Peter Mills No Answers Questions Only

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is a situated collective artistic research practice designed to be embodied by a group of anyones, anywhere at anytime.

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is generated by Peter Mills – a choreographer, performer and researcher currently living in Stockholm, Sweden and working all over the place.

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No answers.

Questions only.

Keep the practice in the room.

You can opt out at any time.

Express any concerns or worries out-loud in question form or communicate them privately to the convener of the practice.

The ethical conditions/conventions/considerations are created by the people in relation to the place.

You are the people in the place.

TASKS??????????????????????????

Ask questions.

If you don’t voice a question, notice what it does to not voice it.

Feel free to repeat the questions of others.

Be prepared to give and to assume authority.

Be prepared to give and receive attention.

Notice to whom or to what you are addressing your question:

yourself, another person, an object, the room, a group, the group, the situation or yourself/other/object/room/group/situation somewhere outside of the room?

Work on accepting that an answer to a question will be another question.

Don’t get hung-up on cause and effect.

Don’t get hung up on trying to make a question in response to another question.

Know that a question might be answered by the effect it has on your thinking, acting, being.

Pay attention to doing rather than meaning.

Is this what you think it is?
Or is this it?
What is the history of this?
Can we stand?
Can we lunge?
Can we walk?
Can we dance?
Can we do the same thing?
Can we do the same thing at the same time?
Can we arrange ourselves in the space?
Can we rearrange the space?
Can we make a performance?
What is it that informs?
What does inform, mean?
How can the questions be about their influence and not about their answer?
How can we avoid answering?
How can we let the questions become another expression?
Do the questions unhinge our definitions?
Do our values shift?
Do I get closer to the other?
Are the questions uncensored?
Do questions make everything ambiguous?
Are they ambiguous?
Are we ambiguous?
Is everything ambiguous?
Is there clarity in ambiguity?
Is there clarity?
Can meaning be in the movement of thought rather than in the thought itself?
Is there a type of freedom to be had by questioning everything?
Are these questions owned?
Does the listener own the question?
Does the question float between us like a possibility?
Is an unanswered question like opening a door and not closing it?
Do these unclosed doors allow us to move and think differently?
What does it do to open so many doors and not close any?
Am I attending to you?
Am I attending to you through being as well as through action?
Am I opening myself up to interrogation without judgment?
Is this a kind of ethics, one without judgment or enforcement?
Does asking what exists without prescribing meaning create another kind of communication?
Does relevance fall away?
Is relevance as heavy as it needs to be?
Is relevance as light as it needs to be?
Do we challenge relevance’s form by prodding and probing its materiality?
What if we map relevance with interest as a uninhibited guide?
What remains inhibited in this realm of no answers only questions?
Is this an ethically questionable practice?
Is this an aesthetically questionable practice?
In a verbally open and vocal environment, what would be a crime?
When I speak of crime, am I speaking of it as something that goes against human decency?
Is the permission to opt-out necessary?
Is opting out necessary in a controlled and enforced society?
Is opting out possible in a controlled and enforced society?
Does no answers only questions imagine a different kind of society?
Is this game about listening or about questioning?
Could questioning without the expectation of getting an answer make one listen closer/harder?
Does one listen closer/harder if a question isn’t affirmed by an answer?
Do the unanswered questions become non-affirmative statements?
Is this soft power or autonomous power?
Does a room of questioning subjects have no hierarchical structure?
Does no answers only questions return responsibility to the individual through the collective voice?
If one hears a question and does not answer it, will there be an enacted response, an action?
Is no answers only questions about generating direct action?
Is no answers only questions about practising direct action?
How does no answers only questions compare to democracy or to freedom?
Why would an answer engage more with hierarchy than a question?
Does the game have something to learn/borrow from post-structuralism?
Does the game attend to the idea that words control us and limit our freedom?
Could the removal of definitions allow us not to be limited by conventions and assumptions?
