Authoritarian Body

Authoritarian dictators quote each other in a shared script of gesture, diktat, and super-humanity.  These repertoires are significant reservoirs of tactics in the gradual buildup of fasctasia’s illusion, like a series of brutal magic tricks of misdirection and sawing nations in half. This piece works with an absurd science fiction premise to reveal, and reflect on, the overlapping and at times contradictory performance scripts of Mussolini, Putin, G.W. Bush, and Trump from the perspective of a cosmonaut/performance studies scholar of the far future.