Post Workers Theatre
Post Workers Theatre (Demitrios Kargotis, Dash Macdonald and Nicholas Mortimer) are a design troupe formed in 2018 in the UK who investigate the future of politically engaged performance, reimagining historic forms of creative resistance for a contemporary context. PWT study and update historic workers’ theatre and folk practices to address inequalities in the contemporary labour market and wider society. Through collective writing, performing, costume and stage production, the collective sets up opportunities for workers and communities to discuss and challenge their conditions and imagine them otherwise.
Post Workers Theatre
During their residency at IASPIS PWT will begin working on a new folk horror performance, The Birdie Dance Macabre, combining puppetry, noise making, costume, and scenography. Reflecting on Marx’s monstrous metaphors, fast food industry and precarious work, PWT will develop research around the “frankenchicken” as a symbol of what happens when power and money combine to turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. PWT will consider ways to remix and retool the allegorical Danse Macabre, a memento mori that described a social levelling from the middle ages with the 1970’s chicken dance craze created by The Tweets novelty record “The Birdie Song”. They are interested in ways to re-imagine these past participatory narrative devices as a way to address the lived experience of unseen workers within industrial scale food production and delivery.
Working as a multidisciplinary collective, Post Workers Theatre produces wide ranging socially engaged projects and exhibit internationally. Recent projects include Slade Green Goes Marching on, commissioned by Three Rivers (2023). Autohoodening: The Rise of Captain Swing at the Lulea Arts and Craft Biennale (2022): The Ballad of Goodwill or The Lecturers Lament at the Demise of Goodwill in the Neoliberal University at Allmänningen (The Common Room) Gothenburg University (2021). Protesteroo at Tate Exchange programme at Tate Liverpool (2019).