The Story of Go (First Draft)
Radical Anthropology Group are collaborating in the presentation of a first ever public reading of this new play by Jonathan Chadwick
2pm-5pm Saturday 27 October 2018 at Daryll Forde Seminar Room University College London Anthropology Department, 14 Taviton St, Kings Cross, London WC1H 0BW
All Radical Anthropology Group events are free and open to the public
This dramatisation depicts a human society 12,000 years ago in deep crisis because their way of life is changing. The women have withdrawn access to sex but the men are no longer able to go on a big-game hunt to make a collective provision of food. The full moon is coming and tensions break out around the emerging movement towards hierarchical organisation amongst the men. The dilemma expresses itself in the story of an adolescent transgender person who attempts to resolve the difficulties.
“What an extraordinary tour de force! I started reading it yesterday morning and the whole thing has been stirring round in my head in the hours since. I am knocked back by the scale your ambition. No-one has attempted anything like this before. Each time I read further, a few lines at a time, those voices speak to me in a new way, but mostly several hours later, as I try to re-imagine those sad turning-points in my own anthropological terms”. Chris Knight in an email to Jonathan Chadwick after reading THE STORY OF GO.
“ I was deeply impressed by Chris Knight’s Blood Relations: menstruation and the origins of culture (Yale 1991) when it was first published. This vision of human development kept re-echoing in contemporary theatre projects and in classical texts in my work as a theatre-maker and director. Then in the recent period I found Abdallah Ocalan’s prison writing extraordinary. In his Manifesto for a Democratic Civilisation (New Compass Press 2015), influenced by the work of Murray Bookchin, he delved back into the emergence of human dominance and hierarchy and came to fundamental conclusions about revolutionary movement, i.e. that it should be principally based on feminism given that he identified the original oppression to be that of women by men. How can we, in the twenty first century, understand, and become consciously active in, the scale and depth of change our society is going through without looking for corresponding historical processes of change?” Jonathan Chadwick
Appeal
We aim to make this reading participatory and open. If you want to take part by reading one of the characters, no matter what experience you might have, please contact info@aztheatre.org.uk
Jonathan Chadwick has been working in informal consultation with the Radical Anthropology Group in thinking through the development of The Story of Go. RAG is based at University College London. “Anthropology asks one big question: what does it mean to be human? To answer this, we cannot rely on common sense or on philosophical arguments. We must study how humans actually live – and the many different ways in which they have lived. This means learning, for example, how people in non-capitalist societies live, how they organise themselves and resolve conflict in the absence of a state, the different ways in which a ‘family’ can be run, and so on”. From Radical Anthropology Group website
Radical Anthropology Group http://radicalanthropologygroup.org