150v: Milgram's Tip Final Proposal

Project Description
Milne, Maeda, Waychoff

"150v: Milgram’s Tip" (working title), a performance that will be created over the next month through the collaboration of artists in three different states (Louisiana, South Carolina and Indiana), is an inquiry into the recent replication of Stanley Milgram's obedience experiments.

Milgram's experiments in the 1960s, and Jerry M. Burger's replication of those experiments in 2006, asked research participants to administer what they believed to be electric shocks to others at varying levels, noting at which levels (tipping points) participants said "no" to the authority figures dictating these actions. Most participants never actually refused, despite the apparent pain they were causing another person from the shocks. For many of these participants, 150 volts was the “point of no return;” by this point they either stopped or were highly unlikely to ever stop.

Using these experiments as a starting point, we will ask questions and creatively reflect on obedience, pain, and willingness to inflict pain in a range of circumstances. From these questions and our reflections on them, we will create objects, writing, movement and other elements that will culminate in a 15-20 minute, two-person performance.

We share a belief that our collaborative process is inherently political. The geographic distance we are working across symbolizes the way any artists work at creative distances, whether acknowledged or not. Through embracing this distance (both geographic and artistic), we respect difference and find ways to bridge, but not erase, it. By embracing a process that is one of acceptance, respect and complexity rather than dictatorial predetermination and direction, the final structure of our performance will ultimately reflect these politics. Our process is thus one of embracing any potential tipping points as we go, making decisions that will carry us in unexpected directions that none of us would have discovered on our own.