Public Calling: THOMAS DRAKE

Thomas Drake at the Norwegian conference "Public Calling", hosted by KORO - Public Art Norway and the Fritt Ord Foundation, at the National Theatre, Oslo, 1 & 2 November 2016.

About the conference:

Public Calling examines the increasingly unsettled and contentious status of public space and freedom of speech in a world defined by the responses to 9/11 and July 22, 2011 in Norway, and the growing list of comparable events elsewhere in the world.

The National Theatre was inaugurated in 1899 with Henrik Ibsen’s, An Enemy of the People, in which a truth-telling whistleblower is increasingly isolated and disempowered by the establishment and his community. Taking this cue, all participants in the conference come together on the main stage–surrounded by vacant seats where silent onlookers would otherwise be–to perform the sharpened antagonisms that dominate contemporary stages for space and speech.