THPERF 490: Relational Aesthetics and Social Acupuncture

Sources and References

Primary textbook — Darren O’Donnell, Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia (Coach House Books, 2006). Supplementary texts — Nicolas Bourriaud Relational Aesthetics; Claire Bishop Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship; Grant Kester Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern Art; Shannon Jackson Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics; Augusto Boal Theatre of the Oppressed; Jen Harvie Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Online resources — Claire Bishop “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October 2004); Dwight Conquergood “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research”; Mammalian Diving Reflex project documentation.

Chapter 1: What Is Relational Aesthetics?

Relational aesthetics is a framework for reading, making, and evaluating art that takes human relationships — rather than discrete objects, images, or stable performance texts — as the primary medium. The term was coined by French curator and critic Nicolas Bourriaud in a series of essays collected as Esthétique relationnelle (1998, translated 2002). Bourriaud argued that a loose cluster of 1990s artists — Rirkrit Tiravanija, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Carsten Höller, Pierre Huyghe, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and others — had shifted the centre of gravity of contemporary art away from the autonomous commodity and toward what he called “the realm of human interactions and its social context.” In his widely cited formulation, an artwork is “a state of encounter.”

For Bourriaud, this shift was not merely stylistic. It responded to a diagnosis of late-capitalist life in which genuine social exchange had been thinned out by mediated spectacle, service-economy scripting, and the commodification of leisure. Against that backdrop, the relational artwork carves out a small, temporary “social interstice” — a shared meal, a free lecture, a game, a waiting room — where people can rehearse other ways of being together. The artwork is less a thing to be looked at than an apparatus for generating a situation.

Several features distinguish relational work from older traditions of participatory or community art. First, the artist is not primarily a maker of objects but a designer of protocols: who meets whom, under what rules, for how long. Second, the audience is not a passive receiver but a constitutive element; without their turning up and talking, eating, or playing, nothing exists. Third, duration and everyday-ness matter — a dinner is as valid a form as a sculpture. Fourth, the gallery or festival is reframed as a convivial host-space rather than a neutral display case.

For a seminar on performance, relational aesthetics is useful because theatre has always been, at some level, a relational art: actors and audiences co-produce the event. But Bourriaud’s vocabulary sharpens what is usually taken for granted. It lets us ask what kinds of encounters a given performance actually engineers, and whom those encounters serve.

Chapter 2: Dialogue as Artistic and Political Practice

If relational aesthetics names the situation, dialogue names its most serious aspiration. In Conversation Pieces, Grant Kester proposes a “dialogical aesthetics” to describe artists whose central medium is sustained conversation with non-art publics — tenants, prisoners, nurses, refugees, municipal bureaucrats. For Kester, such work cannot be judged by the traditional criteria of originality or formal innovation. It must instead be judged by the quality of the listening it generates and by whether participants leave with a different sense of themselves and their situation.

Two philosophical lineages stand behind this claim. The first is Mikhail Bakhtin’s “dialogic imagination,” in which meaning is never the private property of a speaker but emerges in the space between utterances. Bakhtin’s “heteroglossia” — the coexistence of many social voices inside any single text — offers theatre a way of thinking beyond the unified authorial voice. A scene is not one person’s statement but a field where competing worldviews audibly collide.

The second lineage is the dialogic ethics developed by Paul Ricoeur, especially in Oneself as Another. Ricoeur argues that selfhood is never self-sufficient; the “I” becomes intelligible only through relation with a “thou” whose otherness must be respected rather than absorbed. Applied to performance-making, this means that a project built “with” a community is ethically different from one built “about” them or “for” them, and that the difference shows up in small procedural choices — who speaks first, who edits, who has veto power over representation.

Dialogue in this sense is not cosy. Kester and Ricoeur both insist it involves risk, discomfort, and the real possibility of being changed. The seminar’s early weeks use the question “What is dialogue?” to push past the casual sense of “conversation” toward something more demanding: a sustained willingness to stay in contact with a position that is not your own, without rushing to resolve the tension. For practitioners, this reframes rehearsal itself. A devising room in which everyone already agrees is, by this standard, not yet dialogic. The work begins when disagreements surface and the group has to decide whether to smooth them over or let them shape the piece.

Chapter 3: Place and Site — Where Performance Happens

Relational work is almost always site-specific, but “site” in this tradition means more than an architectural container. Place is understood as a thick bundle of histories, uses, power relations, and affective atmospheres. Drawing on theorists such as Doreen Massey, Miwon Kwon, and Lucy Lippard, practitioners ask not only “where are we?” but “whose place is this?”, “what has happened here?”, and “who is welcome?”

