Tony Coult: "The Left Must Take the Right"

“The left must take the right/All around the ring/We’ve got to keep the circle moving/Everybody sing/ One Two Three, open your eyes and see/ We’ve got to keep the circle moving for everyone and me”
Children's Song written by Leon Rosselson for InterAction’s Dogg’s Troupe
As one of the original contributors to Sandy Craig’s Dreams and Deconstructions, I have been reminded by the ASTR conference proposal of many of the driving impulses of the work that book covered, and of the many ways in which those impulses spread across all the superficially discrete categories Sandy used to organise the book.
I would like to offer one stimulus to the conference that I think would be interesting, and would help to place the book in its historical context, but far more importantly would offer a way of sharing ideas about what seems to me to be one of the great paradoxes of British theatre (in itself an expiring category as multi-cultural influences blur nationalistic lines). That is that we now have a situation where many of the challenges of the challenge companies and artists from the period held by Dreams and Deconstructions have been absorbed into mainstream practice. Companies seeking state funding often expect to offer some kind of workshop or side-project activity, justifying this as both educational in its own right, and also increasing the audience, and therefore the cost effectiveness of subsidy. What was once experienced as a radical deconstructing of old forms is now incorporated (and corporatised) into the mainstream. This is both a triumph of some of the Dreams of 1980, but also dangerously close to a Reconstruction of some of the old control mechanisms (or might be understood as such) where art is repressively tolerated, in Marcuse’s famous phrase.
I would like to look at the idea of Play as one of the linking impulses mentioned earlier, and specifically the work of InterAction (London), Interplay (Leeds) and Big Brum TiE (Birmingham). These would be illustrated with visual and some movie support.