CAPITALIST DUETS is a performance made up of seven independently authored duets presented simultaneously as an unaffected spectacle. The 2016 iteration was presented at The Theatre Centre as part of the Blackwood’s 2016 exhibition I stood before the source. The performance tackled alternate ways in which we visualize and understand the economy and the flow of money and labour through choreography, communicating a more affective experience of capitalism located in the body and its movements. In order to disrupt the hierarchical commodification of contemporary performance, fourteen artists were paired, with each pair receiving the same microgrant for the time, props, travel, costume, and other expenses related to their duet. In their curatorial statement, Letters and Handshakes—a collaboration between Greig de Peuter and Christine Shaw—noted the significance in the absence of composers, architects, or any authority figures, describing CAPITALIST DUETS as a “free-market dramaturgy.” This transparency ensures that “the hidden labour of production becomes startlingly visible, and the visible, in turn, becomes practice. From dancer to choreographer, theatre technician, and art-presenting partner, everyone involved in CAPITALIST DUETS holds the status of performer, and every performer danced according to the same rules.”

Because there is only so much to go around. Or is there?

CAPITALIST DUETS is seven independently authored duets performed simultaneously as an unaffected spectacle, complete with merchandise table. There is no composer, no architect, no central authority— only the radical aesthetic modulation of fourteen paired performers, each holding tenuously to the logic of their own creation. CAPITALIST DUETS concludes a three-year experiment to devise a group work responding to the commodity status of contemporary performance: whereas the structure of a conventional show represents a planned (attention) economy, CAPITALIST DUETS employs free-market dramaturgy.

Three duets–sandra Henderson & Liz Peterson, Ame Henderson & Adam Kinner, Katie Ewald & Evan Webber–created the first iteration of CAPITALIST DUETS for OFFTA in Montreal in 2015. Their hard-won conceptual approach was something they nicknamed an “attention market”—a translation of supply-and-demand principles into a collaborative compositional system. For this iteration of CAPITALIST DUETS, the fourteen artists involved received a microgrant for the time, props, travel, costume, and other expenses related to their duet. With no other guiding framework in place, the hidden labour of production becomes startlingly visible, and the visible, in turn, becomes practice. From dancer to choreographer, theatre technician, and art-presenting partner, everyone involved in CAPITALIST DUETS holds the status of performer, and every performer dances according to the same rules.

Lighting design: Paul Chambers

*Produced by Public Recordings in collaboration with The Theatre Centre and co-presented by the Blackwood Gallery