A useful distinction, borrowed from Kwon’s One Place After Another, is between site-specificity as physical location, as institutional frame, and as discursive field. A performance in a laundromat engages the first — the machines, the heat, the rhythm of cycles. It engages the second by reframing a commercial service space as a cultural venue, with implications for who feels entitled to enter. It engages the third by entering ongoing conversations about gentrification, domestic labour, immigration, and the public sphere. Strong site-based work attends to all three layers rather than treating the venue as mere backdrop.

Place-thinking also troubles the default theatre assumption that the black box is neutral. The black box is itself a place: climate-controlled, ticketed, scheduled around evenings, oriented toward seated middle-class attention. Its neutrality is an achievement of exclusion. Relational practice often begins by naming this and then either leaving the building (street, park, subway, classroom) or deliberately reconfiguring it (cabaret tables, shared meals, standing rooms, audience-controlled timing).

For devisers, a practical move is the site audit. Before any content is written, the group inventories who uses the space at what hours, who cleans it, who owns it, what languages are spoken nearby, what the ambient sounds are, and what the unwritten rules of behaviour are. The audit usually generates more dramaturgical material than any preliminary script. It also surfaces the ethical question of what the project owes the place: if a performance draws attention, foot traffic, or media coverage to a neighbourhood, what does it leave behind when it packs up? Place-based practice thus slides naturally into questions of consent, reciprocity, and long-term accountability, which the middle weeks of the seminar take up directly.

Chapter 4: The Ethnographic Body — Encountering Difference

Dwight Conquergood’s influential essay “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research” reframes the performer as an embodied ethnographer: someone who learns with and through other bodies rather than merely collecting data about them. Conquergood distinguishes three modes of knowing — textual, ethnographic, and performative — and argues that the academy has long privileged the first while the second and third contain kinds of understanding that cannot be fully paraphrased into writing. Skills, rhythms, jokes, grief, and tact travel through bodies more reliably than through footnotes.

The seminar uses this framing to think about what it means to make performance that “engages with difference.” Difference here is not a decorative theme but an epistemic condition. If I am making a piece with, say, long-term care residents, or teenagers in a neighbourhood I do not live in, my default categories for explaining their behaviour are probably wrong. The ethnographic body is the discipline of slowing down, spending time, eating meals, getting bored, and letting the other group’s own categories start to reshape mine.

Conquergood warns against three recurring temptations. The Custodian’s Rip-Off treats cultures as stockpiles from which the artist extracts vivid material to enhance their own reputation. The Enthusiast’s Infatuation flattens difference into superficial celebration, ignoring conflict, power, and internal disagreement. The Sceptic’s Cop-Out uses the incommensurability of cultures as an excuse not to engage at all. The useful fourth position — what he calls “dialogical performance” — takes the risks of genuine encounter without either plundering or withdrawing.

For students, the practical implications are considerable. Research calendars lengthen; “pre-production” includes months of hanging out; budgets include fees and meals for community collaborators rather than only actors and designers. Consent is treated as ongoing and revocable, not as a single signature. The work’s aesthetic is shaped by what emerges, which means the artist must be willing to abandon a cherished concept when it turns out to misrepresent the people it claims to feature. The ethnographic body is less a technique than a professional ethic: a refusal to let the glamour of the final show override the slower work of relationship.

Chapter 5: Claire Bishop’s Critique — Antagonism vs. Relational Aesthetics

Bourriaud’s optimism did not go unchallenged. In “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics” (October, 2004), art historian Claire Bishop argues that Bourriaud’s framework quietly smuggles in a normative ideal of “good” sociability — convivial, inclusive, friendly — and then judges works by how warmly they deliver it. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy, Bishop counters that genuine democratic life is constitutively antagonistic: it is the staged collision of incompatible positions, not their dissolution into niceness. An art that only produces warm feelings among people who already share a cultural milieu is, by this measure, not political but therapeutic.

Bishop contrasts Tiravanija’s free curry, shared among gallery-goers who recognise one another’s codes, with works by Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn, which stage uncomfortable asymmetries — paying the undocumented to sit in boxes, building monuments in housing projects the art world never visits. For Bishop, these harsher pieces do more political work precisely because they refuse to paper over the real antagonisms of class, race, and citizenship. Her book Artificial Hells extends the argument historically, tracing participatory art from the Futurists through Dada, Situationism, and 1960s Happenings to contemporary social practice, and insisting that its best moments are disruptive rather than consoling.

