Austin McCann
Turn Over

6 October - 14 December 2024

At play, we inhabit a strange in-between space: between reality and imagination, absence and presence, invention and discovery, safety and danger, me and not-me. Playing helps to establish and maintain the social link, while producing aesthetic experiences and objects that push beyond it. When playing, we might lose ourselves temporarily while exploring the more unsettling aspects of our characters: our enjoyment of obedience, or desire for omnipotence. 

The freedom of play generates and alleviates anxiety in equal measure.

Some catastrophically find themselves unable to play at all. 

(A known scandal.)

(Change of pitch.) 

At first, the mere fact of a meeting taking place in the village is a kind of liberation.

David Hare adapted his 1976 play Fanshen from William Hinton’s influential book through an unusual collaborative creative process with the Joint Stock Theater Company. The play depicts a small village in China undergoing land reform in the late 1940s. Peasants are transformed into revolutionary subjects through the rehearsal of novel forms of speech: discussing, reporting, testifying, questioning, accusing, criticizing, self-criticizing. Fanshen is a slogan from that time, meaning to turn over, or to turn one’s body over. 

One peasant enters the expropriated home of his former landlord with the obligation to take anything he pleases. He chooses a mirror. 

(Silent tableaux of the scene.)

Psychoanalysis is a rehearsal of life which is also life itself. Its particular dramaturgy creates a space where aesthetic action can take place in one’s character, toward the world. 

In Spanish, the word for rehearsal is ensayo (essay), which calls in Adorno’s notion of the essay form as open, experimental, contradictory, incomplete. Dissatisfying. Emancipatory. 

Rehearsal as anti-commodity. 

The materials of the show rotate around this problematic: understudies rehearsing for the ensemble-to-come, stage directions liberated from the page in search of actors, texts that shimmer without yielding.

(They start speaking simultaneously, each riding over the other’s sentences.)

In its large, virtuosic, and ruthless capacity, capitalism has co-opted play and desire in its war against the human being.

Tears don’t mark the failure of play, but its function. 

(The pace is furious.)

(Laughter.)

(Then they drown in sound and light.)

Austin McCann is an artist, researcher, and psychotherapist living in Chicago. He holds a BA in Performance Studies from New College of Florida, an MFA in Art from the University of Illinois Chicago, and an AM in Clinical Social Work from the University of Chicago. He is a fellow at the Chicago Center for Psychoanalysis.