New Sharing Power Episode: Obvious Agency

Sharing Power is a podcast and performance series about distributed leadership and consent-based processes. The podcast, co-hosted by Flux Creative Partners Lori Elizabeth Parquet, Corinna Schulenburg, and Jason Tseng, invites other creators and organizers who are practicing distributed leadership/consent-based processes to discuss how they’re doing it.

The first Sharing Power episode of our second season was with Ari Gass and Daniel Park about their collaboration in Obvious Agency:

Listen on Spotify

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Read the transcript

“We can’t keep looking at how theatre is traditionally made in this country, because those best practices do not serve us. So let’s look at this other field and learn from them and bring that back to the arts and culture and see how things start to work.”
-Daniel Park

““If theatre’s dying but video games are ascending, how do we bring the joys and pleasures from gaming to immersive theater, where we want audiences to really have meaningful choice?”.”
-Ari Gass

Obvious Agency creates interactive, experiential art that ranges from the personal, to the institutional, to the ridiculous. Blending theatrical and digital arts, we create spaces where participants can co-create their own experiences through first-hand exploration of the worlds we create. Always serious, always silly, we believe that by helping create and define culture, we can create systemic and interpersonal change.

Our commitment to co-creative work stems from a dissatisfaction with “immersive” models of live performance. Instead of being pulled under and subject to other’s creative currents, we start from the assumption that people innately have both artistic impulses and the capacity to create art, and that our art is enriched by both their impulses and capacities. We create models of audiencing that help us think about familiar spaces in unfamiliar ways, that empower us to act in ways that might feel too transgressive in less controlled circumstances, and that imagine worlds in which we are empowered to make decisions on the bases of pleasure, not necessity.

Inherent in this imagining of new ways of being and creating is our governing and administrative structure. We are a worker-owned cooperative grounded in anti-capitalist, anti-racist, non-normative, liberatory, and feminist frameworks. Obvious Agency’s work is collectively authored and owned. We split labor and remuneration transparently and unanimously, on a project-by-project basis. And we love what we do.