The Bishop–Bourriaud debate is not simply a quarrel between optimists and pessimists. It forces practitioners to ask a sharper question about their own projects: what kind of sociability are we rehearsing, and at whose expense? A relational piece can be “successful” on Bourriaud’s terms — everyone had a nice time — while remaining politically inert or even reinforcing the exclusions of the host institution. Conversely, a piece can be “successful” on Bishop’s terms — something genuinely difficult was made visible — while alienating the very people it claims to serve.

Most working artists now hold both criteria in tension. Conviviality without friction risks decoration; antagonism without care risks exploitation of participants who did not consent to be provocations. The seminar treats this tension as productive rather than resolvable, and asks students to articulate, for each project, where on the spectrum they are deliberately working and why.

Chapter 6: Applying Relational Aesthetics in Practice

Moving from theory to practice, the seminar asks what it actually takes to design a relational performance. Several working principles recur across the literature and across case studies drawn from companies like Mammalian Diving Reflex, Forced Entertainment, Complicité, and Frantic Assembly’s open workshops.

Start from a question, not a script. The generative impulse is usually a social question — “what happens when children interview adults about money?”, “what would a neighbourhood meeting sound like if everyone had to sing?” — rather than a story the artist wants to tell. The script, if any, comes later and serves the encounter.

Design the protocol carefully. Who is invited, how they are invited, what they are told in advance, where they sit, what they are handed, who speaks first, how long each phase lasts — these decisions are the dramaturgy. Tim Etchells’s Certain Fragments describes Forced Entertainment’s long rehearsal process as largely a matter of protocol design: what rules govern the room, and what happens when a rule is broken. Relational dramaturgy extends that room-logic outward to the audience.

Budget for time. Helen Nicholson’s Applied Drama emphasises that the most valuable artistic labour in this mode is often invisible: the cups of tea, the meetings rescheduled three times, the translator paid from the director’s own pocket. Projects that try to compress relational work into festival timelines frequently collapse into the extraction Conquergood warned about.

Build feedback loops. Participants should have real mechanisms to shape the work, not merely react to it. This might mean editorial meetings, vetoes over specific material, paid co-authorship, or simply the willingness to cut a beloved scene when someone says it misrepresents them.

Document ethically. Photos, video, and press about relational work can flatten complex situations into seductive images. Decide in advance who owns the documentation, who can be named, and what happens to the material after the project ends.

These principles do not guarantee good work. They make honest work more likely by front-loading decisions that would otherwise be made hastily under production pressure. Applied relational aesthetics is, in practice, a discipline of anticipation.

Chapter 7: Power, Privilege, and Voice in Collaborative Making

Relational and participatory projects are saturated with power differentials that are easy to overlook when enthusiasm is high. The artist usually holds the budget, the institutional relationships, the editing software, and the final sign-off on what the audience sees. Participants — especially those recruited from under-resourced communities — often arrive with less of all of these. Pretending otherwise is itself a use of power.

Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed is a foundational reference for thinking about this asymmetry. Boal insisted that the spectator must become a “spect-actor,” able to intervene in and rewrite the scene, and that the facilitator — whom he called the Joker — is responsible for creating the conditions for that intervention without steering its outcome. The Joker is not neutral; the Joker is actively restraining their own authority so that others can exercise theirs. Boal’s techniques (Forum Theatre, Image Theatre, Invisible Theatre) are practical protocols for redistributing voice in a room.

Contemporary practitioners have added further cautions. Jen Harvie, in Fair Play, shows how participatory art can be quietly co-opted by neoliberal funding regimes that celebrate “engagement” while offloading state responsibilities — for youth work, mental health, integration — onto underpaid artists and their unpaid participants. The rhetoric of empowerment can mask a transfer of risk. Shannon Jackson’s Social Works similarly argues that “supporting publics” is material infrastructure — childcare, transit, interpretation, honoraria — and that art which ignores this infrastructure is parasitic on it.

For students, the seminar proposes several diagnostic questions. Who is paid, and how much? Whose time is treated as billable and whose as donated? Who has a named role in the programme and who is listed as a “community participant”? If a funder asked to see the piece without the community members present, could the work still run, and what would that fact reveal about its centre of gravity? None of these questions have tidy answers, but asking them habitually changes the kind of projects one designs. The aim is not purity — an impossible standard — but clarity about the trade-offs one is actually making.

Chapter 8: Darren O’Donnell and Social Acupuncture

Darren O’Donnell is a Toronto-based playwright, performer, and director whose company Mammalian Diving Reflex has spent two decades making projects in which the primary material is other people’s participation — children cutting adults’ hair, teenagers hosting dinner parties for strangers, neighbours competing in absurd civic contests. His 2006 book Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia is the seminar’s primary text and the point where the theoretical vocabulary of relational aesthetics meets a specific, idiosyncratic practice.

