Structure and Flow: Making Heated Conversations

How do we experience heat, what makes it personal, tangible: differing sleep patterns, changes in food preferences, shifts in social interaction. After participating in a heat-related work in 2021, we decided to collaborate on a new work pursuing two specific goals: craft new narratives of heat and the human experience, and enable different levels of participation in live performance.
 
Text, objects, bodies – as theater-makers these are our primary materials. In the rehearsal room, object-body-imagination interaction developed into narrative. The smell of sunscreen evokes childhood holidays on the beach, protection, escape. A hot water bottle is comfort, a substitute for skin-to-skin contact. But it can also burn. Adaptation is key, new actions, solutions. What questions do we ask before we act? What plans can we make in the calm before the next heatwave?
 
These questions building on each other take on a back and forth rhythm that is wave-like on a very different time scale to a heatwave. Simple and concrete, “ask a question” is also a relatively direct task for a participant to complete. The question form also dovetailed with a new interest in our collaboration: a work where art and science don’t compete with eachother but compliment and nourish each other instead.
 
Playing with our perceptions of research and the priorities of the future, we developed a superfiction centered on two researchers for a mysterious organization. In this speculative fiction, alternative future, Heated Conversations captures one hour in these characters’ lives, projected into an unknown future, shaped by increasing heat and late capitalist incentive structures.
 
The architecture of the performance is embedded in this superfiction; the data collection sessions are standardized, the researchers have conducted them dozens of times. Participants are primed, with information and a warm-up, then the main data collection session is structured in three waves of questions. In the first two, each response is answered with another question, generating a ripple that refuses to resolve. The third wave shifts. Each question begins with “What if…”, turning participants’ minds toward imagination and possibility.
 
The nature of participant engagement develops over the course of each session. Within the superfiction, the data collection takes place on multiple levels: spoken questions, written questions, notes taken on clipboards plus information on how and when speakers switch. The researchers themselves do not conduct any of the data analysis and are solely concerned with maintaining the standardized rounds and breaks.
 
While our characters have very specific tasks for each round and break, as artists we are concerned not only with maintaining our characters and telling this story, but also enabling framing that empowers participation. Showcasing questions from the audience, we shift our narrative of heatwaves from a natural phenomenon that happens to us to a story of active protagonists shaping and responding to their changing environments. We raise our voices to interrogate and take action, and we listen to the stories of others to learn and adjust. Because listening is a kind of participation — in fact it’s probably the most important kind.