Jesse Jones, The Selfish Acts of Community, 2012. Image: Simon Steven

Jesse Jones
The selfish act of community

Saturday 1 September 2012
16:00—17:00

United Reformed Church

The Selfish Act of Community was a new performance project by Jesse Jones that took the form of a theatrical dramatisation of an iconic encounter group therapy session originally staged in 1968 by American psychologist Carl Rogers. The original encounter aimed to bring together a cross section of American citizens to examine the role of ‘self’ in social dynamics. By re-stating this historical event as an adapted verbatim script, Jones aimed to re-inhabit the encounter to make visible the shifts in our understanding of feminism and politics in the past half century focusing on in particular how the ideas of the 1960s counterculture permeated the desires of the ‘silent majority’. In a moment of similar crisis and raising political dissent, the project asked what could be learned that may be useful to contemporary ways of thinking through convergence and being together in the world. It questioned how we may look, not only through the lens of vast historical movements but also through the incremental shifts in how we inhabit our everyday lives and experiences.

Part of Stages in the revolution.