Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers (Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development) 3030805905, 9783030805906

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN PLAY, PERFORMANCE, LEARNING, AND DEVELOPMENT

Performance Activism Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers

Dan Friedman

Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development

Series Editor Lois Holzman, East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy, New York, NY, USA

This series showcases research, theory and practice linking play and performance to learning and development across the life span. Bringing the concerns of play theorists and performance practitioners together with those of educational and developmental psychologists and counsellors coincides with the increasing professional and public recognition that changing times require a reconceptualization of what it means to develop, to learn and to teach. In particular, outside of school and informal learning, the arts, and creativity are coming to be understood as essential in order to address school failure and isolation. Drawing upon existing expertise within and across disciplinary and geographical borders and theoretical perspectives, the series features collaborative projects and theoretical crossovers in the work of theatre artists, youth workers and scholars in educational, developmental, clinical and community psychology, social work and medicine—providing real world evidence of play and theatricaltype performance as powerful catalysts for social-emotional-cognitive growth and successful learning. Advisory Board Patch Adams, Founder, Gesundheit Institute, USA Natalia Gajdamaschko, Simon Fraser University, Canada Kenneth Gergen, Professor, Swarthmore College, USA and Tilburg University, the Netherlands Artin Gonçu, Professor, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA James Johnson, Professor, Pennsylvania State University, USA Fernanda Liberali, Professor, Pontific Catholic University of São Paulo, Brazil Yuji Moro, Professor, University of Tsukuba, Japan Alex Sutherland, Professor, Rhodes University, South Africa Jill Vialet, Founder and CEO, Playworks, USA

More information about this series at https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14603

Dan Friedman

Performance Activism Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers

Dan Friedman East Side Institute New York, NY, USA

Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development ISBN 978-3-030-80590-6 ISBN 978-3-030-80591-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to Zenobia Alverez and Marketta Kimbrell Who Taught Me How to Perform On-Stage And to Fred Newman and Lois Holzman Who Taught Me How to Perform Off-Stage

Acknowledgments

Let me thank the pioneering performance activists who freely gave of their time to share their experiences, ideas, and emotions with me (and now you). What they gave (and continue to give) makes up much of the content of this book. I also want to thank the researchers, scholars, and theorists whose work in the fields of theatre history, performance studies, sociology, and psychology paved the way for this work. They have provided the conceptual frameworks and the language that have allowed me to see and articulate the emergence of performance activism. Thanks to Lois Holzman, the series editor of Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, for encouraging me to write this book and supporting me every inch of the way. I’m deeply appreciative of the All Stars Project, Inc. and the East Side Institute for providing me with the social and financial support that allowed me to focus on and complete this book. I also want to thank Elsa Dial for her valuable proofreading and reference checking of the first draft of the manuscript. And thanks to my long-time friends and comrades—Sandy Friedman, Kate Henselmans, Emilie Knoerzer, Susan Massad, and Jan Wootten—who helped create the environment in which I could work efficiently and passionately during the sad and frightening COVID lockdown when the bulk of Performance Activism was written.

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Contents

1

By Way of Introduction

Part I

1

Performance Leaves the Theatre and Joins the Revolution 9

2

Ritual, Theatre, Activism

3

Agit-Prop

17

4

Improvisation

35

5

Psychodrama and Sociodrama

47

6

Happenings, Be-Ins, and Flash Mobs

59

7

Performance Art

67

8

Avant-Garde Theatre

75

9

Performativity and the Sixties

95

Part II

(Some of) What Performance Activism Does

10

Educating

145

11

Politicizing

163

12

Building Bridges

177

ix

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CONTENTS

13

Creating Community Conversations

185

14

Healing Trauma

195

15

Reinitiating Creativity

205

16

Building Community

211

Part III Re-performing the World 17

Performance as a Way of Life

237

18

Community Organizing as Performance

249

19

Ontology, Community, Sustainability

269

Index

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CHAPTER 1

By Way of Introduction

This is a book about a growing international movement that approaches performance as a means of social, political, and cultural change. This movement, despite the fact that it has serious implications on the very nature of learning and knowing, has emerged primarily outside of the academy in the arenas of community education and development, critical psychology, civic engagement, and political activism. It embraces the proposition/insight/discovery, arrived at primarily through on-theground, grassroots activity, that play and performance have the power to significantly impact, indeed even transform, individuals and communities and generate collective community creativity. It has long been noted, and, since the emergence of the academic discipline of Performance Studies, emphasized in that arena (and beyond), that much of human activity can be approached/studied/understood as performance. That approach/understanding is a perquisite for the discussion that follows. That said, while much of Performance Studies research and writing looks at performance as a means of sustaining and/or restoring day-to-day behavior, that is, as the activity by which we construct and preserve social reality, what is specifically under investigation here is a movement that approaches performance as an activity selfconsciously entered into as a means of engaging social issues and conflicts,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_1

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that is, as an ensemble activity by which we reconstruct/transform social reality. This book is about that movement’s discovery of itself. A movement, in usual political and cultural parlance, refers to a group of people working together, on a mass scale, to advance their shared political, social, or artistic ideas and concerns. The movement documented and explored here didn’t start with a group of people working together. It started/is starting with individuals and small groups of people working primarily in isolation and obscurity—on the train platforms of India, the prisons of South Africa, the war-ravaged villages of Colombia, the favelas of Brazil, and the poor communities of New York City. While there is considerable overlap in values and concerns, this movement doesn’t have a unified ideology, program, or specific set of goals. What the individuals and small groups that make up this movement-in-the-making do have in common is that they are seeking new ways, through play and performance, to be helpful to the poor and oppressed, to build community, to address local and international social and political issues, to bring antagonistic forces and communities together, to heal, to educate, to free the imaginations of those who have had their imaginations beaten or bombed or starved out of them. These diverse individuals and small groups—consisting of theatre, dance and performance artists, political and social activists, community and youth organizers, progressive and critical educators and therapists, social workers, doctors and nurses, organizational consultants, and others—at first had (and many still have) little or no idea that others in far flung corners of the planet were experimenting with and developing approaches similar to theirs, using play and performance outside the confines of the institution of the theatre to impact on daily-life-as-lived. The motion, flux, development being documented and explored is the transition in contemporary societies of performance from primarily an aesthetic activity practiced by trained specialists (actors) to a social/political activity practiced by ordinary people. Put another way, this book is the story of performance’s ongoing journey from the stage into daily life. The process of self-discovery in which this movement is now engaged by necessity involves a grappling with the nature of performance, for it is performance as an activity/tactic/method that distinguishes this movement from those of the past as well as those with which it co-exists in the world today. Thus, the question of the nature of performance at this point

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in history might also be viewed as the overarching frame of this book. In tracing the movement’s self-discovery, we must ask where it came from and why it is emerging at this point in history. For millennium in both Western and Eastern cultures, performance was something that took place in the theatre, whatever its physical or social space looked like in a particular time, place, culture. Trained actors performed (“acted”) while audience members stood or sat and watched them do it. Performance was, for the most part, the province of trained specialists who functioned within clearly recognized cultural and institutional frames. Looking at the cultural, intellectual, and political contexts in which this began to change over the last century—what we might call the pre-history of performance activism—is the concern of Part I. Over the last four decades the practice and understanding of performance has begun to change on a mass scale both in rural traditional societies and urban modern ones—and, of course, it’s not unrelated that the line dividing the two has become increasingly porous. The globalization or internationalization of an interdependent common economy—capitalism—and its concurrent cultural and ethical perspectives has advanced rapidly over the last half century and is the historical context in which performance activism is emerging. I find it helpful to look at the cominginto-being performance movement in relation to “movement” as it’s used in musical composition. In music, a movement is a principal division of a longer musical work connected in terms of key, tempo, and structure. This book, among other things, is an exploration of how diverse performance activists and activities are emerging in response to cultural, social, and political developments in particular cultures and nation states. What these keys, tempos, and structures sound, look and feel like, and how they resonate with each other, is the focus of Part II. The coming-into-being movement being documented and explored here is both political and cultural, though not in the conventional or popular meaning of either. Cultural is not here interchangeable with aesthetic, that is, this movement is not primarily an artistic movement. The aesthetic and artistic approaches to performance included in this coming-into-being movement vary tremendously; what unites its practitioners is the framing of performance outside of the theatre and inside the continuum of social change tactics. If culture is understood in the anthropological and sociological sense as the sets of values, customs, traditions, and norms of social behavior evolved by human societies over the course of their histories, then a movement challenging the accepted uses and

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meaning(s) of performance in a society is self-evidently cultural in nature. What is less obvious, perhaps, is how the coming-into-being movement being documented and explored in this book is political. Indeed, how, or in what sense, it is political is a matter of some dispute to those involved with it. My working premise for this exploration is that the line between the cultural and the political is everywhere a porous one. If, indeed, culture is approached as the complex of values, customs, traditions, and norms of social behavior evolved by human societies over the course of their histories then all culture is political and all politics is cultural. Power relations—and the economic and social structures they are related to—are a part of, indeed, embody, the larger frame of a society’s values, customs, traditions, and norms of social behavior. Perhaps a clearer way of saying this is: politics is a subdivision of culture. That said, there are many unanswered questions and different pointsof-view about the political nature of the coming-into-being movement being documented and explored here. Among them: In what ways can play and performance impact on communities and their social and power dynamics? Can small groups working separately impact the large frameworks of tradition and custom? Can cultural activity be transferred/transformed into political activity? If so, how? What are the dynamics between local projects (for all live performance is by its nature local) and initiatives connecting such projects across political and cultural barriers? Is there a relationship (and if so what is its nature) between the power generated by groups of people involved in collective creative activity and political power? Are there connections (and, if so, what kinds of connections) between those using performance toward various ends, for example between those performing to heal, to educate, to bridge antagonisms, to build community, and to imagine new possibilities? What is the impact of short-lived projects as distinct from long-term institutions? In short: how do all these aspects of performance as a form of activism relate to the question of power and authority? For me, part of the value of documenting and exploring the movement’s self-discovery is tracing/unpacking/discovering its various approaches to power and politics and the interaction and mutual influence these various approaches are having on each other. Overarching all these questions about political impact is the question of the nature of performance itself. Perspectives within the movement range from viewing performance as a tool-for-result, that is, for example, as a tool for teaching, or for building bridges between antagonistic communities, or for healing trauma, or for stimulating social action, etc., to those

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who approach performance as simultaneously a tool-and-result, that is, who understand performing as not simply a tool for change but also as the change itself. This view approaches performance as an activity of qualitative human development, as an activity through which we human beings simultaneously shape ourselves and the larger world. Put another way, this perspective sees performance itself as a form of power. While these questions are, in many ways, my frame of reference and weave their way throughout the book, they are examined in depth in Part III. * Before you, hopefully, plunge into the depths of this book, I want to acknowledge its limitations—at least the ones I’m conscious of at this point. First, movement, as I use it here, implies a large (and expanding) number of people engaging in similar activity—in this case, the activity of performance to impact on daily life. An activity, as distinct from a thing, is in constant motion, flux, transition, and development. This book, therefore, can only capture a particular moment in the activity’s evolution (movement). It is, at best, a snapshot. This movement is also remarkably widespread. It is, therefore, impossible to document it in all of its diversity or to give all the contemporary pioneers of performance activism the attention they deserve. In researching for this book, I interviewed at least twice as many performance activists as I have been able to include in these pages. This is not a reflection on the importance, influence, or vitality of their work. My decisions about who and what to include were always difficult and sometimes painful to make. They have been motivated by an attempt to make the study as diverse as possible geographically and culturally, while also bringing attention to projects and people who have had little international exposure. In this regard, I would like to note that this study does not give Theatre of the Oppressed—by far the largest trend within the performance activist movement—the attention its influence deserves. While I do touch on its origins and trace, at least to some extent, its influence on subsequent trends and forms of performance activism, I don’t attempt a thorough examination of Theatre of the Oppressed per se. This is a conscious and conflicted decision based on how much literature, documentation, and dialogue already exist relative to Theatre of the Oppressed. My attempt is not to denigrate Theatre of the Oppressed but provide as wide a lens as possible to the varieties of performance activism emerging around the world.

