Workforce, Forcedwork

Watch an excerpt from Workforce/Forced Work

Workforce/Forced Work is the second piece in a trilogy (which began with Schooled and Unschooled) of heavily researched pieces about American institutional systems. Through filmed re-behavior of daily rhythms on cardboard sets, claymation expressions of physics equations, and instructional, indicative live performance of text and music, the piece tests and stretches formal argument and jargon.

Workforce/Forced Work was developed at LMCC's 14 Wall St space through the Swing Space program and chashama's 217 E 42nd St space through the Residency @ chashama. Thanks to our performers: Herbie Go, Meredith Kitz, Chelsea O'Connor, and Matthew Stephen Smith.

Structurally, the piece will be formed around two things: the idea of “workforce,” especially in terms of the music: the idea of workers as a force, as a current, as a hydroelectric-type structure, which are channeled and formed into something that produces.

Second, we will use the rough narrative convention of a productivity seminar, led by a certain apocryphal Dr. Hackle, who has found a way to psychologically and emotionally induce individuals to work their hardest and fastest. The entire piece will be bound by the formal presupposition of this seminar, and Dr. Hackle will lead the audience pedagogically and condescendingly.

We will be built cardboard “sets” on which to film naturalistic documentary sections and interviews. However, instead of simply using interviews as examples or argument support (a la Studs Terkel), our process with these interview transcripts would be to compare and contrast the “objectives” of two bodies:

1.) the objectives of a capitalist-democratic socio-political body obsessed with the ideas of “productivity” and “progress” and

2.) the objectives of a single body, i.e an individual person.

Where do they agree? Where do the objectives clash? How important are a single person’s set of objectives? Does the market that structures work systems have individuals in mind or are there more “transcendent” motivations? How do we perceive the hierarchies in this view of the work system and how does it actually work? To argue many sides of these questions, we will first analyze and condense the language of working, terminology, perceptual frameworks (“making a living,” “sick leave,” “shovel ready” “white collar”) and underlying doxa about work.