Wrongness by Thinker-in-Residence Hester Chillingworth

I’ve been thinking a lot about queerness and failure, childhood as a queer space, and the spaces within Live Art. I made this list, about wrongness.

Things that (I think) are wrong. (I could be wrong):

• Live Art is easy to define
• Queerness is easy to define
• Hope is easy to define
• Transness is measurable
• Youth is measurable
• We will all live to be old
• Gender is binary
• Gender is an actual thing
• Cultural forms that perpetuate and celebrate and venerate tradition are the most important kinds
• Language gets us closer to understanding
• Mess is worthless and always a by-product rather than an intended product
• Virtuosity is what we should aspire to
• Destruction is always destructive, never generative
• There is no value in mistakes
• Mistakes can’t be the and end in end and of themselves
• Theatres are accessible enough
• Theatres are accessible enough to push for and bring about radical thinking and action in any large way
• The theatre that young people encounter and sometimes participate in has a lot of space for Otherness in how it represents gender
• Theatre has a lot of space for Otherness in how it represents most things
• What you can do is more interesting than what you can’t do
• Creation is more interesting than decay
• We talk about despair enough
• We are realistic about pain
• We know what to do
• We know how to do
• We should keep producing at the rate we are now
• We are not responsible for the future
• We are realistic about despair
• We talk about hope enough
• Our lives are not, by their very nature, performative
• Children cannot handle the truth
• Children are good at getting things right
• Adults are good at getting things right
• We should aspire to get things right
• We should aspire to succeed
• Success is measurable
• We should keep reproducing at the rate we are now
• Productivity equates to value
• Other people can make you whole (either for the first time, or again)
• Children don’t want to think about difficult things
• Things breaking is bad
• Things not working is bad
• Things going wrong is bad
• Things collapsing is bad
• Losing things is bad
• Looking hard at hard things is negative
• We are all given too much permission and affirmation to carve out our own space, throughout our lives
• We are given far too many tools 
• Carving out your own space isn’t important
• The margins wish they were the page
• The page wishes it was the margins
• Carving out your own relationship with language doesn’t matter
• Language is an actual thing
• Learning strategies for dismantling is not the same as discovering a power
• Live Art would be better if everyone loved it
• Lists are not ever even a little bit lazy
• Lists are lazy