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On the other hand, I give a lot of attention to performance activism that is rooted in social therapeutics. In fact, I dedicate all of Part III to it. There are three reasons for this attention. First, its on-the-ground influence far outweighs its recognition in academic circles. While known and respected in certain areas of psychology and education, there is a notable gap relative to social therapeutic performance activism in Theatre, Performance Studies, and Sociological/Political Science research. I am hopeful that my unpacking of its history, practice, and potential may begin to reverse this neglect. Second, social therapeutic performance activism is very broad, touching on all aspects of people’s lives (e.g., their work, family, health, and mental health, etc.) rather than being confined to a particular project (or population or location) or two. Its roots in a broad politically motivated mass organizing effort to engage and transform social reality has meant a continuous experimentation with creating new activities and organizations capable of utilizing the power that performance activism generates. Third, social therapeutic performance activism is the trend I am most intimate with, as I have been part of bringing it into being, along with thousands of others, for forty years. For these reasons, I am eager to share the discoveries of social therapeutic performance activism with the larger movement and with readers around the world. As an active player in the performance activism movement, I make no claim to objective scholarship (In fact, I don’t think there is such a thing.) As part of this emerging movement, I view this book as a contribution to the movement’s ongoing process of self-discovery. To use Donovan’s words, I humbly offer this book as, “gift from a flower to a garden” (Epic Records, LSN 6071, 1967). The garden I write for is not only those currently engaged in this performance-based social change work, but also the second and third generations of such activists coming down the line. It’s also meant for all of you who have never encountered or heard of performance activism before picking up this book. There is something new and, I believe, positive and important, in the world and you should know about it. My active role in helping to bring performance activism into existence also means, of course, that I bring my own experiences, my history, my influences, my politics, and my (albeit unintended) biases to the creation of this book. While I apologize for none of them, you should be aware that they are, for better or worse, part of the warp and weave of the text you are about to read.

PART I

Performance Leaves the Theatre and Joins the Revolution

Today’s performance activists work with the assumption, understood and articulated in various ways, that performance is, in some way or the other, growthful or developmental. This has not always been assumed by theatre artists and educators, or psychologists, sociologists, or political activists. It’s only recently that approaching performance as a developmental activity has emerged—and it’s far from universally recognized. Put in historical context, approaching/understanding performance as a developmental activity that can be practiced in everyday life outside of a play, a staged show, or a prescribed ritual is a new phenomenon. Until very recently, in most of both Western and Eastern cultures, performance was something that trained actors did while audience members passively watched them do it. What we’ll be exploring in this part is how the shift from performance as an institutionalized art to performance as a developmental activity emerged in the twentieth century. What has made it possible for a cultural norm stretching back two millennia to be challenged? What aesthetic, cultural, intellectual, social, and political conditions and developments have allowed performance to be liberated from the institutional framework of the theatre and brought into the classroom, the workplace, the community center, the hospital, the prison, the village square, the railroad platform, the political rally? What is the journey performance has taken from being, for the most part, limited to resolving social conflicts aesthetically on stage (or screen) to engaging unresolvable conflicts in daily life? How is that journey even possible? How did performance leave the theatre and, in effect, join the revolution?

CHAPTER 2

Ritual, Theatre, Activism

To start with, performance was never actually limited to the theatre, which, at least as I mean it here, is an organization of performance particular to specific societies and periods of history. To begin to understand the phenomenon of performance activism it is helpful to consider what it has in common with the theatre and what it doesn’t. Over the last forty years or so, a general consensus has emerged among anthropologists, performance studies researchers and theorists, and theatre historians that play and its grown-up version, performance, are universal in human cultures. Performance often has taken (and continues to take) the form of religious ritual, ceremony, and pageant. In tribal societies (both historic and contemporary) ritualized performance is/was communally enacted, sometimes by the whole community (band, gens, clan, village, etc.), often with the intent of influencing nature/ancestors/spirits/gods. Such rituals may seek to ensure a good hunt or harvest, to bring rain, to prepare for battle, to protect from harm or heal once harm has been inflicted. Sometimes the ritual performance is limited to initiates in particular religious societies within the tribe. Sometimes it’s restricted to a cohort of a certain age moving from one role to another in the life cycle, for example, from childhood to adulthood. And, as performance studies has taught us over the last forty years, performance is to be found as well in contemporary/modern religious and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_2

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secular rituals—from weddings and Sunday Mass to parliamentary elections to tailgate parties at U.S. football games. In these ways, ritual is a group performance that does not differentiate actors from audience. People don’t watch it, they participate in it. Its magic is contained in the collectivity of the performance. By contrast, a defining characteristic of theatre, as I use it here, is the separation of actors from audiences. Upon first reflection, this may appear to be a subtle distinction; however, it has, as we shall see, profound social implications. Why and how did this distinction appear? The simplest and most honest response is: No one knows for sure. From historical (written) records we do have a pretty good idea of when and where theatre, in the sense I am using it, appeared. In China, in the Northern State of Qi, there appears to have been narrative theatre (actors performing a story for others) as early as the sixth century B.C.E., although extended narrative drama didn’t fully gain traction until the Yuan Dynasty over a thousand years later in the thirteenth century C.E. As Chinese influence spread to Japan, Noh Theatre appeared there in the fourteenth century C.E. In Athens and other city states of Greece theatre emerged in the fifth century B.C.E. In India, the first record of theatre was written sometime between 200 B.C.E. and 200 C.E. This record is Natyashastra, an extended treatise on theatre and related performing arts, attributed to the sage Bharata-Muni. Theatre as a practice/institution had obviously come into being sometime before a book could have been written about it (Zarrilli et al., 2006, pp. 59–66; 112–113; 115–117). What did these diverse cultures separated by vast geographical divides have in common that generated the common divergence of communal ritual into theatre? For one thing, they each had written language, which allowed scripts to be written and preserved. It’s possible, of course, that non-literate societies also generated theatre but could leave no record. However, literacy itself appears to be the product of other factors, including a level of trade for which the keeping of records is helpful. That level of trade implies a settled society and a productive capacity beyond subsistence, which presupposes agriculture and horticulture, and the subsequent growth of towns and cities. These factors, which emerged separately in ancient China, India, and Greece, brought with them a gradual but definitive social transition from tribal organization based on shared property and a shared community of interests to societies based on social class—masters/slaves; landowners/peasants, and in India’s case,

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the complex caste system which in broad strokes (with many subsequent subdivisions) can be summarized as consisting of the Brahmana at the top (priests and scholars), the Kshatriya next (the warriors), the Vaishya (farmers and merchants), the Shudra (laborers), and the Dalits, the Untouchables, to handle waste. In all these cases, the tribe had been replaced by the state as the overarching structure and enforcer that holds the society together. In these contexts, ritual performance by all those involved in the relevant community to impact on nature/spirits/gods or to facilitate social transitions within a stable social structure, gives way to theatrical performance—the depiction, by a separate group of actors, for a distinct audience, of the now irresoluble conflicts of a society split into classes. Usually, at least to begin with, these conflicts are projected within the mythic framework of religious stories. In its earliest manifestations, theatre is directly connected to the state, in Greece by an annual statesponsored theatre contest and festival, in China and Japan by appearing as an art form created for the ruling class. This barebones historical sketch draws primarily on the work of the Marxist British classicist George Thomson. His long-neglected book, Aeschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of Drama (1941), meticulously unpacks the transition in ancient Greece from tribal to class society and the relation that transformation had to the emergence of theatre. In the course of tracing this development, Thomson makes the case that the shift from the dominance of collective ritual to the dominance of theatre was both a response to and a tool for coping with the internal conflicts of a class society. He writes, “In the [Dionysiac] Mysteries from which, Aristotle tells us, drama emerged in ancient Greece, the initiates still have to participate actively in many of the rites … at the tragic festivals the role of all but a fraction of those present has become entirely passive, being confined to expressing those emotions of pity and fear which are evoked in them by the climax of the plot” (Thomson, 1941, pp. 382–383). Aristotle, the first in the Western cultural continuum to write about theatre, maintained that the purpose of theatre, tragedy in particular, was catharsis, the purging of what we might call anti-social feelings, impulses, and thoughts through the emotions of pity and fear stimulated by the play. Thomson sums up what he considers the fundamentally conservative nature of the institution of the theatre, “The citizen who has purged himself in this way becomes thereby a more contented citizen. The emotional stresses set up by the class struggle are relieved by a spectacle in which they are sublimated as conflict between man and God,

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or Fate, or Necessity. Plato banned tragedy because it was subversive of the established order; Aristotle replied that a closer analysis showed it to be conservative of the established order. For, like modern psychologists, he assumed that when there is maladjustment between the individual and society, it is the individual that must be adapted to society, not society to the individual” (Thomson, 1941, p. 383). Nor is this conservatizing function of theatre confined to the Western tradition. In the Natyashastra, India’s earliest dramaturgical writing, Bharata-Muni writes, “This maya [illusion, that is, theatre] teaches duty to those who go against duty, love to those who are eager for its fulfillment, chastises those who are ill-bred or unruly, promotes self-restraint in those who are undisciplined, gives courage to cowards, energy to heroic persons, enlightens men of poor intellect and gives wisdom to the learned. It will [also] give relief to unlucky persons who are afflicted with sorrow or [over]work, and will be conducive to observance of duty” (Bharata-Muni, 1967, pp. 14–15). I want to emphasize that this is only one theatre origin story. No knows for sure. There’s just not enough verifiable historic material to irrefutably account for the divergence of theatre from ritual. In the case of Greece, for example, some contemporary scholars, doubt the reliability of Aristotle’s claim that theatre emerged from the Dionysian rites, and certainly there is no solid proof (see, for example, Schechner, 1988, pp. 1– 8). Are there societies that made the transition from tribal to class/state societies without theatre? Certainly. We need to only look at those societies growing out of or embracing the Abrahamic Religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam), all of which initially considered theatre to be a form of idolatry; indeed, there are fundamentalist streams within each of them that still do. Are there examples of tribal societies transforming into class societies and developing the state but not developing theatre until much further into their histories? Certainly. The examples of most of northern Europe will do. Are there transitional forms between theatre and ritual, in which a passive audience watches or listens to a narrative told/sung/performed by a specialist in this activity? The bards of the old Germanic tribes of Europe, the griots of West Africa, and the singer-storytellers among the Rohingya today, all attest to that. This story of the connection between the emergence of class society (sometimes referred to as “civilization”) and theatre is not universal or inevitable. Nor is this narrative/analysis in sync with the evolutionary/hierarchical views of some early twentieth century scholars, now usually referred to

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as the “Cambridge Anthropologists,” who assumed Greek Theatre (and all subsequent performing arts) to have emerged from religious ritual, and, more problematic, to consider ritual to be a primitive and theatre a more developed form of performance.1 Instead, the core of Thomson’s thesis, at least as I read it, is that ritual and theatre fulfill different social functions—and that theatre is a particular organization of performance linked to the emergence of class and the state. Despite these qualifications, I nonetheless find this story to be helpful in explaining both why and how theatre emerged as a distinct practice/institution in very different cultures at similar points in their development and in accounting for the primarily conservative role theatre—and its very recent progeny, film, and television—have, to my eyes, clearly played since its emergence. To return to the question with which we began this chapter, “What do performance activism and theatre have in common?” The obvious answer is performance—and, as is now probably also obvious, they both have performance in common with ritual as well. The primary way in which performance activism is different from theatre or ritual is what its performance does in the world. Ritual performance, in a myriad of ways specific to the culture in which it functions, seeks to control natural and social behavior in prescribed ways. Richard Schechner, one of the grandfathers of Performance Studies, who we shall hear much from and about in the course of this investigation, articulates the difference between theatre and ritual this way, “Ritual is very close to theatre, but also exquisitely different. Ritual’s actions are not make believe; they are ‘make belief’: ‘invariant sequences of acts and utterances not encoded by the performers’ enacted by ‘performers totally immersed in the proper execution of their complex tasks.’ The outcome is binding” (Rappaport, 1979 as cited in Schechner, 2009). The social function of ritual, as Schechner says, is to “make belief,” which is, in effect, to “make real,” that is, to give shape to and make meaning of daily life over the life span not only of an individual, but over the life span of a society/culture. Theatre, on the other hand, is clearly make believe. No one, except perhaps a small child or someone suffering from delusions, believes that what happens on stage is “real” or that it directly shapes daily life. Theatre is a socially agreed upon pretense, a pretense that has evolved into a 1 The Cambridge Anthropologists and their major works are: Cornford (1914), Harrison (1912), and Murray (1912).

