Join us at the gallery for the launch event of A Socially Useful Production: “The Participation Waltz,” Sophie Huckfield and Company’s exhibition, which begins with The Lucas Plan: a radical proposal developed by workers at Lucas Industries in the UK in 1976, which was nominated for a Nobel Prize.
During the plan’s inception, the play The Participation Waltz was developed with Lucas workers by Broadside Mobile Workers Theatre. The play was performed in factories, on picket lines, in car parks and community halls, exploring the “many dilemmas faced by these highly skilled workers: cancellation of projects, perennial redundancies, having to work on military rather than socially useful products”.
As a highlight of the launch, former member of Broadside Mobile Workers Theatre Ian Saville, who is also the world’s leading socialist magician (possibly the only one), will perform a series of magic tricks that invite us to think about our role as workers, what we can do to participate in the revolution, and how we might work together to unbind ourselves from capitalist sorcery.
While magicians are known for making objects disappear, Ian Saville has the more ambitious aim of making international capitalism and exploitation disappear. While he hasn’t quite succeeded, he keeps on trying. Along the way, he has made a lot of people laugh, and some of them think he might be onto something.