Liberation vs Waste

Halfway through the summer, two of our group arrived giddy to show us a Temu shopping cart they’d been filling with inflatable toys, confetti, and grotesque costumes. As we scrolled through the items including an inflatable cigarette, balloon boobs, a nun mask with oversized lips to name a few, some of us laughed, but others felt uneasy. Would all this single-use plastic just repeat the same overconsumption we were trying to question? Were we celebrating decadence, or just slipping into wastefulness?


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We didn’t rush to solve it. Instead, we let the contradiction sit with us. The Temu basket crystallised a central question: does an aesthetic of abundance free us, or trap us in excess? The debate was both practical (budget, clean-up) and ethical (our role as artists). Could balloons, confetti, and plastic props be more than empty spectacle?


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Adam Alston’s writing on decadence helped us hold this tension. He argues that performance “makes a spectacle of expended energy night after night,” and that this “wastefulness” itself can sharpen critique. Rather than trying to sanitise theatre into something useful, he suggests embracing its “uselessness, wastefulness, outmodedness, and alternative productivities” as ways to ask what and why we value (Alston, 2023, pp. 10–11).


 

This gave us permission not to bury the problem of waste but to stage it. We kept the inflatables and confetti, but we exposed them dramaturgically. After a crescendo of revelry, the lights snapped on harshly, the music cut, and we stood with the audience in silence among the debris, breathing hard, eyes darting, offering no solution. That two-minute pause held all our contradictions: ecological unease, attraction to abundance, and our complicity in both.


 

Jill Dolan writes that “being moved emotionally is a precondition for being moved politically” (2005, p. 9). That moment worked for us because it didn’t lecture or claim to have answers. It simply invited recognition.


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Claire Bishop’s analysis of participatory art also gave us useful context. She highlights the tension between autonomy (art for its own sake) and accountability (art as socially useful), and notes that these positions “exist in continual tension with one another” (2012, p. 276).

 

For PLEASE, this was a provocation rather than a rule. Saying yes to flamboyance, bodies, and abundance felt liberating, tied to queer and camp aesthetics that refuse respectability. But liberation without awareness risks harm. Our inflatables and confetti weren’t there to solve the politics of excess. They were a way to explore pleasure’s contradictions—joy and unease, attraction and fatigue—side by side.


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Alston reminds us that decadence can also over-identify with productivist excess, pushing it to absurdity (2023, pp. 146–147). That helped us calibrate. We didn’t abandon spectacle. We let it build until it collapsed under bright white light. Pleasure and waste remained unresolved, and that refusal of closure was the point.

 

Personas of Pleasure

Alongside these questions about waste, we also wanted to work with the contradictions we felt in ourselves as we worked with the mirrors and throughout our process. Each of us had different experiences with the mirror exercises and with the entire theme of “pleasure” as it kept slipping away when we tried to pin it down. Instead of searching for one “message” or a story, we leaned into our differences and let them guide our performances.

We asked each other: What consistently gives you pleasure, even if you’re embarrassed to admit it?

 

Through devising and reflection, we noticed patterns in how we performed and what gave us satisfaction. From this, we landed on four words that framed our onstage personas: ATTENTION, POWER, MANIPULATION, and IMPRESSIVNESS. These weren’t “characters” in a traditional sense but honest and somewaht guilty aspects of ourselves we drew from in performance.


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We debated whether to include words in the piece. Each time we tried, it felt clunky, our process always led us back to music and dance. In the end, we chose to keep the piece mostly non-verbal, letting the audience respond in their bodies rather than their heads. To hold onto the words, we wrote them on the mirrors. That way, they stayed present as a frame for the performance, offering the audience an anchor without dictating their interpretation.