The title’s three terms each do work. “Suicide” names O’Donnell’s diagnosis of contemporary theatre: by his account, mainstream Canadian stages had become so inward-looking, so addicted to the safety of aesthetic connoisseurship, that they were effectively killing themselves as a civic force. “Performance” is what remains after that self-diagnosis — a practice that escapes the theatre building in search of actual publics. “Utopia” is the political horizon: not a blueprint for a better society but a set of small, concrete experiments in what better relations might feel like. The book’s register alternates between manifesto, memoir, and practical tips, and its tone is deliberately unpolished, as if the form itself were refusing the glossy professionalism O’Donnell distrusts.

The central concept, “social acupuncture,” is a metaphor. Traditional acupuncture inserts fine needles at specific points to release blocked energy elsewhere in the body. Social acupuncture applies small, precisely targeted interventions to a social body — a neighbourhood, an institution, a demographic — in order to release blocked flows of attention, care, or power. The intervention does not need to be large or expensive. A well-chosen encounter between two groups who would normally never meet can, in principle, reverberate through their respective networks long after the event ends.

Crucially, O’Donnell insists that the needle must be placed with skill and consent. A clumsy intervention bruises. A well-placed one is almost invisible and yet changes things. This image gives the seminar a vocabulary for evaluating projects that does not depend on traditional theatrical criteria. Instead of asking “was the show good?”, it asks “where did we stick the needle, did we have permission, and what flowed afterward?”

Chapter 9: Social Acupuncture Methods — Equipment and Representation

Beyond the guiding metaphor, Social Acupuncture offers a toolkit. Two of its most discussed concepts are “equipment” and O’Donnell’s sceptical account of “representation.”

Equipment. Borrowing loosely from Kenneth Burke’s idea of literature as “equipment for living,” O’Donnell treats relational projects as devices — props, protocols, and prompts — that equip participants to do something they could not do before. A dinner table, a microphone, a questionnaire, a guided walk, a colour-coded badge: these are not mere logistics but the actual artistic material. The designer’s job is to craft equipment that is simple enough to be grasped immediately, rich enough to reward unexpected uses, and robust enough to survive participants’ inventiveness. If the equipment is well-made, the performance almost runs itself; if it is poorly made, no amount of directorial charisma will save the evening.

Representation. O’Donnell is wary of the default theatrical transaction in which one group of people — actors — stands in for others on a stage for the benefit of a third group — audiences. Representation in this classical sense, he argues, carries a built-in condescension: someone else has decided who needs to be shown, how, and to whom. Social acupuncture prefers “presentation” over “representation”: bring the actual people into the actual room, with whatever real textures they carry, and design a situation in which their presence is the event. The artist becomes a host and convenor rather than an interpreter. This has obvious limits — not every story can be told by the people who lived it, and there are good reasons for fictional distance — but as a corrective to decades of well-meaning theatre “about” communities whose members were never in the room, it is bracing.

Both concepts push students toward concrete, testable design questions. What equipment does this project provide, and what does it enable? Who is represented, by whom, and why could they not represent themselves? The answers rarely stay stable across a semester, but the habit of asking them is itself a relational-aesthetic discipline, and it aligns directly with the power-and-voice concerns of earlier chapters.

Chapter 10: The Fishbowl and Other Dialogic Exercises

The seminar devotes a dedicated session to the fishbowl exercise, a structured dialogue format widely used in community organising, conflict mediation, and devising rooms. A small inner circle of chairs (the “bowl”) is surrounded by a larger outer circle. Only people sitting in the inner circle speak; everyone else listens. One or two chairs in the inner circle are left empty, and anyone from the outer ring may step in at any time to speak, at which point someone else rotates out. There is no single chair, no formal agenda beyond a starting question, and no resolution required at the end.

The form is deceptively simple, and its effects on a group are often striking. Because speaking requires a physical move, casual interjections drop away; people speak only when they have something they are willing to stand up for. Because listeners outnumber speakers, the ratio of attention shifts toward reception. Because the inner circle can be completely replaced over the course of a session, hierarchies of expertise erode — the first speakers are not necessarily the last, and the final shape of the conversation belongs to no one.

For a course on relational aesthetics, the fishbowl is both practice and object of study. As practice, it gives students an embodied experience of dialogic form — they feel what it is like to yield a chair, to wait, to be listened to without being argued with. As object, it raises the theoretical questions the seminar has been tracking. Is a fishbowl “performance”? Who is its audience? What is its equipment? Where is its needle placed? How would Bishop critique its conviviality? How would Boal assess its redistribution of voice?

