Andrew Westerside – författare

In rooms like this room people lie. Not little lies, the kinds of lies that kill people, or worse…In this room, or in rooms like this room, they use phrases like collateral damage, like extraordinary rendition, like perception management. They cover up their dirty words with clean ones, in rooms like this room. In rooms like this room, they redact the names.In rooms like this room, language is laundered. The name of the game is spin. Dead Cats is the third contemporary theatre work in Proto-type’s critically acclaimed Truth to Power Project, following on from A Machine They’re Secretly Building and The Audit – a socially-engaged exploration of power, democracy, truth-telling, protest, privacy, conspiracy, and control. It blends new writing, performance, film-making, and an obvious plant, to show – not tell – the truths behind the fictions.

‘I want you to know what’s happening…’From what might be a news desk, an office, a bedroom, a bunker under a mountain or a theatre, two people – reporters, senators, freedom fighters, or just… well… concerned citizens like you – think about what it is to speak up, speak out, blow the whistle and lift the veil.A Machine They’re Secretly Building charts a course from the Top Secret secrets of WWI intelligence (via the moon, 1972’s Chess World Championships, a disco in Oklahoma and the cafeteria at CERN) through to 9/11, the erosion of privacy, Edward Snowden and the terror of a future that might already be upon us.It is about how we got to the point where our governments are spying on us and how that’s changing who we are.

The global economy is a mess. The crash has landed, the tide’s swept out, and it’s taken our hope with it. There’s less in our pockets and more to be spent. The rich have got richer, the middle’s squeezed tight, and the poor are being dragged ever downwards. With the true value of money and the human cost of greed firmly in their sights, Proto-type Theater tell the story of how, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, the nation of Iceland raised their voices in protest and railed against the currents.Using original text, performance, film, music and animation, The Audit is about finding strength, overcoming a world designed to keep us docile, and how collective power can move a mountain – even if only a little.

This book locates and critically theorises an emerging field of twenty-first century theatre practice concerned, either thematically, methodologically, or formally, with acts of commemoration and the commemorative. With notions of memorial, celebration, temporality and remembrance at its heart, and as a timely topic for debate, this book asks how theatre and performance intersects with commemorative acts or rituals in contemporary theatre and performance practice. It considers the (re)performance of history, commemoration as a form of, or performance of, ritual, performance as memorial, performance as eulogy and eulogy as performance. It asks where personal acts of remembrance merge with public or political acts of remembrance, where the boundary between the commemorative and the performative might lie, and how it might be blurred, broken or questioned. It explores how we might remake the past in the present, to consider not just how performance commemorates but how commemoration performs.