Repairing The Social Bond 

2016

Repairing The Social Bond was a duet presented within Really Useful Theater (Berlin, 2016), its title drawn from a Guy Debord quote critiquing capitalist models of spectacle with a plea for social care/repair. Together with Karol Tyminski, Jeremy Wade staged this performance as a naked actionist exploration of rupture, intimacy, and collective awe. The now infamous Double Dildo Duet, transformed a crisis between Tyminski and Wade, each having an awkward unstable bond that they try desperately to uphold. In the sheer effort, the wincing, the longing for this active site of connection, a third reciprocal relation is formed with the audience. In service of utility, a “really useful theater,” both performers make invisible forces visible through an ecstatic labor, meaning the lines between performer and audience are “really” real. Commissioned under the festival’s theme of reframing performance as functional intervention rather than aesthetic spectacle, Repairing the Social Bond enacted ritualized somatic reconnection, cotton candy and Whitney Houston included.