The session typically pairs the fishbowl with related exercises: Boal’s Image Theatre, in which participants sculpt one another into frozen tableaux expressing a social problem and its possible transformations; listening pairs, in which one partner speaks uninterrupted for a fixed time while the other only listens; and silent walks through a chosen site followed by collective debrief. Each exercise tests a different dimension of dialogic practice — embodiment, attention, place — and together they form a vocabulary students can recombine in final projects. The exercises are not warm-ups; they are the content.

Chapter 11: Ethics of Participatory Performance

Running underneath every technique discussed so far is a set of ethical questions that the seminar treats as inseparable from craft. Participatory performance routinely involves people who are not professional performers, who may be vulnerable in ways the artist does not initially see, and whose everyday lives continue long after the project’s closing night. Ethical practice here is not a checklist but a habit of attention.

Several principles recur across the readings. Informed, ongoing consent. Participants should know, in language they actually use, what the project is, what their role will be, where the material will travel, and that they can withdraw without penalty. Consent is renewed at each stage, not captured once. Proportional risk. The artist should not ask participants to take emotional, reputational, or physical risks that the artist themselves would not take in a comparable situation. Reciprocity. Projects should leave something concrete behind — skills, relationships, infrastructure, money — not only extract experiences for the artist’s portfolio. Tania Bruguera’s “Introduction on Useful Art” pushes this furthest, arguing that art should be judged by its usefulness to the people it involves, not by its reception in the art system.

Honest framing. The artist should resist the temptation to sell the project’s participants, in marketing copy or funding reports, as more marginalised or more transformed than they actually are. This is a form of representational violence even when it is well-intentioned. Long tails. Consider who will still be around after the festival leaves. A relational project that produces wonderful documentation but strains local relationships may be a net loss for the community, even if it is a net gain for the artist’s career.

Helen Nicholson’s Applied Drama frames the field as a “gift economy” in which the artist offers something — skill, attention, equipment — and receives something in return, and argues that gift relations only remain healthy when the flow goes in both directions. When it flows only one way, the work slides into charity or extraction. Jen Harvie’s warnings about neoliberal co-option reinforce this: an ethics that remains individual and vocational, without attention to the larger political economy in which the work is funded and promoted, will not be enough. Ethics here is both a personal discipline and a structural critique, and the two reinforce each other.

Chapter 12: Evaluating Relational Work — What Does Success Look Like?

The final conceptual question of the seminar is also the most uncomfortable: how do we tell whether a relational performance succeeded? Traditional theatre criteria — script quality, acting precision, design coherence, audience numbers, review stars — either do not apply or actively mislead. A relational project can have a mediocre script, amateur performers, and a tiny audience, and still represent a major achievement; conversely, a polished production can be relationally hollow.

Several alternative evaluative frames emerge from the course. From Bourriaud: did the work produce a genuine interstice, a temporary zone in which people related differently than they usually do? From Bishop: did it make an antagonism legible rather than smoothing it away? From Kester: did the dialogue it hosted change how participants understood themselves and each other? From Boal: did it redistribute who gets to speak and act? From Conquergood: did it honour the bodies and knowledges it engaged, or reduce them to material? From O’Donnell: was the needle well-placed, and did anything flow afterward? From Bruguera: was it useful? From Nicholson: was the gift reciprocal? From Harvie: did it resist or reinforce neoliberal offloading?

No single frame is sufficient, and the frames sometimes conflict — a work that scores well on conviviality may score poorly on antagonism, and vice versa. The discipline of evaluation is therefore less about arriving at a verdict than about being honest about which criteria the project committed to and how it fared by its own standards. Shannon Jackson’s Social Works argues that this kind of self-accounting is itself a political act: it resists both art-world mystification (“it was a beautiful piece”) and bureaucratic metricisation (“we reached 347 participants”), and it holds practitioners to account in a register that matches the work’s actual ambitions.

A practical outcome, which the seminar’s final assignment embodies, is that artists should write their own evaluation alongside the project. This document names the protocol, the publics, the place, the equipment, the ethical commitments, the power asymmetries, and the criteria by which success or failure should be read. It travels with the documentation and makes the work legible to future readers who were not in the room. In a field where so much happens in ephemeral encounters, such self-accounting is the closest thing to an archive, and it keeps the practice honest. It also closes the loop with the seminar’s opening question — what is dialogue? — by treating even the evaluation as a continuing conversation rather than a final verdict, one the artist holds with participants, peers, institutions, and their own future selves.