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complex and often beautiful art form with many variants. Its pretense is its point and its power. Its impact is, essentially, political in that it plays at resolving social conflicts that have no ongoing resolution off the stage or screen. Theatre is the (re)organization of performance into an institutional framework in which trained specialists (actors) can “act out” for audiences of large groups (dozens in the case of a small local theatre, tens of millions in the case of commercial film and television) social conflicts and contradictions that cannot, at least not consistently, be smoothed out or covered over by ritual performance. If ritual performance “makes belief” and performance in the theatre “makes believe,” performance in performance activism “makes-anew.” Performance activism is a loosening of performance from both the prescribed behavior of ritual and the aesthetic pretense of theatre. In doing so, performance activism frees up the power of performance to generate new relationships, emotions, activities, and possibilities. Schechner, speaking of performance in the context of the emerging performance activism, says, “To perform is to explore, to play, to experiment with new relationships. To perform is to cross borders. These borders are not only geographical, but emotional, ideological, political, personal” (Schechner, 2014, p. 51). The other border that performance activism crosses is the one that separates stage from street, actor from audience, and it does so without the traditionally prescribed behavior dictated by ritual. It is giving the creative possibilities of performance away to “ordinary people,” providing them with the power “to explore, to play, to experiment with new relationships.” How it does this, and the various understandings of why it works, will be explored later. For now, what’s important to realize, or at least entertain as a possibility, is that through the emergence of performance activism the social impact—and the very meaning—of performance is in the process of changing. This is not to say that there are solid walls separating ritual, theatre, and performance activism. Performance activism often involves, at some point in its process, performance in front of an audience, although who’s doing the performing, how it’s created, and what social impact it’s having is often very different from in the theatre. Performance activism can, at times, also take the form of ritual. However, rather than reproducing traditional behaviors or reinforcing the status quo, ritual in the context of performance activism is most often used to help communities move beyond trauma and create conditions for generating new possibilities.

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Unlike the emergence of theatre some two and half millennium ago, for which there is virtually no documentation, we are much closer to this new cultural phenonium, indeed we are living through it. Therefore, there is considerably more documentation—primary, written, filmed, and videoed. What has not been done, until now, is to take a detailed and systematic look at that documentation and begin the process of tracing the various cultural, political, and conceptual streams contributing to the coming-into-being performance activism.

References Bharata-Muni. (1967). The Natyashastra (M. Ghosh, Trans.). Asiatic Society of Bengal. Cornford, F. (1914). The origin of the attic comedy. Edward Arnold. Harrison, J. E. (1912). Themis: A study of the social origins of Greek religion. Cambridge University Press. Murray, G. (1912). The four stages of Greek religion. Oxford University Press. Schechner, R. (1988). Performance theory. Routledge. Schechner, R. (2002). Performance studies: An introduction. Routledge. Schechner, R. (2009). A ritual seminar transcribed. Interval(le)s, 2009(4/5), pp. 775–793. http://labos.ulg.ac.be/cipa/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/ 2015/07/71_schechner.pdf. Schechner, R. (2014). Can we be the (new) third world? In A. Citron, S. Aronson, & D. Zerbib (Eds.), Performance studies in motion: International perspectives and practices in the twenty-first century (pp. 42–58). Bloomsbury. Thomson, G. (1941). Aeschylus and Athens: A study in the social origins of drama. Lawrence & Wishart. Zarrilli, P. B., McConachie, B., Williams, G. J., & Sorgenfrei, C. F. (2006). Theatre histories: An introduction. Routledge.

CHAPTER 3

Agit-Prop

The first practical challenge to the assumption that performance is done by trained artists within the physical and institutional walls of a theatre came with the workers’ theatre movement that burst forth in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. In the 15 years following the revolution a vast cultural, social, and political upheaval swept across the newly established Soviet Union. In addition to socializing the means of production, the revolution threw up challenges to the social and cultural norms of centuries. Long-established barriers, both legal and cultural, were broken. Jews, for example, were free, for the first time in centuries, to live where they wanted, and to enter whatever professions they were inclined toward. Women were given equal rights. There was free abortion on demand. Marriage was taken out of the realm of religion and divorce could simply be declared by either partner at any time. Free day care centers were opened so that women were able to enter the work force. Literacy campaigns were launched across the vast expanse of the Soviet Union. Where the language spoken did not have written alphabets, they were invented. Communities were given the choice of the language in which to receive instruction in reading and writing. Free schools were established that emphasized the integration of academic work with physical activity and the natural environment (Rosa & Montero, 1990). © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_3

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All of this was happening amidst ongoing war and extreme physical hardship. The Communist seizure of power in October, 1917 was almost immediately met with the invasion of 14 foreign armies (including 8,000 U.S. troops), most of them quickly repulsed, and then five years of civil war (1918–1922), that left the working-class population decimated and the country’s industrial infrastructure in ruins. Yet, along with the acute shortages of goods and the terrible famines that swept through the countryside, came one of the most intense and productive periods of intellectual and artistic ferment in history. As Erika Fischer-Lichte, German cultural analyst and theatre historian, wrote while describing this period in Russian history, “Revolutionary times are liminal times—times in which society undergoes substantial changes and decisive transformations. The old order is abolished; a new one not yet established. A multitude of possibilities seem to emerge; contradictions can co-exist in peace; anything can happen” (Fischer-Lichte, 2005, p. 97). This liminality and ferment of possibility was also manifest in the graphic arts, poetry, cinema and, perhaps most dramatically (pun intended), in the theatre. During the civil war and the decade that followed, hundreds of thousands of industrial workers embraced performance as something they could, and should, do to help promote and shape the revolution they were participating in. Mark Slonim, a Russian born American critic of Russian literature and theatre, wrote of those times: “The interest in the theatre resembled an epidemic. Never and nowhere had such a phenomenon been witnessed in modern history. … There was … an explosion of creative instinct, a wish for self-expression, for artistic activities … In all corners of the former empire of the tsars one could find experimental workshops and dramatic schools; every local Soviet had theatrical sections, while every plant or military unit organized amateur performances” (Slonim, 1961, pp. 240–241). Viktor Shklovskii, a Soviet literary theorist and critic, wrote in 1923, “No one knows what to do with the dramatic circles. They propagate like influenza. Neither the fuel shortage, the food shortage, not the Entente [the anti-Soviet alliance invading Russia]—nothing—could hold back their development” (Shklovskii, 1923 as quoted by Gorchakov, 1957, p. 418). The statistics are quite impressive. During the bloody years of the Civil War, over 3,000 amateur theatrical organizations came into being. (Carter, 1925b, p. 13). By 1926, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (Greater Russia) alone had some 20,000 amateur dramatic

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circles, involving about 208,000 worker-actors who performed for an audience of approximately 25 million people a year (Slonim, 1961, p. 281). In 1930, the numbers had grown to 50,000 dramatic circles involving 800,000 worker-actors (Diament, 1933, p. 4). Before the revolution, in the entire Russian empire less than a dozen theatre journals had been published. Between 1918 and 1923, despite a nationwide paper shortage, in St. Petersburg and Moscow alone, over 40 theatre journals were in print (Gorchakov, 1957, p. 114). The town of Kargopol in Olonets Province of northern Russian in many ways typifies the performance fervor of those times. There were fewer than 4000 residents in the town, yet in 1918 they not only had organized a resident company, but also had begun publishing a theatre bulletin (Gorchakov, 1957, pp. 120–121). There had never before been—and there has not been since—an amateur theatre or performance movement of this scope. For our purposes, this explosion of grassroots theatre activity is notable for a variety of reasons. The first is the number of people involved, and not only in the Soviet Union. As will be discussed in more detail later, the amateur workers’ theatre movement spread in the 1920s from the Soviet Union to Germany and from there to much of the industrialized world eventually involving literally millions of people. There had, of course, been amateur theatre before (and since), mostly among artistically inclined middle class and affluent people. From the perspective of loosening performance from the hold of the theatre, the importance of the workers’ theatre movement of the early twentieth century is not simply the number of people involved, but who those people were. They were overwhelmingly poor and working class, mostly industrial workers. They had no theatre training, indeed, many had never even experienced theatre as an audience member. The very fact that they organized themselves on a mass scale to devise and perform plays—or more accurately, in most cases, skits—was in itself a challenge to the traditional concept and practice of the theatre. As Platon Kerzhentsev, one of the leaders of the Soviet workers’ theatre movement, wrote in 1923, “The task of the proletarian theatre is not to train good professional actors who would be able to enact socialist plays successfully. But rather to give issue to the creative artistic instincts of the broad masses” (Kerzhentsev, 1923 as quoted by Gorchahov, 1957, p. 158).

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Another aspect of this movement that reverberates with the emerging performance activism of today is that these worker-actors linked their performance work to social change and politics. Indeed, they considered their performances to be their political activism. They didn’t produce amateur versions of classic or pre-revolutionary mainstream plays; they created new plays/skits/performance pieces to fit their own purposes, in the process, creating stylistically innovative shows that they hoped would further the goals of the revolution. Fritz Hoffman, who was active with the German language workers’ theatre, the Prolet-Bühne (Workers’ Stage), in New York City and a member of the Communist Party USA in the early 1930s, put it this way, “For us there was always one challenge; the end was education. The end was that the audience [should] be educated [politically]. They had an interest to better themselves but they didn’t know how to do it” (F. Hoffman, personal communication, January 1977). While today’s performance activism includes much more/other than political education in its toolbox, it’s nonetheless important to note that a link or unity between performance and political/social engagement on a mass scale was first explicitly articulated by the workers’ theatre movement of the early Soviet Union. While an aesthetic and/or stylistic analysis of the workers’ theatre movement is not within the scope of this study, it will be helpful in looking at this early ancestor of performance activism, to briefly examine how this mass performance movement developed within the historical and social circumstances thrown up by the Revolution—and how that shaped the performance content, styles, and aesthetic that it birthed.

Theatrical Aspects of Political Demonstrations Street demonstrations are, of course, by their nature performatory (and ritualistic); they are, after all, publicly demonstrating for or against something. Early Soviet demonstrations were plentiful and demonstrators grouped themselves according to their factories, enterprises, institutes, or unions. Every detachment included a group of marchers in make-up and costume. These costumed people would perform dances, roundelays, choruses, and the chanting of politicalized folk-rhymes. The demonstrations also often included tableaux illustrating political slogans on the back of flatbed trucks; the tableaux quickly evolved into moving allegories and farces (Gorchakov, 1957, p. 147).

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Collective Declamation The most basic, and as far as we can ascertain, probably the first, performance form adapted/developed by the worker troupes was collective declamation. It consisted of the entire theatre group reciting together, with solo voices, harmonies, and counterpoints. The worker-actors apparently started with poetry by well-known authors, but were soon writing their own material. This collective declamation, which has obvious links to the chanting of street demonstrations, was taken out of that context and performed on its own. It became the foundation of the style that would come to characterize the workers’ theatre movement, which retained choral declamation (and soon developed group choreography as well), even as it grew more sophisticated. Gorchakov writes, “Verse furnished the first literary means by which dramatic circles reflected revolutionary events. … They needed no décor or acting technique, and the infrequent conversations of the ‘soloists’ could be staged against a choral background” (Gorchakov, 1957, pp. 143–144).

Staged Debates Given the violent confrontations that characterized the Civil War and its aftermath, it’s not surprising that mock debates should emerge as a common performance form. Political speeches and reports were frequently read aloud to often illiterate workers and peasants and illustrated by pantomime, tableaux, choruses, or staged conversations. This last led to formalizing these political dialogues into theatricalized debates. Supporters of the revolution would be pitted against “priests,” “White Guardsmen” (counter-revolutionary soldiers), “kulaks” (rich peasants), etc. The participants in these staged debates would wear make-up and costumes and enact roles that had been rehearsed (Gorchakov, 1957).

