How to ferment your own degrowth cabaret

A living recipe by Chaga Collective: for joyful resistance, guided by fungi, ferment, and the courage to not know exactly what will flourish

Ingredients

(As with all wild ferments, quantities are flexible, intuitive, and community-sourced)

• A fair number of mycelial nodes (humans with burning questions & no stage fright)
• 1 safe & weird space (preferably a squat, a garden, or an ungovernable theatre)
• A base culture of degrowth imaginaries
• A pinch of performance hunger
• Several spoons of cross-border tenderness
• A jar full of radical slowness
• Telegram (or equivalent digital fungus-threader)
• Creative chaos
• A whole lot of trust
• A continuous feeding of emotional safety

Optional (but highly recommended):

• One DIY poster fairy
• A couple of economists ready to misbehave

 

INSTRUCTIONS: STEP BY STEP FERMENTATION

Step 1 - Cultivate the spores (a.k.a. The initial hunch)

“We saw a cabaret once and something fermented.”

Observe something weird, intimate, off-beat: a cabaret, a clown, a wedding performance. Let it tingle in your gut.

Ask yourselves: What if we fermented something like that, but with degrowth?

Trust that hunch. Feed it love, not feasibility studies.

Mycelium teaching: Mycelium doesn’t rush toward the fruiting body. It spreads underground, quietly. You’re not organizing an event. You’re weaving a possibility.

 

Step 2 - Prepare the medium (Invitation as brine)

“Open the call. But not just any call. A call with care, with clarity, with humour.”

Draft a call that welcomes chaos, that de-centres professionalism, and makes room for poets, economists, dancers, clowns, and people who never thought they'd be in a show.

Use art, not bureaucracy. Share it widely and wildly, like mushrooms spread spores.

Know any local artist with activistic force? Pass them an invitation to participate.

Let the first applications arrive like wild yeasts: generous, unexpected, alive.

Fermentation tip: The brine is salty, not sterile. Boundaries are love. Clear what you can and let the rest bubble.

 

Step 3 - Start the culture (The digital mycelium cake)

“Telegram group, shared folder, first Zoom. Let the micro-organisms meet.”

Don’t rush into deliverables. Begin with:

• Mutual introductions (but… no egos: have people introduce each other)
• A shared doc or Mirò board where everyone deposits their “burning questions” and ideas
• Regular but light check-ins (every 3 weeks = a good microbial rhythm)

Mycelium teaching: Community doesn't emerge from agendas. It grows from shared presence.

Keep it moist, not corporate.

 

Step 4 - Wild ferment (Unpredictable growth (but the good one), adaptation, joy)

“Someone left the group. Someone joined. A venue appeared. A protest poem arrived. The ferment thickens.”

Let the project respond to its surroundings. Don’t fossilize the plan, compost it when needed.

Create a buddy system for feedback. Organise a sofa-surf directory. Bake logistical spreadsheets with love.

At this stage, things might smell weird. That’s okay. It means it’s alive.

Fermentation tip: You can’t rush flavour. But you can taste along the way. Check the vibe.

Adjust salt. Add garlic.

 

Step 5 – Let it breath (Audience interaction = aeration)

“How do we bring the audience in? Not just as viewers: as participating spores.”

Think beyond the stage. Keep open slots. Accept last-minute acts. Ask:

• What do people need to feel, not just know?
• What would degrowth look like if it danced?
• How can audience feedback be inoculated (added) into the next batch?

Mycelium teaching: Fruit doesn’t emerge in isolation. It’s the visible sign of an unseen ecology carrying the nourishing conditions for seeds to take root and trees to thrive. Invite the forest in.

 

Step 6 - Fruiting body (Show time!)

“A sold-out cabaret with no general rehearsal. But overflowing presence.”

Let it all come together: messily, beautifully. The show is not a product. It’s a moment. A collective act of courage.

No one’s the director. No one’s the star. Everyone's mycelium.

You might:

• Share snacks.
• Cry a little backstage.
• Realize someone forgot their pants.
• Receive more love than your academic papers ever will.

 

Fermentation tip: Trust the unknown. Taste the surprise. Laugh. Let go. You did it.

 

Final notes from the fermenting cellar

• Don’t scale. Repeat with difference.
• Trust fun as a tool of systemic critique.
• Language is more than words. It’s movement, glance, tone, silence.
• Organise like a fungus: cross-border, anti-hierarchical, nutrient-sharing.

 

Fermenting reflections (to include on the jar label)

• “If degrowth is about another world, let’s start dancing it.”
• “If capitalism isolates, then we will entangle.”
• “If language fails us, let us invent new gestures.”
• “This is not just a cabaret. It is a compost heap of hope.”

 

Aftertaste: Why this ferment worked (even online)

“We are bodies that feel, that express, that move. That, unfortunately, rarely happen through a screen.”

And yet… something fermented.

 

Most virtual collaborations go stale. They exhaust. They flatten.

They leave us Zoom-fatigued, emotionally fragmented, and aching for air.

So why did this Degrowth Cabaret not rot but ripen?

 

The answer may lie in two intertwined forces:

1. Trust as a wild yeast

We trusted the process: not because it was structured, but because it was shared.

We let uncertainty breathe. We trusted each other to hold the vessel.

• We didn’t force cohesion. We fermented it.
• We didn’t expect polished acts. We cultivated presence.
• We didn’t run on urgency. We ran on affection.

 

In a space where misunderstanding is easy, we fermented a shared language.

Not one of identical vocabularies, but of mutual resonance: glances, glitches, poems, farts, silences.

A language born of the collective process, not imposed from outside.

Cabaret became a shared tongue. A slow grammar of becoming.

2. Joy as a radical culture

We didn’t gather to fight the monster: we gathered to dance with each other.

This ferment wasn’t just about resistance. It was about irresistibility.

While activism often asks “what are you against?”, this cabaret asked:

“What would you gift the world, if it listened with an open heart for five minutes?”

 

And so, we sang, danced, wept, laughed, and, by doing so, we showed that a degrowth future is not only necessary, but joyful.

We created not just a show, but a future rehearsal.

 

A way to say:

• “We’re not only against the system: we’re fermenting something better.”
• “This is what degrowth can taste like: collective, imperfect, alive.”
• “Touch matters. But sometimes, so does a well-timed meme on Telegram.”

 

So, dear future fermenters…

If you’re reading this wondering if your digital collective cabaret will crumble,

remember: the trick is not to perfect it.

 

Even a screen can be a petri dish.

The trick is to nurture the medium,

listen to the microbes,

and laugh together when things bubble over.

 

With mycelial magic,

the Chaga Collective

chagacollective@proton.me