The State Department Presents is an all-new performance experiment in international relations, office politics, and the pleasures of disco by Lindsey Goss and Nicholas Ridout.

Want to travel the world? Speak many languages? Assist in complex hostage negotiations and intervene in territorial disputes?
You need specialist performance assistance from the people with the expertise.

For three nights only at 95 Empire, Lindsay Goss and Nicholas Ridout will show you the drill.

May 2, 3, & 4 @ 8pm
Empire Black Box
$5 at the door

Nicholas Ridout’s work is concerned primarily with a political understanding of the theatrical event as an instance of cultural production, an affective experience and a mode of social organisation.  Current projects include a book on work in modern theatre. Provisionally entitled Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism and Love, this book takes the figure of the amateur – understood as the person who makes theatre out of love – as a way of developing a theoretical and historical account of the idea of community in twentieth and twenty-first century theatre and performance.

Lindsay Goss is a fifth-year PhD candidate in Theater  and  Performance Studies at Brown University.  Her research cuts across theatre historiography, labor history, political theory, and affect studies, in order to explore the terms according to which politically motivated performance practices appear or fail to appear in histories of theater, performance, and political protest in the US, Europe, and Iran.