Staged Trials The dramatic possibilities inherent in trials had long been recognized in dramatic tradition, and the early Soviet workers were quick to utilize this dramatic potential for their own ends. Among the many staged trials that took place were of: leaders of the White Army; the murderers of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who were leaders of the failed Spartacus [Communist] Revolt in Germany in 1919; landlords; drunkards;

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the typhus louse; and Mensheviks (a moderate faction of Russian Marxists who opposed the revolution). The characters in the trial—judges, juries, defendants, and witnesses—wore costumes and make-up and used props. Their dialogue and speeches were partly rehearsed and partly improvised within the context of the “legal proceedings.” There was much audience participation in these mock trials, with audience members encouraged to take the stage as “witnesses” and “sufferers” (Gorchakov, 1957, pp. 142–143).

Living Newspaper Another influential workers’ theatre form emerged from Communist Party organizers faced with the task of spreading the news (and views) of the revolution in the countryside. The largely illiterate peasantry was, on the whole, more conservative than urban workers and their support for the revolutions was slower in coming and more tenuous in nature. A good synopsis of how the Living Newspaper was invented in response to these circumstances is provided by theatre historian C.D. Innes: “There was nothing dramatic about this [Living Newspaper] when it first began in the U.S.S.R. after the revolution as a means of communicating news to a largely illiterate population. It was similar to the earlier European tradition of the town crier. Bulletins were transmitted by telegraph to the towns and villages and read out by political officials through megaphones to local inhabitants gathered in the central square … the fact that the majority of workers were neither Marxists nor revolutionaries led to this type of factual broadcast being combined with political exhortations and discussion conducted by the news reader; and since the aim was not only to inform, but to arouse enthusiasm, these public meeting were rounded off by playing the Communist anthem, the ‘International.’ The basic elements of theatre were there—a speaker, and audience and emotional involvement as well as rational communication. When music was added to underline points of importance and news readers began to ‘exhibit’ events with bodily movements, it was a short step to a more formal kind of performance” (Innes, 1972, p. 23). In its more mature form, the Living Newspaper broadened its content to include not only current events, but also “feature articles,” “cartoons,” and “editorials” (Markov, 1934, p. 139). Since the purpose of the Living Newspaper was explicitly to propagate news, along with favorable views, of the revolution, that is, to agitate for it, the Living Newspaper appears

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to be the form to which the term Agit-Prop Theatre (short for Agitation and Propaganda) was first applied. It became the label for all the theatre that emerged from this movement.

The Animated Poster Closely related to the Living Newspaper was the Animated Poster. It was inspired by one of the most popular graphic arts that flourished in the early years of the revolution, the window posters printed by the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA, abbreviation in Russian). These posters were written and drawn by the poet, playwright and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky. The ROSTA poster often consisted of more than one image, usually a series of four. In the Animated Poster, the poster became the scenography. A huge political poster was placed on stage. Holes were cut in the poster for the heads, arms, and legs of the human figures. The performers would then stick their heads and limbs in the proper holes and recite their speeches, dialogues, or verses in this position, accompanying them with appropriate gestures (Deák, 1973a, p. 50).

Montage As may be obvious by this point, the Soviet workers’ theatre was not narrative-based. Although certain basic conflicts—between workers and capitalists, between the revolution and the counter-revolution, etc.—were implicit in virtually all the performances and not infrequently led to the chorus of workers running the capitalists and/or counter-revolutionaries off stage, the overarching structure that emerged was that of the montage. Theatre groups would assemble textual bits from letters, police dossiers, memoirs, political speeches, resolutions of Communist Party congresses, verses, and political slogans. Extracts of different length and tone would then be assembled for dramatic effect, which depended not on plot or character but on juxtaposition, repetition, implied association, and leitmotifs. The typical structure consisted of a main “reader” (so-called, but with text usually memorized) and a chorus that would declaim in response to the soloist. This responsive declamation would be interrupted by pantomimes in which either individual characters or a crowd would take part. At other points, the reader and chorus might be interrupted by masked acting or dancing, which could be either comic or serious (Gorchakov, 1957, p. 144).

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Sergei Eisenstein, the Soviet film innovator, was active in the workers’ theatre movement before he began directing movies. In 1922, three years before his first film, Eisenstein described the development and impact of montage, which he would go on to carry from agit-prop theatre into film, this way, “A genuinely new approach [to theatre] radically changes the possibilities in the principles of building … the performance as a whole, instead of a static ‘reflection’ of a given event necessary for the theme, and of the possibility of its resolution solely through effects logically connected with such an event. A new method emerges—free montage of arbitrarily selected independent (also outside of the given composition and the plot links of the characters) effects (attractions) but with a view to establishing a certain final thematic effect.” Eisenstein in the same essay goes on to praise the montage as, “The way of completely freeing the theatre from the weight of ‘illusory imitativeness’ and ‘representationality’” (Eisenstein, 1974, p. 79). Although Eisenstein is using aesthetic language, it’s helpful to remember that these changes grew not out of aesthetic concerns per se, but emerged from working people, untrained in established theatre arts, striving to give performatory expression to the revolution they were involved in creating. Within five years, the basic characteristics of Agit-Prop were in place. In all its variations, it was mobile and almost never done in a theatre building. Instead, it was performed on factory floors and courtyards, meeting halls, cafeterias, at rallies, and on the streets. Performances were characterized by: radical (communist) political content; mobility of set, costume, and make up; the integration of dialogue with chanting, choral recitation, singing, music, dance, and circus techniques; the consequent use of an extremely physical presentational acting style; the use of archetypal characters (The Radio, the Boss, the Church, etc.) and symbolic dramatic imagery, which, tied together by political association in the form of montage, became the basic dramatic structure (as distinct from linear plot, based on consistency of character, time, and action). With these basic characteristics, Agit-Prop was soon to spread internationally.

Amateur Workers Theatre in Other Countries The workers’ theatre movement spread relatively rapidly to Western Europe, the United States, Japan, and China in the 1920s and early 1930s (For source material on workers theatre in countries other than the Soviet

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Union, Germany, and the United States, see Friedman, 1979, Appendix 1, pp. 736–737). After the Russian civil war ended with communist victory, visits by groups of communist and non-communist workers’ delegations to the Soviet Union were encouraged by the Soviet government as part of a general strategy of building support for the new socialist government among the working class in the capitalist countries. These delegations often attended workers’ theatre performances and excitement about this new type of political theatre was spread by word of mouth in their native countries. That said, what appears to have most impacted on the spread of the amateur workers’ theatre beyond the Soviet Union was its generation of a professional agit-prop troupe, the Blue Blouse. The origin of the Blue Blouse, so named for their use of a plain blue work shirt as their basic costume, are obscure and disputed (see Carter, 1925b, p. 260; Deák, 1973b, pp. 43–44; Scherson, 1931, p. 6. for various accounts). Whatever its immediate origin, it can be said with certainty that by early 1924 a professional agit-prop troupe consisting of twelve actors called the Blue Blouse was functioning, sponsored by the Moscow City Council of Trade Unions (Deák, 1973b, p. 44). The Blue Blouse absorbed and refined the innovations of the grassroots agitprop theatre movement, adding vigorous acrobatics and more complex, albeit still mobile, set pieces into to the mix (Friedman, 1979, pp. 33– 41). The troupe’s performances before trade union members proved so popular that the troupe quickly divided into two groups of twelve actors each. These two then split and so on until by 1930 there were twelve official Blue Blouse troupes organized into the Central Organizations of Blue Blouses. They constantly toured the Soviet Union (Scherson, 1931, p. 6). In 1927, in honor of the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the original Blue Blouse troupe toured Latvia and Germany. The tour proved to be the singular spark that popularized agit-prop theatre beyond the Soviet Union. Of particular importance was their appearance in Berlin before a Congress of the International Workers’ Aid, a communist-led international relief organization that raised money for clothes, food, and medicine for workers around the world. In addition to Germans, there were also delegates from England, Holland, Belgium, France, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and the United States (Deák, 1973b, p. 46). Germany, which had its own nascent workers theatre movement stretching back to the late nineteenth century and which had developed

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Sprechchor (Speaking Choruses) as early as 1920 (Hoffman & HoffmannOstwald, 1973, p. 31) had, until the election of Hitler, an agit-prop movement second in size only to that of the Soviet Union.1 Both the Social Democratic and Communist parties encouraged workers to organize amateur troupes. In 1928 the Arbeiter Theatre Bund Deutschland, A.T.B.D. (Workers’ Theatre Association of Germany), which contained troupes associated with both parties, was organized. By 1928, the 300 agit-prop troupes directly associated with the German Communist Party (which was the largest, but not the only part of the agit-prop movement in the country) reached an audience of approximately 3,600,000 (Report of the Central Committee of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschland to the Twelfth Party Congress, June 9–16, 1929 as quoted in Hoffman & Hoffmann-Ostwald, 1973, p. 38). The third country in which the agit-prop movement flourished (briefly) was the United States. The first group of workers to adapt and consistently perform agit-prop in the United States was, not surprisingly, a German immigrant group from New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood, then primarily a German working-class community on Manhattan’s upper east side. They were called the Prolet-Bühne, which is a German contraction for Proletarian Stage.2 In April of 1930, the Prolet-Bühne began to perform outside the German immigrant community and its impact was immediate. There are numerous accounts, all of them excited and enthusiastic, of witnessing Prolet-Bühne performances for the first time. What most impressed audiences were the group’s energy level, its very physical and precise performance technique, its ability to perform anywhere, and the straightforward political content of its scripts (Blake, 1935, pp. 15–17; Williams, 1974, pp. 36–37). Almost simultaneously with the emergence of the ProletBühne, an English-language workers’ theatre calling itself the Workers’ Laboratory Theatre (WLT) appeared in New York. They were initially organized to produce conventional style political plays from a workingclass perspective. However, when they encountered the Prolet-Bühne they immediately began to translate the former’s scripts and adapted their

1 For an overview of the German workers’ theatre movement in 1920s and early ‘30s, see Knellessen (1970). 2 For an in-depth study of the Prolet-Bühne and its influence on American theatre, see Friedman (1979).

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performance style (For an account of the Prolet-Bühne’s impact on the WLT by a WLT member, see Elion, 1933, p. 6). The Prolet-Bühne and the WLT took the lead in coordinating the rapidly proliferating U.S. agit-prop troupes to work with and learn from each other. In the summer of 1931, they founded the Dramatic Bureau of the New York Cultural Federation. At its first meeting, in July 1931, nine groups attended; in September fourteen groups were represented; by November the number of troupes had doubled to twenty-eight; and by April of 1932, there were 150 groups associated with the New York Dramatic Bureau.3 In 1932 these groups formed a national organization called the League of Workers’ Theatres (LOWT) which distributed play scripts, held competitions, established a school to teach agit-prop technique, carried on a vast network of correspondence, and published a monthly magazine, Workers Theatre that, at its peak in 1935, had a circulation 18,000 (Blake, 1935, p. 57). In April 1934, LOWT’s second national conference, held in Chicago, was attended by 1,500 people representing 400 workers’ theatres from twenty-eight cities across the United States (Marvin, 1934, p. 29). Thereafter, for reasons discussed later, the movement began to decline. Agit-prop took on a different role in Germany, the United States, and other capitalist countries than it had in the Soviet Union, where it was encouraged, until the mid-1930s, by the state. Outside of the Soviet Union, agit-prop played an oppositional role relative to the status quo. However, as in the Soviet Union, those involved were striving to win others to revolutionary politics and approached their performances as political organizing. They worked hard to have their performances interface with specific economic hardships being faced by workers, such as unemployment and eviction, as well national political issues such as the fight to save the Scottsboro Boys, a group of Black teenagers falsely accused of raping a white woman on a freight train in Alabama, from execution. A particularly clear account of this attempt at bringing performance and politics together comes from the Jewish Workers’ Clubs of Chicago, which had organized a troupe called the Workers Laboratory Theatre of Chicago, and reported in the May 1934 issue of New Theatre, the successor to Workers Theatre: “The group was booked to present an eviction play written by one of its members before an Unemployment

3 See Footnote 18 in Friedman (1985).

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Council branch. Arriving at the hall, they heard news of an eviction taking place around the corner. They accompanied the Unemployed Council members to the scene of action, helped put the furniture back in the house, fought off the cops, and then proceeded to present the play. Thus, reality and make-believe were merged into a decisive educational experience for actors and audience” (Evans, 1934, p. 22). This “decisive educational experience” was precisely what the workers’ theatres hoped to achieve through the nexus of politics and performance.

