Savva Dudin
Social DesignSavva Dudin is busy with how politics gets under the skin and ricochets back. His research on live action role-playing informs the design of performative situations. Problematizing the obtrusive participation, his practice sits between theater-making and group relations analysis of how individuals translate affects, moods, and emotions into collective legislative demands.
What do gnomes do all day? is a performative investigation into the Dutch Kabouterbeweging of the 1970s. Archival research into the movement’s electoral guerrilla theater, narrative experimentation, and organizational efforts will serve as a trampoline to revisit the transformations of the concept of leefbaarheid or liveability, viewed through the dwarfs' perspective. The Kaboutersbewegeing refused compromises between utopian and pragmatic. In response, performance will follow a visceral question: what are we actually prepared to sacrifice for political imagination? The three acts reanimate fragments of unrealized legal proposals and invite the audience to notice what participation might demand. Presented in dialogue with a video installation by Noor de Vries, the work questions what remains possible when utopian ambitions encounter political reality.
Please note: All three performances are in English with fragments of Dutch.