I myself have created work for theatre whose raison d’etre is a recalibration of the relationship between actor audience and text. But it is highly dangerous to insist that only works that directly involve physical participation by the public are participatory. To suggest that unless the public are speaking or moving they are not involved is to feed into the destructive atomisation of art as commodity and audience as consumer. In engaging imagination, art produces movement.

Theatre is very clearly a collaborative form of thinking. We come into a room and make sense of a story, together. The audience offers their attention and the company works with that attention to reveal. In contemporary dance, which involves improvisations and contingencies at so many levels, the attention of the audience contains and reflects the questing work of the performer.

Listening, reading, witnessing are all supremely valuable participatory acts. They should form essential components of any expanded notion of citizenship. Whether in politics, work or art, it is vital that the person’s offering is received. A revitalised democracy must validate the unique gift of the individual. Unless the creative act, however artistic or not, is allowed to flow and circulate, frustration will forever hijack the pursuit of the common good. A safe space for expression, for making private thoughts public, is the first prerequisite for a true democracy.

In tandem with this must be developed a sensitive and supportive critical faculty. If work art politics religion can be seen ways of performing thinking, then there is a possibility for us to learn to focus on the thought and not the thinker. When this thinking is understood as a process, then science art and other forms of knowing can be recuperated as a rich tapestry of metaphors about process, providing a revitalised vocabulary for critical engagement with the evolving train of thought that we carry on. We become artist agents of an intelligence that sculpts an evolving common sense and weaves the subjectivities of our private meaning making.

These forms of knowledge manifest in myriad ways, but whether expressed in speech or song, as labour or love, through the body or through ideas, we can say that this poetry of participation is a movement that provokes a movement. In some basic way, we are moved by each other. If we truly aspire to a civil space which excludes no one, then we must be prepared to be moved in ways that our present configurations will struggle to accommodate. It is in this instance that we can learn from the dancer, who has made a vocation of cultivating new ways of knowing.

Only through finding graceful and flexible embodiments of our high aspirations and tempering human invention by grounding our activity in the complex give-and-take reality of a systemic ecology, will human society find its proper forms. The function of civil space is to contain our modes of expressions and it must be contained in turn by the limits of our ability to perceive those forces that act on our reality. The stability of the human project should be one of dynamic equilibrium, where organs of government flow outward from civil society to negotiate on behalf of freedom.

Right now, we can conduct this work. If civil space is a state of mind, then we create it new in every encounter we make with each other. If participation is a flowing creativity, if it is possible to get social relations dancing, then a state of being characterised by grace, lightness, flexibility, flow, spontaneity and change is possible. In this state of dance truth is emergent, movement is the rule, and change is synonymous with pleasure.

this note forms part of a quiver of arrows