Mass Spectacles In addition to agit-prop, the Russian Revolution contributed another distinct performance activity that also, although in a very different way, challenged the institutional constraints of the theatre—Mass Spectacles. Their roots, as with early agit-prop, were, at least in part, in the ritual performances of street demonstrations. Unlike most of the performance forms developed by the amateur workers’ groups at the grassroots level, Mass Spectacles were initiated by the new revolutionary government, which enlisted professional avant-garde theatre artists to direct them. The Mass Spectacles of the early Soviet Union involved thousands of performers and audiences of tens of thousands. They were either huge allegory plays such as The Mystery-Play of Liberated Labor, directed by Yury Annehovi and Alexander Kugel performed on May 1, 1919 and In Favor of a World Commune directed by a team headed by Konstantin Mardzhanov, performed on November 7, 1919 (Fischer-Lichte, 2005, pp. 97–98) or reenactments of recent historical events on their original locations such as The Storming of the Winter Palace, which was performed in 1920, three years after the actual event, during which workers, led by the Bolsheviks (soon renamed Communists), had stormed and captured the tsar’s winter palace in St. Petersburg. The vastness of these spectacles is indicated by the fact that The Storming of the WinterPalace, directed by Nicolas Evreinoff, used a cast of 8,000, a chorus of 40,000 voices, and, at the end, when the entire audience became involved in the mock battle, about 100,000 participants, far more than the original event itself (Carter, 1925a, pp. 30–31; Gorchakov, 1957, pp. 149–150). The staging of Mass Spectacles faded after the civil war years. This was partly because the ritualistic need they served no longer seemed necessary to the Soviet government and also because a number of serious injuries, including maiming, took place during these spectacles as the participants

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got so carried away that they apparently lost the “make believe” of theatre in the “make belief” of ritual (Orlovsky, 1954, p. 25). While the Mass Spectacle was an important performance activity in the early years of the Soviet government, unlike agit-prop, it was not extremely influential in the development of the international workers’ theatre movement in the subsequent decades. For the most part, such extravagant spectacles went beyond the resources of the workers’ political movements in the capitalist countries. The one exception was Germany, where in the post-World War I years both the Social Democratic and the Communist parties had millions of members. In Leipzig between 1920 and 1924 there were a series of what the Germans called Massenspiele (Mass Plays) produced as part of that city’s annual trade union festival (Hoffman & Hoffman-Ostwald, 1973, pp. 85–87; Pfützner, 1960). The first Leipzig Massenspiele, Spartacus was performed on August 1, 1920 at an open-air cycling track. It was the story of the famous Roman slave uprising. Its title and subject were significant because the Spartacist League was the name of the left wing of the Social Democratic Party, recently reorganized as the Communist Party of Germany, that had, the previous year, led a short-lived failed rebellion commonly referred to as the Spartacist Revolt. The cast of the Massenspiele consisted of nine hundred trade union members and it played to an audience of fifty thousand. The performance was so enthusiastically received that it was repeated the next day before another huge audience. The following year the Leipzig unionists presented another Massenspiele, Poor Conrad, based on the history of the German Peasant Wars, which were proto-communist peasant uprisings in the seventeenth century (For background on the Peasant Wars see Engels, 1926; Kautsky, 1897). Its cast was even larger, involving a total of eighteen hundred worker-actors. In 1923, the third Leipzig Massenspiele, Scenes from the French Revolution, was staged. The script was by professional playwright and poet Ernst Toller, then spending five years in prison for his six days as president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic during the Spartacist Revolt. The last two Leipzig Massenspiele were less historical and more fanciful. War and Peace in 1923, also with a script by Toller, depicted a European-wide revolution which ended in the universal brotherhood of man. The city’s final Massenspiele, in 1924, featured a mock naval battle which ends when the sailors on both sides revolt and construct a “Palace of Peace” on a nearby island. There is record of only one other Massenspiele in the post-war German Theatre. In 1925, in Eisleben, as part of its festival commemorating the

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four hundredth anniversary of the Peasant War, which was centered in that area, the Communist Party produced Thomas Müntzer, named after the leader of the peasant revolt. While both the Soviet and German Mass Spectacles had died out by the mid-1920s, their impact in loosening the ties that bound performance to the institution of the theatre is worth considering. Mass pageants were not new to the Soviet Union nor to Weimar Germany; they had their antecedents in the medieval pageants of Europe staged to celebrate Corpus Christi and various saint’s days, and, even more directly, in the secular historical pageants that were organized in various European countries and the United States in the decades before the First World War, and which continue to this day in, for example, with the Civil War reenactments popular in the United States. For more on contemporary mass spectacles (see Carlson, 2004, pp. 108–109; Fischer-Lichte, 2005, pp. 90–93). British theatre and art critic Huntly Carter drew these distinctions between the earlier and pageants and those organized by the Soviet communists: “The mass theatre conceived by the Bolshevik enthusiasts was not pageantry in the Western European sense. Its purpose was not the pictorial representation of an historical epoch, but to encourage the people, many of whom had never entered a playhouse, to fight the battles of the Revolution over again so as to understand their meaning, and to theatricalize human life. (emphasis added)” (Carter, 1925a, pp. 30–31).

The Demise of the Amateur Workers Theatre Agit-prop remained theatre in that a distinct group of actors performed for audiences that, for the most part, passively watched. However, the contexts of those theatre performances were rallies, meetings and as, in the case cited of the Workers Laboratory Theatre of Chicago, direct action in which the experiential and political bonds between performers and audience were strong and fluid; thus, it bore elements of ritual as well. Agit-prop’s foreshadowing of performance activism is to be seen, as already discussed, in taking performance out of the theatre into the streets, its connection of performance to political activism and, perhaps most importantly, in democratizing who was allowed to perform. The amateur workers movement did not survive the 1930s. Nor did it die of natural causes. Where it had the strongest footholds, in the Soviet

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Union and Germany, it was killed by the State. As with anything associated with the socialist and communist movements, agit-prop troupes were banned and violently repressed by the Nazis in Germany (In fact, by the late ’20s fascist thugs had made violently breaking up agit-prop performances a regular activity). The victory of Nazism in Germany changed the political and cultural climate of the industrialized world. In the Soviet Union, as it became clear that socialist revolutions in Germany and the rest of Europe were not imminent, Stalin began a process of shutting down and reversing the cultural innovations generated in the first decade of the revolution. In the face of fascism, and the invasion from the Germany that could be expected, Stalin determined that the reimaging of human possibility had to take a back seat to the survival of the Russian nation state. The most immediately effective means of motivating people to work hard and sacrifice much were not new and strange notions of human relations but traditional values to which the mass of people had been conditioned by eons of class society—family, patriotism, authoritarianism. The laws of marriage were redrawn along traditional lines, women’s rights de-emphasized, and educational innovations were thrown out the window. Agit-prop was among the early victims of Stalin’s cultural reversal/repression. The Blue Blouse troupes were shut down, and support for amateur workers troupes was withdrawn. For those troupes that continued, the state sent actors from the Moscow Art Theatre and other professional theatres to teach the workers how to “really” act. There were parallel moves in the United States Hoffman recalls that the Communist Party asked members of the Group Theatre to give the Prolet-Bühne performers acting lessons. They were taught that their work had been “primitive” and that realism was the apogee of theatrical art (F. Hoffman, personal communication, January, 1979). On the heels of this, the Federal Theatre Project began providing paying theatre jobs to some of the most skilled amateur performers. For example, Jon Bonn, the director of the Prolet-Bühne, was appointed by Hallie Flanagan and Elmer Rice to head the German section of the Project (Friedman, 1985, p. 117) and members of the W.L.T. provided the core of the Federal Theatre’s Living Newspaper unit. (Remember that the Living Newspaper form emerged from the amateur workers theatre movement in the Soviet Union.) (McDermott, 1963, pp. 39–40; Williams, 1974, pp. 234–235). When Congress defunded the Federal Theatre Project a few years later, the agit-prop troupes were gone, as were the theatre jobs the Project had provided to some former worker-performers.

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Neither the leaders of the amateur workers theatre movement nor the producers of the Mass Spectacles of the early twentieth century spoke explicitly about performance in everyday life or the transformative power of performance. Those concepts and that language, now common in the performance activist movement, wouldn’t emerge until nearly a century later. Their concepts and language were those of class struggle and of creating a distinct working-class culture. They did, however, as we saw in Kerzhentsev, cited above, talk of liberating, “the creative artistic instincts of the broad masses.” In this regard, however, there is one notable exception, one whose notions and language about performance and daily life was prescient, albeit in a highly romantic way, of the language of Performance Studies and the activity of today’s performance activists—Nicolas Evreinoff, the director of The Storming of the Winter Palace. In his book, The Theatre in Life, published in 1927, by which point he had left Russia for in exile in France, Evreinoff identified performance (which he called “theatricality”) as a human instinct that allowed for, indeed, had the power to generate, transformation: Man has one instinct about which, in spite of its inexhaustible vitality, neither history nor psychology nor aesthetics have so far said a single word. I have in mind the instinct of transformation, the instinct of opposing to images received from without images arbitrarily created from within, the instinct of transmuting appearances found in nature into something else, an instinct which clearly reveals its essential character in the conception of what I call theatricality. … The instinct of theatricalization which I claim the honour to have discovered may be best described as the desire to be ‘different,’ to do something that is ‘different,’ to imagine oneself in surroundings that are ‘different’ from the commonplace surroundings of our everyday life. It is one of the mainsprings of our existence, of that which we call progress, of change, evolution and development in all departments of life. We are all born with this feeling in our soul, we are all essentially theatrical beings. (Evreinoff, 1927, pp. 22–23)

References Blake, B. (1935). The awakening of the American theatre. Tomorrow. Carlson, M. (2004). Performance: A critical introduction. Routledge.

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Carter, H. (1925a). New spirit in the Russian theatre, 1917–1928. International Publishers. Carter, H. (1925b). The new theatre and cinema of Soviet Russia. International Publishers. Deák, F. (1973a). The AgitProp and Circus Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. The Drama Review: TDR, 17 (1), 47–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144791. Deák, F. (1973b). Blue Blouse (1923–1928). The Drama Review: TDR, 17 (1), 35–46. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144790. Diament, H. (1933). The struggle for the revolutionary theatre. International Theatre, Bulletin No. 3, 4. Eisenstein, S. (1974). Montage of attractions: For “Enough stupidity in every wiseman” (D. Gerould, Trans.). The Drama Review: TDR, 18(1), 77–85. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144865. Elion, H. (1933). The problems of repertory. Workers Theatre, 3, 6. Engels, F. (1926). The peasant war in Germany (M. J. Olgin, Trans.). International Publishers. Evans, A. (1934). W.L.T. of Chicago. New Theatre, 3(6), 22. Evreinoff, N. (1927). The theatre in life (A. I. Nazaroff, Trans.). Brentano’s. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2005). Theatre, sacrifice, ritual: Exploring forms of political theatre. Routledge. Friedman, D. (1979). The Prolet-Bühne: America’s first agit-pop theatre (Unpublished doctoral thesis). University of Wisconsin. Friedman, D. (1985). A brief description of the workers theatre movement of the thirties. In B. A. McConachie & D. Friedman (Eds.), Theatre for working class audiences in the United States (pp. 1830–1980). Greenwood Press. Gorchakov, N. (1957). The theatre in Soviet Russia (E. Lehrman, Trans.). Columbia University Press. Hoffman, L., & Hoffmann-Ostwald, D. (1973). Deutsches arbeitertheater, 1918– 1933. Roger und Bernhard. Innes, C. D. (1972). Erwin Piscator’s political theatre: The development of modern German drama. Cambridge University Press. Kautsky, K. (1897). Communism in Central Europe in the time of the reformation (J. L. & E. G. Mulliken, Trans.). Fisher & Unwin. Knellessen, F. W. (1970). Agitation auf der bühne—Das politische theatre der Weimar Republik. Verlag Lechte. Markov, P. A. (1934). The Soviet theatre. Victor Gollancz. Marvin, M. (1934). Workers theatre marches. New Masses, 11, 29. McDermott, D. (1963). The living newspaper as a dramatic form (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). University of Iowa. Orlovsky, S. (1954). Moscow theaters, 1917–1941. In M. Bradshaw (Ed.), Soviet theaters (pp. 1917–1941). Edwards Brothers Inc.

