The RATConference

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Description

rat is an anarchic association of theater artists committed to sharing work and ways of working outside market and political conventions of growth. We are anarchic: unregulated and unstructured, collecting no dues, electing no officers, convening arhythmically. We are an association: communicating by all means, but most real in live encounters, believing that the performing arts are corporal mercies, caring for bodies in space through acts of hospitality. We share work and ways of working: by requiring each other's labor and expertise, stepping past advertising and news. We cast each other, co-write, seize each other's resources, and make problems for/with each other. We are outside the market on the theory that every use of a dollar represents a failure of hospitality. Money is morally neutral but imaginatively stunted; we promote barter and unmediated exchanges of goods and services. We look for alternatives to conventional script and organizational development believing that the myth of perfectible efficiency endorses stasis, thing-ness, and unjust concentrations of wealth. "rat" because: every city has them; because build the new in the shell of the old; cunning; unlovely, ineradicable.