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NO Answers, QUESTIONS Only

Workshop

A Situated Collective Choreographic Practice & Workshop Score

Generated by Peter Mills

NO ANSWERS, QUESTIONS ONLY is a situated collective artistic research practice designed to be embodied by a group of anyones, anywhere, at anytime. It functions as a choreographic score, an improvisation game, a relational laboratory, and an ethics of collective presence.

RULES

  1. No answers. Questions only.
  2. Keep the practice in the room.
  3. You can opt out at any time.
  4. Express any concerns or worries out loud in question form or communicate them privately to the convener of the practice.
  5. The ethical conditions, conventions, and considerations are created by the people in relation to the place.
  6. You are the people in the place.

TASKS

  • Ask questions.
  • If you don’t voice a question, notice what it does to not voice it.
  • Feel free to repeat the questions of others.
  • Be prepared to give and to assume authority.
  • Be prepared to give and receive attention.
  • Notice to whom or to what you are addressing your question: yourself, another person, an object, the room, a group, the group, the situation, or yourself/other/object/room/group/situation somewhere outside of the room?
  • Work on accepting that an answer to a question will be another question.
  • Don’t get hung up on cause and effect.
  • Don’t get hung up on trying to make a question in response to another question.
  • Know that a question might be answered by the effect it has on your thinking, acting, and being.
  • Pay attention to doing rather than meaning.

THE PROMPTS & QUESTIONS

Use these prompts inside the practice to provoke movement, spatial rearrangement, relational shift, and conceptual unhinging:

Spatial, Physical & Choreographic

  • Is this what you think it is? Or is this it?
  • What is the history of this?
  • Can we stand? Can we lunge? Can we walk? Can we dance?
  • Can we do the same thing?
  • Can we do the same thing at the same time?
  • Can we arrange ourselves in the space?
  • Can we rearrange the space?
  • Can we make a performance?
  • What music goes well with this choreography?

Authority, Ethics & The Collective

  • Does a room of questioning subjects have no hierarchical structure?
  • Where are the police inside the No Answers, Questions Only game?
  • Why would an answer engage more with hierarchy than a question?
  • Does No Answers, Questions Only return responsibility to the individual through the collective voice?
  • Is this soft power or autonomous power?
  • Is the permission to opt-out necessary?
  • Is opting out necessary in a controlled and enforced society? Is opting out possible in a controlled and enforced society?
  • Does No Answers, Questions Only imagine a different kind of society?
  • What if authority was given the burden of proving its legitimacy?
  • How to undermine illegitimate authority?

Perception, Ambiguity & Listening

  • Do the questions unhinge our definitions?
  • Do our values shift?
  • Do I get closer to the other?
  • Are the questions uncensored?
  • Do questions make everything ambiguous? Are they ambiguous? Are we ambiguous? Is everything ambiguous?
  • Is there clarity in ambiguity? Is there clarity?
  • Could questioning without the expectation of getting an answer make one listen closer or harder?
  • Is an unanswered question like opening a door and not closing it?
  • Do these unclosed doors allow us to move and think differently?
  • What does it do to open so many doors and not close any?

Language, Materiality & Value

  • Can meaning be in the movement of thought rather than in the thought itself?
  • Is there a type of freedom to be had by questioning everything?
  • Does the listener own the question? Does the question float between us like a possibility?
  • Could the removal of definitions allow us not to be limited by conventions and assumptions?
  • Could the removal of answers allow for unknowns to become material, valuable?
  • Is it possible to value something without recognizing its shape?
  • Do questions on top of questions calm the anxiety to understand?
  • Does understanding the inability to understand fully calm?

Identity, Relation & Potential

  • Are these my thoughts? Is this my body? Is this my movement? Is this my breath? Is this my life?
  • What can I prove? What do I want to prove? What do I have to prove?
  • Why am I speaking as I? Why just I / me, why not you / you, me / you, you / me, or you / me / we?
  • What are we? Am I decentralized? Is this an ecology? Is this rhizomatic? Is this intersubjectivity?
  • How to reclaim our creative potentiality? Who took our creative potentiality?
  • How to hear another expansive, unexpected, unheard story?
  • Can we unlearn our expected trajectory?
  • Can we be a vocally bodily community?

🛠 Facilitation & Workshop Hosting

No Answers, Questions Only can be hosted as a 60-to-180 minute participatory workshop, an ongoing residency warm-up score, or a public intervention for groups of 5 to 50+ participants.

  • Target Audiences: Dance artists, theater makers, university students, activist groups, and community gatherings.
  • Space Requirements: Any open indoor room, studio, gallery, or outdoor space where voices can be heard and bodies can move freely.
  • Facilitator / Convener: Peter Mills (available for guided sessions, institutional hosting, and teacher orientation).

Archival Context & Publication

For academic research, theoretical background, and the associated research paper published via ADiE / Nivel, see the dedicated research page:

View Academic Research & Publication Record →

Inquiries & Workshop Bookings

To invite Peter Mills to convene or teach No Answers, Questions Only:

Contact: Peter Mills — www.stillpeter.com