Muscial Chairs:What Are They Teaching You?

Performance Canadian Federation of Students Demonstration, Montréal | March 31, 1999

I staged this performance within a larger demonstration against funding cuts to education. Its structure was borrowed from childhood: a classic game of musical chairs. Play, I reasoned, could carry a political argument lightly enough to be heard.

I painted a dozen folding chairs in bright colours. On each seat I inscribed a single word: "funding," "equality," "accessibility," "justice." Folded away, a chair revealed a different message: "change the game."

Participants arrived dressed as clowns, as protesters, some as both. Each received a red rubber nose. They circled the chairs, competing for a place to sit, absurd and earnest in equal measure.

I took the role of the "evil teacher." My costume was a severe grey wool skirt suit, once my mother's, worn in the 1960s. The suit carried her history into the performance: authority worn on loan from another generation. Round by round, I eliminated players. Each removal disposed of an essential element of education put at risk by the cuts. The game made the arithmetic of scarcity visible: fewer chairs, more people left standing.

Thirteen years later, I discovered one of the painted chairs resting outside a historic building inOld Montréal. A prop from a single afternoon had persisted, quietly, in the city. The question in the title still feels unsettled: what are they teaching you?