: Emily Roysdon <mailto:roysdon@gmail.com> 

To: (undisclosed recipients)

Sent: Monday, February 05, 2007 7:11 PM

Subject: TNT/// invitation to participate -------

Welcome

to

TNT

The Nation and the Theatre.

Upon a degraded stage you are invited to write a newer document.

How do we interpret the Nation text, the performance text? How do we ignite them? The Nation and the Theatre are both dominated by texts (the letter and the law), by languages that my body animates and updates (citizenship and capitalism).

Do you identify with an alienating text? Know the root of your symptom or your action? How are you associating and interpreting the texts that dominate you? We must not only consider our relation to language as complicit. How do we reinvest language on the level of politics—exposing the lack of potential in our present vocabulary? I want to get dominated by your flagrancy and your image of laborious articulation.

Theatre is protest, frame, laboratory, and site. And TNT is the delicate matter of your excess. Where do you hold your TNT? Cradled under your poncho hoodie? Thigh-strapped like an extra hard softie? I request visual manifestos. Or what can you not say? Visual visible—show me this dominion. Not of your hope, but of your fear and registration, fantasy and resistance. On what level do you feel this call and in what corner of the frame will you insert your body to mark it? Upon the threshold of communicability, the nether-land of performativity!

Disarticulated National T THEATRE.

The National Theatre has exposed itself as needing to be reconstituted. And this call heralds your manifest contribution into a radical reframe of abject articulation.

Saddle up, ride your cannon down to the show. Make it obvious.

Details: I will be there with a camera and a video camera. I am unsure of your response. My thought had been to organize the “newer document” as unedited contact sheets, the accumulation over time (time) scripting another theatre but not issuing a proper recourse. In the service of your voice, I have not discovered the answer, and will bring the video to capture and then negotiate. I have focused on images speaking to text and the identifications/misidentifications that happen when you act up act out.

Your contribution can be in any way, as you wish. I was imagining them short-ish (between thirty seconds and five minutes), but certainly that paradigm can also be toppled. Together, we will decide on how to record your event: one picture or twenty, both camera and video, or none.

Please RSVP and let me know your interest and concerns. I am hugely looking forward to seeing where this goes.