Could the removal of answers allow for unknowns to become material, valuable?
Is it still possible to have and/or give value within the game?
Does the game demonstrate the possibility for value outside of existing structures?
Does the value inside the game never take a particular shape?
Is it possible to value something without recognising it’s shape?
Does allowing for any question, even questions which question questioning, stop one from lashing out, from testing the limits of acceptable behaviour?
Does one stop concerning one’s self in reaction or relation to the enforcement of a specific logic?
Where are the police inside the no answers only questions game?
Does the questioning game become an improvisation about provocation?
How does it not become an improvisation around provocation?
What is the logic we improvise with in the no answers only questions game?
What happens when we are no longer juxtaposing our improvisation activity against an authority, social or literal?
What if one no longer needs to use improvisation as a tool to test the limits of the conventions for that particular improvisation?
Do the questions expose the challenges present in the conventions of the improvisation?
Or do the question reveal/exhaust/ illustrate the fictitious nature of the authority?
Do the questions allow one to engage with legitimate authority, debunking an authority unable to withstand this open and uncensored questioning?
Does the questioning game scale up?
What is the capacity for participation in the game?
Does the subjectivity/proximity/intimacy render the game unable to engage with objective knowledge?
Can one think of this choreographic game as a new world order?
Would objective knowledge have to legitimise itself via unfettered questioning?
Is stupidity eliminated in the same way crime is?
Is nothing stupid, is nothing criminal?
Does rationality take on an increasingly personal role in this game?
Does rationality take on an increasingly personal role in this society?
Does the questioning game function because it is easier to ask a question than to make a statement?
Does the abundance of questions allow one to hide a question in amongst all of the others?
Is it possible to exhaust one’s questions?
Do some questions produce the same thing?
Should one repeat a question to see if it does something different?
Do some questions do the same thing?
Are all questions unique?
Is this poetic?
Or is this only prolific?
What has this already informed?
Is the question always generative?
What are we generating?
Does creativity lead to equality?
Does creativity depend upon freedom?
Where will we go from here?
Is it always a question?
Is it ok to go and let the going lead us somewhere else?
Is it possible to go a place, without deviation?
Where aren’t we going?
Do questions on top of questions calm the anxiety to understand?
Does understanding the inability to understand fully calm?
Are these my thoughts?
Is this my body?
Is this my movement?
Is this my breath?
Is this my life?
What can I prove?
What do I want to prove?
What do I have to prove?
Why am I speaking as I?
Why just I me, why not you you, me you, you me, or you me we?
What are we?
Am I decentralised?
Is this an ecology?
Is this rhizomic?
Is this intersubjectivity?
How to reclaim our creative potentiality?
Who took our creative potentiality?
How to undermine illegitimate authority?
How to hear another expansive/unexpected/unheard story?
Can we unlearn our expected trajectory?
Can we be vocally bodily community?
What is idealised authority?
What is an open communicativity/plasticity/proximity?
Is this a question?
What if one follows hard the deconstructive method to challenge authoritarianism?
What if authority was given the burden of proving its legitimacy?
What of using symbolic deconstruction to expose the choreographic means of authority?
What about challenging authority to create a non-representational ethics?
What about challenging authority to cause a non-representational ethics?
Can one demonstrate that there is no such thing as singular representation?
What is choreography?
Is this choreography?
What happens when a collective practice asks that everyone only speak in questions?
What might deny any single authority the ability to sustain itself?
What if one just goes unquestioningly with the collective?
Or what if one opposes, undermines, suggest alternatives or expresses slight reluctance in relation to the collective?
What happens if we expand the range/scale/dimension of what we perceive to be collective understanding?
What happens if we continually increase commitment to one and other?
What happens if we create a continuous ethical commitment to the collective?
Can we ask irrelevant questions?
What do irrelevant questions do?
What does a distraction create?
Is everything relevant?
How will you plan your week?
Is this the best way to spend your time?
Is there a best way to do anything?
Is this nihilistic?
What music goes well with this choreography?