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Pfützner, K. (1960). Die massenfestspiele der arbeiter Leipzig (1920–1924). F. Hofmeister. Rosa, A., & Montero, I. (1990). The historical context of Vygotsky’s work: A sociohistorical approach. In L. Moll (Ed.), Vygotsky and education: Instructional implications and applications of sociohistorical psychology (pp. 59–88). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO978113917367 4.004. Scherson, C. (1931). Letter from the Blue Blouse of Russia to the workers laboratory theatre. Workers Theatre, 1(1), 8. Slonim, M. (1961). Russian theater: From the empire to the Soviets. World Publishing Company. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press. Williams, J. (1974). Stage left. Scribner.

CHAPTER 4

Improvisation

The conviction that “we are all essentially theatrical beings,” was articulated slightly differently by Viola Spolin, the mother of modern improvisation, in 1963 when she wrote, “Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise” (Spolin, 1999, p. 3). She already had three decades of experience helping “everyone” to improvise. The improv movement that she birthed in Chicago’s Hull House in the 1930s working primarily with immigrant children and adults has since spread across the United States and beyond and now constitutes a subgenre within the institution of the theatre, at least in the Anglophile world. At the same time, and more to the point of this study, the improv movement has played a significant role in democratizing who is allowed to perform and blurring the borders of acting on stage and performing in other aspects of life. Although Spolin and her progeny are important forces in the democratization of performance we are tracing here, improvisation itself is not new to the twentieth century. If improvisation is understood broadly as performance without the use of a written text—or as spontaneity allowed within the frame of a written text—it has been a part of theatre and ritual all along. Within the European cultural continuum, the best-known improvisation-based theatre was the Commedia dell’arte, originally a bawdy comic street theatre developed in the cities of Italy in the sixteenth century. Traveling theatre troupes spread Commedia across Europe, and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_4

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it appears to have been perhaps the most popular theatre form in Western Europe over the next two centuries. Commedia drew on the tradition and skills of street performers of the Middle Ages with a lineage that can be traced back to the mimes of ancient Rome. It had no written scripts, but did make use of agreed-upon scenarios, predetermined character types represented by particular masks, costumes, and physical movements, and an arsenal of comic “bits” known as lazzi.1 Improvisation as a means of generating performance for an audience and as an element within an otherwise scripted performance can be found in virtually all theatre—Western, Eastern, and African.2 However, as a method of creating plays in the West it basically died out in the eighteenth century. In their book, Improvisation in Drama, Theatre and Performance: History, Practice, Theory—the most extensive and deepest study of the history and nature of improvisation to date—Anthony Frost and Ralph Yarrow explain the waning of improvisation in the West this way: “Improvisation does not vanish—improvisation is at the heart of all theatre—but the tradition of improvised play-making disappears with the development of the enclosed, plush and decorous theatre space during the eighteenth century. The rise of the function of the director, too, contributes to the disappearance of the tradition” (Frost & Yarrow, 2016, p. xxii). The professional theatre of Europe began in the early twentieth century to explore improvisation as a tool of deepening character and improving interaction among the actors in scripted drama. Among the most influential of these are: Konstantin Stanislavski (Russia); Jacques Copeau and Suzanne Bing (France), Jacques Lecoq (also France) and, later in the century, Jerzy Grotowski (Poland).3 None, however, viewed improvisation as an end in itself nor approached it as a distinct theatrical art form. Those developments would emerge from the work of a recreational worker in a settlement house in the slums of Chicago.

1 For an overview of Commedia dell’arte and its history see Smith (1912) and Katritzky (2006). 2 For an example from the Near East see Ayten (2015). For an example from West Africa see Barber et al. (1997). 3 For an overview of twentieth century European improvisation see Frost and Yarrow (2016, pp. 3–37).

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Contemporary Improvisation (or “Improv” as it generally known today) is not only an approach to acting training that has become ubiquitous in most conservatories and university theatre departments in the United States and Europe. It is, as well, a theatre genre performed by (now hundreds) of professional and amateur troupes that have generated an array of forms and structures and that attract large audiences night after night in the major cities of the United States, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere.4 Motivated by both improv’s proselytizing spirit and by finances, most professional improv troupes, almost from their beginnings, have offered training programs. These ongoing improv classes have generated ever more improv troupes (amateur and professional) and provided an entry point into professional performance for many not exposed to or not interested in either conventional or experimental acting in the literary theatre. These troupes, and their training programs, have produced some of the most renowned American comic television and film actors of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.5 Because the contemporary improv movement—both as performance training and as a genre of theatre—can be traced back, directly and indirectly, to Spolin and her work with “non-actors” at Hull House, it is important to share the journey of this significant figure. Spolin started as what in the United States today we call a “social worker.” At the time, she called herself a “recreational worker.” From 1923 to 1926 she studied with Neva Boyd, an early theorist and practitioner of play as a developmental activity, at Boyd’s Recreational Training School at Hull House. According to Aretha Sills, Spolin’s granddaughter and Associate Director of Sills/Spolin Theatre Works, “Boyd’scurriculum included folk dancing, storytelling, arts and crafts, table games, and the playing of traditional children’s games that she had gathered from across The United States and Europe” (Sills & Sills, n.d.). Boyd considered acting in the theatre, indeed all of the performative arts, to be subcategories, or offshoots, of play, “Play behavior has produced some units of behavior or patterns that are called dances, games, sports, drama, 4 For an overview of improv as a distinct theatrical art form, see Leep (2008).

For histories of the emergence of the early improv troupes, see Coleman (1990), Sweet (2004), and Wasson (2017). 5 As of this writing, the major American improv troupes with renowned training programs are: Second City (Chicago); Upright Citizens Brigade (New York City); BATS Improv (San Francisco); The Groundlings (Los Angeles).

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stories, etc.” Indeed, her working definition of play would resonate with most theatre artists’ experience of acting on stage, “…to play is transport oneself psychologically into an imaginatively set-up situation and to act consistently within it, simply for the intrinsic satisfaction one has in playing” (Boyd, n.d.). It is not surprising that Spolin would prefer to call performers “players” rather than “actors” (Frost & Yarrow, 2016, p. 44). Boyd was not alone in approaching performance in the context of play. In 1939 Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian and one of the founders of the field of cultural history, published a book, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, which examined virtually all aspects of human activity as forms of play (Huizinga, 1949). Subsequently, research relating to play and performance has emerged in educational training, psychology, anthropology, and sociology (See, for example: Lobman & O’Neill, 2011; Lytle, 2003; Sutton-Smith, 1997). Fred Newman, the founder of social therapeutics, one of the major currents in the growing stream of contemporary performance activism, which will be examined with some depth in Part III, often referred to performance as “adult play.” Boyd apparently had no direct influence on these subsequent scholars and activists, but she had in Spolin a protégée who would impact significantly on the American theatre and provide a method for including non-actors in theatrical creation. As Eric Bentley, a leading American theatre critic and theorist of the mid-twentieth century, said of Spolin’s contribution, “Schiller taught us long ago that we are fully human when we are at play. Shakespeare has the phrase ‘all the men and women merely players.’ I like to think of Viola Spolin’s theory and practice as beautifully exemplifying such truths” (Sills & Sills, n.d.). Hull House was one of many “settlement houses” established in poor urban neighborhoods in the United States and the United Kingdom between the 1880s and the 1920s. The settlement houses were/are (they still function in some cities) literally buildings (“houses”) in poor neighborhoods that provided services such as daycare, outside of school education, health care, and in the case of Hull House, the teaching and encouragement of play among children and, and to a lesser extent, adults (For an overview of the Settlement House Movement see Barbuto, 1999). Spolin, a first generation American, was herself a product of Hull House. As children, she and her siblings attended its programs. Looking back on the settlement house movement in 1943, Boyd noted, “It was in the early settlements, not in the schools, that cultural activities such as the arts, drama, music, etc., were experimentally prompted often by gifted

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professional men and women who in general served without monetary compensation” (Boyd, n.d.). As Spolin was developing her work at Hull House, she was also leading recreational programs at orphanages, bible schools, and workshops for single working-class women in the early years of the Great Depression, 1931–1935. At the same time, she was majoring in drama at DePaul University’s night school, and studying with Charlotte Chorpenning, the author of many children’s plays and the artistic director of the children’s theatre at Chicago’s Goodman Theater. During this period, she also acted in and stage-managed various productions in the Chicago area. In 1935, she briefly went to New York to study acting with The Group Theatre. By 1937, Spolin was teaching folk dancing and creative dramatics for the Works Project Administration (WPA), a federally funded government program established in response to the Great Depression that was meant to get the unemployed working, at a training camp for recreational instructors, at Hull House. In 1939, recommended by Boyd, Spolin become a drama supervisor for the WPA Recreational Project in Chicago, where she remained until 1941.6 Spolin, when she started teaching theatre and creating plays at Hull House, used games as a path to performance. She reports that she started “…using the game structure as a basis for theatre training, as a means to free the child and the so-called amateur from mechanical, stilted stage behavior” (Spolin, 1999, p. xlix). She took a step beyond her mentor, in that instead of relying on traditional games, she created new ones as she went along. As she describes it, “The games emerged out of necessity. I didn’t sit at home and dream them up. When I had a problem [directing] I made up a game. Then another problem came up, I just made up a new game.” Jeffrey Sweet, playwright and historian of Chicago theatre, writes of Spolin’s games at Hull House, “They were not games in the sense that they were competitive and were won or lost, but were a means of dealing with theatre problems in a playful spirit” (Sweet, 2004). He unpacks Spolin’s process further, “Sometimes she would have the students play scenes in gibberish so that they would have to make their dramatic points without dependence on language. This would prompt the actors to make their gestures more expressive and endow their characters with a

6 For this and other biographical details of Spolin’s life I am indebted to Sills and Sills (n.d.).

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more vivid physical life. If the actors seemed to be oblivious to the location in which the scene was set, she would have them define the ‘where’ by doing what she called space work (mime) to create objects and activities specific to that environment. If the actors seemed inhibited, she might have them play ‘contact,’ a game requiring each to find a logical reason to make physical contact with another player for every line spoken. … By the time the shows were ready for audiences, they would be filled with these discoveries, moments that had been created by the performers themselves” (Sweet, 2010). Although these games usually had a practical onstage problem to solve, they were something else as well, more political (with a small “p”) than aesthetic. To start with, they were decidedly not psychological, in that they focused on relationships, not inner states of mind. Clayton D. Drinko, a New York actor and teacher who has worked with improv Olympic in Chicago, writes in Theatrical Improvisation, Consciousness and Cognition, “What connects Spolin’s work to Boyd’s is that their games require outward focus from participants” (Drinko, 2013, p. 15). The focus for Spolin is on cooperation and the building of the group. “Group participation and agreement remove all the imposed tensions and exhaustion of the competitiveness and opens the door to harmony,” she wrote (Spolin, 1999, p. 11), and further: “With no outside authority imposing what to do, when to do it, and how to do it, each player freely chooses self-discipline by accepting the rules of the game (‘it’s more fun that way’) and enters into the group decisions with enthusiasm and trust. With no one to please or appease, the player can then focus full energy directly on the problem and learn what he or she has to learn” (Spolin, 1999, p. 6). The point of the cooperative activity of building the group was not so much the production of a fine work of art, but the growth, the development, of the participating players. “If the environment permits it, anyone can learn whatever he or she chooses to learn, and if the individual permits it, the environment will teach everything it has to teach. ‘Talent’ or ‘lack of talent’ have little to do with it. We must reconsider what is meant by talent. It is highly possible that what is called talented behavior is simply a greater capacity for experiencing” (Spolin, 1999, p. 3). The type of performances that were created in the 1930s and early ’40s by the young people and adults Spolin was working with is described by Howard Vincent O’Brian writing in the Chicago Daily News of a 1939 production at Hull House that Spolin directed called Halsted Street: “Few will ever see this play, and I doubt if any professional critic will ever hear

