West Hall
Troy, NY 12180
USA
Open and free admission shadow theater performance—My Revolutionary Dream Toilet!—on Wednesday, 14 Aug, 5-6pm in West Hall Auditorium. No commitment or advanced notification is required. Just show up!
Abstract
Shitters of the world unite! There will be no social justice, no peace in our times, unless and until the engineers of the world, technologicals and sociologicals alike, meet the people and their government on common ground, the ground in and around the despicable toilets of the burgeoning global city, to together remake those toilets and so end the assault on human dignity and well-being that is the daily lived experience of the 1 billion plus souls making due in the informal, transformational, intensely personal, shacked spaces and running gutters of the slums where few lines are straight and the dream of a clean toilet confronts hard realities – the bushes and snakes and stink that lurk, the thieves and vandals and drunkards who destroy, the politicos desperate that the politics of toilets not unseat them from their sullied thrones, the cleaners and contractors and bureaucrats variously overwhelmed, underpaid, un-enthused, unsupported, under-educated yet also often trying, while the engineers and economists and academics in the main blush and look away and busy themselves with more esoteric concerns, ignorant of the aesthetics of sanitation in hard places, failing to dream the dreams of hardware and plants, of schemes to smartly, soothingly, gently insinuate our piss and shit back into rhythms of earth, fitting toilets into the rhythms and close quarters of the new urban places where the world is being made, teeming with life and striving, hunger and illness, music and drink and sudden violence, and a unrelieved humiliation that needn’t be, that permeates the pores, fouls the air, assaults the senses, sickens the kids, degrades us all. Let us make a hard task easier by lavishing one ten-thousandth the genius, the cash, the passion that flows to making possible suburban bathroom make-overs, two and a half bath wonders of color and chrome, of fetishized fixtures, of forgetfulness and repose. Shitters of the world unite! Make it flush (or compost)!