The L.A.-based artist collective My Barbarian has been creating kitsch-tinged site-specific plays, concerts, theatrical situations and video installations together for nearly ten years. Malik Gaines, Alexandro Segade, and Jade Gordon have combined their eclectic backgrounds in theater, theory, and contemporary art to create incisively intelligent work in a variety of media that encompasses references to mythology, social and political issues (both contemporary and historical), and popular culture with a sense of humor that is as biting as it is playful.

Unlike My Barbarian's video Golden Age, which features the group booty-dancing in tricked-out sailor suits next to an equally agile audience mimicking a song and dance routine that grapples with the legacy of the African slave trade, a video clip from their Post Living Ante-Action Theater [PoLAAT] workshop at the Miami MOCA highlights one of the greatest challenges of interactive work: how to invite participation without being coercive.

The MOCA video shows a sight familiar to everyone that has ever dared to cross the threshold of inviting audience participation: a smattering of the generally enthused peppered with languid, half-hearted participants and a few stiff-lipped starers, bored in the name of culture.

Documentation is always slippery. What it cannot show are the ways that these exploratory workshops succeed, like facilitating active reflection upon participants’ positions within the field of representation promised by a democratic structure, as was the case in a workshop held during the Democratic primary, in which participants clapped their hands and publicly revealed their vote in chant form, punctuated by individual free-style justifications of their choice. Or simply creating new, multi-disciplinary connections, as a group of participants an Italian workshop in Trento did when they formed a temporary theater group that performed their own version of work they did with My Barbarian.

Collective members Alexandro Segade and Malik Gaines took the time to explain PoLAAT in more depth before heading off to Spain for PoLAAT Madrid, presented as part of ARCO'S spotlight on Los Angeles.

Fanzine: In the 1960s, many experimental theater groups saw direct, physical participation in artistic creation as a "precursor to social change." Do you think this still holds true? In your opinion(s) what is the radical potential for contemporary experimental theater?

Malik: Theater is social change. The form is always collective, sometimes communal, occasionally communistic, and done over time. Because of the bodies that narrativize space, politics are immediately legible in theater. A history of radical leftist theater makes sense in my imagination, while histories of radical leftist visual art or music seem spotty. There’s [Augusto] Boal’s [founder of Theatre of the Oppresed] saying about theater: “not the revolution, but a dress-rehearsal for the revolution.” Of course there is a long tradition of ethical instruction in theater, and it’s not just in the 1960s or even with Brecht that politics entered performance.

Audience participation is difficult. Who wants to be compelled into someone else’s system, given false choices that prop up the spectacle, but offered nothing that really feels transformative? That’s the compulsory participation our democracies demand of us; why, even in the pursuit of realism, re-perform that? In participating, our deepest alienations become apparent to us. On the other hand, some participatory forms are very popular, like certain line-dances.

Participation should feel voluntary to the participant.