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of it. Yet for importance I think it is worth about a dozen Broadway successes rolled into one. … There were about 150 people in the cast— Italians, Greeks, Mexicans, Negroes. …They were all ages and both sexes. What they were doing is not exactly a play. It was perhaps what is called a revue. But its form doesn’t matter. The important thing about it was that it was conceived, written and played by the people themselves” (Sills & Sills, n.d.). What made it possible for “the people themselves” to create a performance like Halsted Street was the trust and cooperation generated among the players in the process of creating it. To generate the trust that allowed each player to participate and contribute fully to the creative process, Spolin maintained that the individuals had to give up judging the spontaneous choices made by their fellow players. They need, instead, to embrace each other’s moves and find ways to spontaneously build on them. “Approval/disapproval grows out of authoritarianism,” writes Spolin, and authoritarianism, she pointed out, permeates our culture. To improvise successfully, “approval/disapproval” needs to be replaced by focused listening and cooperation in which each person, “…functions together as a working unit, one small organic whole within the larger organic whole of the agreed environment which is the game structure. Out of this integrated experience … comes a support and thus trust which allow the individual to open up and develop any skills that may be needed” (Spolin, 1999, p. 6). Spolin never used the phrase “yes/and” in her writings, or, for that matter, in her in-person teaching (A. Sills, personal communication, January 13, 2020). Indeed, no one appears to know how or when it came into use; it seems to have emerged anonymously from the improv movement itself. Nonetheless, the approach it articulates is clearly inspired by Spolin’s work and it has become a catch phrase for the method through which the “support and trust” needed for a successful improv performance or experience takes place. “Yes/And” is the activity of accepting whatever premise our fellow player(s) offer (“yes”) and adding to it (“and”). In this way, we cooperatively create a shared reality/meaning on stage/in the game and have a way of moving the collective creation forward. While Yes/And has been implicit in improvisation (and all stage performance) from time immemorial, it is the contemporary improv movement sparked by Spolin that has provided this simple, straightforward phrase/methodology for generating the cooperation that Spolin maintained was the requisite for improvisation, a methodology that, as

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we shall see, reverberates beyond the stage. Yes/And is essentially a giving activity and, as such, stands in contrast to our current culture’s ethos of getting. For this giving to be possible in the midst of a culture dominated by getting is a challenge. Spolin put a lot of thought and energy into the process of building the group in which trust and cooperation prevail, indeed virtually all of her games can be understood as contributing to this process. “A healthy group relationship demands a number of individuals working interdependently to complete a given project with full individual participation and personal contribution,” she wrote. “Theatre is an artistic group relationship demanding the talents and energy of many people. … Without this interaction there is no place for the single actor, for without group functioning who would one play for, what materials would one use, and what effects could one produce? A student must learn that ‘how to act,’ like the game, is inextricably bound up with every other person in the complexity of the art form. Improvisational theater requires very close group relationships because it is from group agreement and group playing that material evolves for scenes and plays” (Spolin, 1999, p. 10). For Spolin and her followers, the building of trust (and the group) includes not only doing away with judgment but also the embrace of failure as part of the creative process. Spolin considered competition and judgment (judgment of the other and judgment of oneself) to be the enemies of improv, “Competition is based on the approval/disapproval syndrome and the approval/disapproval syndrome is killing us.” She said in an interview (Schwartz, 2008). She added, elsewhere, “The language and attitudes of authoritarianism must be constantly scourged … The expectancy of judgement prevents free relationships within the acting workshop” (Spolin, 1999, p. 8). Relative to mistakes and failure, she wrote: “There is no right or wrong way to solve a problem, there is only one way—the seeking—in which one learns by doing through the process itself” (Spolin, 1999, p. liii). Frost and Yarrow expand on the importance of failure in the improv environments created by Spolin and her successors, “The hardest thing to learn [about improv] is that failure doesn’t matter. It doesn’t have to be brilliant every time—it can’t be. What happens is what happens; is what you created; is what you have to work with. What matters is to listen, to watch, to add to what is happening, rather than subtract from it, and to avoid the reflex of trying to make it into something you think it ought to be, rather than letting it become what it can be” (Frost & Yarrow, 2016, p. xvi).

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For Spolin the group includes the audience. “The audience is the last spoke which completes the wheel, and its relation not only to the play but to the playing is most important,” she writes. “The performance is certainly not the end of the line. It brings the whole creative process of doing a play to its fruition; and the audience must be involved in the process” (Spolin, 1999, p. 338). In the spirit of involving the audience in the process, Spolin was, “the first to open up improvisational work deliberately to include audience suggested material” (Frost & Yarrow, 2016, p. 44). In so doing, she introduced a technique that has become a major feature of contemporary improv and gave the audience a way to play with the performers on stage. This has proven to be a significant aqueduct through which performance has flowed off stage and daily life has flowed back on stage. This has led—if not in a straight line—to at least two theatre forms in which audience participation is key. These are: Playback Theatre, in which the performers solicit stories and concerns from audience members and then “play them back” in the form of short improvised scenes and skits; and Theatre of the Oppressed, which, in many of its variants, takes audience participation a step further by inviting audience members to come on stage and take the place of actors playing particular characters and improvise, with the other actors on stage, endings to scenes which forefront social and political issues. Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed have taken the creative role of the audience seriously indeed, embodying some of the possibilities generated by Spolin’s simple but profound move of asking the audience for suggestions. Their work is a significant development in the process of activating the creativity of the audience and of expanding who is allowed to participate in the creation of theatre. At the same time, while Playback and Theatre of the Oppressed, like contemporary Improv itself, have considerably stretched, perhaps even broken, the rules of mainstream theatre, they nonetheless remain within the confines of the theatre to the extent what they create is a performance to be watched by an audience. They are bringing more people onto the stage, not working explicitly to bring performance off stage. Thus, they leave in place the distinction between theatre and daily life, a distinction that some forms of performance activism have, in recent years, begun to challenge. There is another legacy of the improv movement that might be termed extra-theatrical, that is, working to take the games, techniques, and skills of contemporary improv off the stage (out of the theatre)

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and into schools, hospitals, non-profit organizations, government agencies, and corporations. This current, often called “Applied Improv,” has taken Spolin’s maxim, “Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise,” to its logical conclusion. Susanne Schinko-Fischli, an applied improv practitioner and a lecturer at the University of Liechtenstein and the University of Ganz, writes, “In applied improvisation these [improv] principals are no longer the exclusive preserve of actors on stage; rather they are applied to all other potential domains and professions” (Schinko-Fischli, 2019, p. 11). The individuals and organizations that do this work, many of them associated with the Applied Improv Network (AIN), have devised countless games, workshops, and ongoing programs designed to help organizations of all sorts, educate their members, engage issues of diversity, equity, and other management challenges, find ways for doctors and nurses to interact more humanly and creatively with patients, facilitate dialogue between groups with apparent conflicts of interest, etc. The Applied Improv movement can be viewed as part of a larger category of “Applied Theatre” that has emerged in the early decades of the twentyfirst century. Applied Theatre is a broad label that is now used to cover a lot of activity in the coming-into-being performance activist movement. Both Applied Theatre and Applied Improv take theatre techniques and work to “apply” them to the challenges of everyday life by involving, to various degrees and in various ways, non-actors on and off the stage. We will unpack the emergence and impact of Applied Theatre later, for now allow me to say, using very broad strokes, that Applied Theatre, for the most part, holds on to the actor-audience divide, while Applied Improv is primarily focused on workshops with non-actors and is often not concerned with putting on a show at all. Applied Theatre tends toward the didactic, while Applied Improv, as might be expected given the nature of improvisation, is more emergent and more concerned with building groups than with reaching conclusions and staging plays.

References Ayten, E. R. (2015). An improvised example in traditional Turkish theatre: Ortaoyunu. International Journal of Social Sciences, 6, 115–134. Barber, K., Collins, J., & Richard, A. (1997). West African popular theatre. Indiana University Press. Barbuto, D. M. (1999). American settlement houses and progressive social reform: An encyclopedia of the American settlement movement. Greenwood.

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Boyd, N. (n.d.). The theory of play. Viola Spolin. http://spolin.com/?page_id= 1068. Coleman, J. (1990). The compass: The improvisational theatre that revolutionized American comedy. University of Chicago Press. Drinko, C. D. (2013). Theatrical improvisation, consciousness and cognition. Palgrave Macmillan. Frost, A., & Yarrow, R. (2016). Improvisation in drama, theatre and performance: History, practice, theory (3rd ed.). Palgrave. Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo ludens: A study of the play element in culture (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949 (Original work published 1939). Katritzky, M. A. (2006). The art of commedia: A study in the commedia dell’arte 1560–1620 with special reference to the visual records. Rodopi. Leep, J. (2008). Theatrical improvisation: Short form, long form and sketch-based improv. Palgrave Macmillan. Lobman, C., & O’Neill, B. E. (eds.). (2011). Play and performance: Play and culture studies, vol. 11. University Press of America. Lytle, D. E. (ed.). (2003). Play and educational theory and practice. Prager. Schinko-Fischli, S. (2019). Applied improvisation for coaches and leaders. Routledge. Schwartz, G. [Gary Schwartz]. (2008, January 1). Viola Spolin interview [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mil3d9oD_Uk&fea ture=emb_logo. Sills, A., & Sills, C. (n.d.). Viola Spolin Biography. Viola Spolin Official Website. https://www.violaspolin.org/bio. Smith, W. (1912). The commedia dell’arte. Columbia University Press. Spolin, V. (1999). Improvisation for the theatre: A handbook of teaching and directing techniques (3rd ed.). Northwestern University Press. Sutton-Smith, B. (1997). The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press. Sweet, J. (2004). Something wonderful right away: An oral history of the second city and the compass players (5th ed.). Limelight. Sweet, J. (2010). Viola Spolin from Dramatics Magazine, Viola Spolin. http:// spolin.com/?page_id=1384. Wasson, S. (2017). Improv nation: How we made a great American art. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

CHAPTER 5

Psychodrama and Sociodrama

The first arena in which performance and improvisation was seen as a developmental activity which can be extended beyond theatre was in the emerging field of psychotherapy in the early twentieth century. Jacob Moreno, known as the father of psychodrama, was born to a Sephardic Jewish family in Bucharest, Romania in 1889. His family moved to Vienna when he was a child and he earned a medical degree from the University of Vienna in 1917. He practiced and developed his performance-based therapeutic approach in Vienna between 1918 and 1925, when he immigrated to United States, eventually basing himself in Beacon, New York, 60 miles north of New York City. There, in 1936, he founded the Beacon Hill Sanatorium, later the Moreno Institute, where he was chief physician from 1936 to 1968. He taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University’s Teachers College as well as in Czechoslovakia, Hungry, and the Soviet Union. Moreno authored some 30 books, founded a series of journals, organized conferences, and established organizations which promoted his theories and practices, one of which, the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama, remains active today. Moreno was intensely interested in both theatre and therapy. Shortly after earning his degree in psychiatry at the University of Vienna, he founded what we today would call an improv theatre, the Theatre © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_5

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of Spontaneity. The therapeutic practice he was simultaneously developing, and which he came to call “psychodrama,” borrowed heavily from the theatre, including using a stage, approaching his clients/patients as performers, and assigning the role of “director” to the therapist. The basic idea of psychodrama is simple but in the context of its time and place, quite radical: instead of simply talking about a patient’s emotional history and issues as is done in standard Freudian (and virtually all subsequent versions of) psychotherapy, the patient performs her/his emotional history and/or current issues as a way of re-experiencing, and therefore, presumably, reorganizing her/his understanding of/emotional attitude toward them. If we take a long view of cultural history, there is nothing new about people using performance, in particular, organized as ritual, to deal with emotional (and, for that matter, physical) pain and illness. That, in one form or another, is what shaman in tribal societies have done since time immemorial. Moreno was the first in modern times to successfully retrieve performance from the theatre and attempt to return it to explicitly clinical, that is, healing ends.1 The activity that Moreno started experimenting with in post Enlightenment Europe with a literary theatre tradition stretching back hundreds of years, and emerging, as it did, within the new discipline of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, looked a lot more like theatre, at least in form, than it did like shamanism. Over the years, psychodrama’s basic form has become set. A typical session consists of three sections: the warm-up, the action, and the sharing. During the warm-up, which utilizes various theatre games— games that might well be used in a basic acting class—and conversation, the group decides on which individual to focus the session on. That person becomes the “protagonist.” The second part, “the action,” consists of the performance. Some of the group members step up to perform the other characters needed by the protagonist to enact the history and/or issues being explored. Others in the group function as the audience, but can, at any time, step onto the stage to perform. During the final part, the sharing, the performers/patients comment on the action, intended not as a critique, but as a sharing their empathy and experiences with the protagonist (Yablonsky, 1981, p. 13).

1 For interesting discussions of the parallel between shamanism and psychodrama, see Mackinnon (2012) and Pendzik (1988).

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Moreno borrowed and/or developed a number of performance techniques from the theatre to further the explorations of the action section. “Mirroring” in psychodrama consists of the protagonist, in conjunction with the other actors/patients acting out an experience, after which, the protagonist steps out of the scene and watches as another actor/patient steps into their role and portrays her/him. In “doubling,” a member of the group, either on the suggestion of the director/therapist or on their own initiative, performs, usually by standing behind the protagonist, articulating the thoughts and feelings she thinks the protagonist is unable or unwilling to express. The person being doubled has the right to reject any of the Double’s statements and to correct them as she or he see fit. “Role playing” in psychodrama is when the actor/patient portrays not themselves, but a person or object that is problematic to him or her. “Role reversal” is when the actor/patient is asked to portray someone other than her or himself in a particular scene that has been created while another steps into his character. For example, in a parent–child scene, a protagonist who is the child reverses the role with one of his or her parents. “Soliloquies” are also used, as they are in theatre, to allow the actor/patient to speak his or her thoughts aloud (Blatner & Cukier, 2007, pp. 129–132). As is clear from this simplified overview, Moreno’s psychodrama takes performance, improvisation, and various theatre games and applies them to the task of therapy. In this, although Moreno (nor anyone else in the early twentieth century), used the term, psychodrama was the first form of “applied theatre,” that is, the conscious use of performance outside of the institution of the theatre for ends other than the aesthetic or didactic ones of the theatre.

Taking Therapy to the Streets: The First Support Groups According to Moreno, in 1912, when still a student at the University of Vienna and just beginning to develop psychodrama, “I attended one of Freud’s lectures. … As the students filed out, he singled me out from the crowd and asked me what I was doing. I responded, ‘Well, Dr. Freud, I start where you leave off. You meet people in the artificial setting of your office. I meet them on the street and in their homes, in their natural surroundings. You analyze their dreams. I give them the courage to dream again. You analyze and tear them apart. I let them act out their conflicting

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roles and help them to put the parts back together again’” (Moreno, 2011, p. 68). In the early years of his work, Moreno did, indeed, take his work out of the office and off the stage. In 1913, while still in medical school, he began organizing group therapy sessions with prostitutes. “I had in mind what LaSalle and Marx had done for the workers, ideology aside. They made the workers respectable by giving them a sense of dignity. … I suspected, to begin with, that the ‘therapeutic’ aspect would be far more important here than the economic, because the prostitutes had been stigmatized for so long … that they had come to accept this as an unalterable fact” (Moreno, 2011, p. 59). Over the next year or so, he met with groups of eight to ten sex workers two or three times a week. At these meetings, they talked about the ongoing issues of their lives. Over time, the women volunteered to contribute small amounts to meet the expenses of the meetings and established a collective savings fund for emergencies. What Moreno was bringing out to Vienna’s sex workers was, at this point, not yet psychodrama. These group conversations can perhaps best be understood as the first known “support groups” for oppressed and marginalized people. After about a year, the women organized a mass meeting to rally support for unionization, which was broken up by pimps and the police. In the 1930s, after he had migrated to the United States, Moreno took what was, by that time, recognizable as psychodrama out of the “artificial setting” of the office and to the Hudson School for Girls (a youth prison or as it’s called in the United States, a “reform school”). According to René Marineau, a Moreno biographer, at Hudson, “…he started to use role playing and psychodrama to change the girls’ attitudes and behavior. He asked them to play real or imaginary situations, giving each other feedback, and then used analysis of what he saw to help them reflect back on what had happened. Often, he would get the girls to play the same situation again so that they could measure their own progress. … It carried a step further the original intent of the ‘encounter group’ with the prostitutes of Vienna” (Marineau, 1989, p. 113). These examples of bringing therapy—and later, psychodrama—out of traditional institutional frameworks to engage social problems is another way in which Moreno prefigured some of the impulses and activities now being articulated through performance activism.

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Sociodrama His efforts to engage social problems led Moreno to yet another amalgam of performance, therapy, and social engagement, which he called “sociodrama.” The key difference between sociodrama and psychodrama is that psychodrama, though it involves a group, is focused on helping an individual, “the protagonist,” with her or his emotional issues. Sociodrama, on the other hand, is focused on helping the group to engage social/collective issues and concerns. “The true subject of a sociodrama is the group,” wrote Moreno. “The concept underlying this approach is the recognition that man is a role player, that every individual is characterized by a certain range of roles which dominate his behavior and that every culture is characterized by a certain range of roles which it imposes with a varying degree of success upon its members” (Levy, 1946, p. 354). Moreno’s notion that everyone performs learned social roles, came more than a decade before sociologist Erving Goffman popularized it in his book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, published in Scotland in 1956 and in the United States in 1959. Goffman’s book would prove influential on the development of Performance Studies and on the more general unfolding process of approaching performance as more/other than an art reserved for the stage. For Moreno, an activist at heart, sociodrama’s goal was to engage those social roles and, perhaps, in the process, discover how to modify or transform them. During and immediately after World War II, Moreno conducted sociodrama workshops that engaged Black-white relations, the internment of Japanese Americans in the United States, and the challenges facing returning U.S. soldiers who had married German or Japanese women. Over the next decades, he held sociodrama workshops related to, among other topics: the 1948 Harlem Riots; the riots in Peekskill, New York in 1949 which consisted of right-wing mobs attacking a concert by the African American communist singer Paul Robeson; the Eichmann Trial; and the Kennedy assassination (Moreno, 2000, p. xiv). This work, as limited as its immediate impact appears to have been, clearly foreshadows some of what we now see emerging as performance activism.

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Impacts and Progeny Psychodrama remains an accepted niche in mainstream psychology with Moreno Institutes on both coasts of the United States and the Federation of European Psychodrama Training Organization, which has member organizations in 27 European and Mediterranean countries, all offering psychodrama training and/or therapy. While it never became a widespread therapeutic movement, it is one of the significant streams that have flowed into the “drama therapy” movement, which emerged in the 1970s and is more eclectic and less formulistic than psychodrama. Phil Jones, whose book Drama as Therapy, Theatre as Living, looks at the history of both, writes, “The field of Drama Therapy has emerged as separate from psychodrama … However, there can be no doubt that the structure of much of Drama Therapy has been influenced by the warmup/action/sharing pattern. Specific techniques such as role reversal are used and adapted within Drama Therapy. The relationship between the two is still in flux” (Jones, 2002, p. 63). Drama therapy is practiced around the world and, as of this writing, there are academic training programs in drama therapy in Britain, Germany, the Netherlands, Canada, Croatia, Israel, and the United States.2 Psychodrama’s most widespread, influential, and direct descendent is Playback Theatre. The primary founder of Playback Theatre, Jonathan Fox, a Harvard graduate who had spent two years in rural Nepal with the Peace Corp, was leading an improvisatory community theatre in New London, Connecticut in the early 1970s when he first encountered psychodrama. “Someone invited me to a psychodrama weekend,” he recalled in 2010. “What I saw there was close to my deepest vision for the theatre: it was intimate, personal, communal, intense. Psychodrama was built on a paradoxical equilibrium of respecting the individual and valuing the group. In contrast to typical hierarchical social structures, psychodrama, with its concept of spontaneity, allowed any participant to take the creative focus at any one moment. Psychodrama also invited deep emotions. I wanted such balance, flexibility, and catharsis for the theatre” (Fox, 2010). Jo Salas, Fox’s wife and co-founder of Playback, recalls that around the same time, “Over a cup of hot chocolate in a diner, the idea

2 In addition to Jones, see Johnson and Emunah (2009), Landy and Montgomery (2012), and Weiner (1994).

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came to him [Fox]: an improvisational theatre based simply on the reallife stories of people in the audience, enacted on the spot by a team of actors” (Salas, 2013, p. 9). In August 1975, the family moved to Beacon, New York so that Fox could complete psychodrama training at the Moreno Institute. (Fox would much later, in 2008, be the editor of The Essential Moreno, a collection of Moreno’s writings.) (Moreno, 2008). By November, Fox and Salas were continuing in Beacon the theatre experiments they had started in New London. According to Salas, most of the performers at this point “came through the psychodrama network, people who were attracted to the intimacy and intensity of enacting real life stories.” Zerka Moreno, Moreno’s widow (he had passed away the year before), paid the rent for rehearsal space for the first year (Salas, 2013, p. 10). In addition to these historic links, the form of Playback bears some strong resemblances to psychodrama. Like psychodrama, Playback involves the acting out of someone’s story. Veronica Needa, co-founder of True Heart Theatre, a Playback troupe in Hong Kong, explains its basic premise this way, “Someone [from the audience] tells a story or a moment from their life, chooses actors to play the different roles, and then watches as their story is immediately recreated and given artistic shape and coherence” (Needa, 2015). There is an initial warm-up that includes the audience. Each troupe has a “Conductor,” similar to psychodrama’s “Director,” who acts as host and interviewer of those who want to tell a story. Those who volunteer to share a story are called “Tellers,” echoing the “Protagonist” of psychodrama. Then comes the “Enactment,” not unlike the “Action” in psychodrama, which is totally improvised by the performers without consulting each other. A typical Enactment ends with an “Acknowledgment” by the performers of the Teller, who has a chance to comment on the Enactment, echoing the “Sharing” of psychodrama. (Needa). This outline is very basic, and perhaps oversimplified. Over the nearly 50 years of its history many variations have emerged. The point here is to indicate the ways in which Playback’s DNA is rooted in psychodrama. In later years, Fox made a point of distancing Playback from psychodrama. “Many have incorrectly considered playback to be an outgrowth of psychodrama, or a branch of it,” he wrote in 2010. “Moreno, before the evolution of psychodrama, directed a theatre group in Vienna called Stegreiftheater (Spontaneity Theater). I feel more allied to that tradition than what developed later” (Fox, 2010). The most

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important distinction, Fox argues, is that Playback is not a form of therapy, “In contrast to psychodrama, playback theatre does not position itself in the therapeutic domain, even though it is grounded in the concept of constructive change” (Fox). If psychodrama brought performance to the therapy room, Playback has brought performance to the town hall meeting or, to be more precise, Playback brings-into-being town hall-like meetings through its performance events. In this regard, Playback, took a qualitative step beyond/outside therapy and into what we now call performance activism. Moreno remains better known among psychologists than among theatre artists and performance activists. That, however, doesn’t diminish his role as a precursor. He was the first in modern times to consciously apply performance to a social task other than theatre and his life-long efforts to merge therapy and performance as a means of impacting on human development, even if not well known among contemporary performance activists, speaks to much that motivates us today. At the same time, it is important to note that despite Moreno’s radical move to bring performance into the therapy room and the challenge that represented to the Freudian orthodoxy, psychodrama never broke with psychiatry’s and psychology’s basic premises: although they may have social origins, an individual’s emotions are located primarily in his/her head; and the patient is helped by reliving (through talk or performance) traumas of the past and having them “analyzed.” Nor does psychodrama challenge the interior cosmology imagined by Freud (the unconscious, the ego, the id, etc.). In the last decades of the twentieth century, there have been subsequent points of contact and interface between therapy and performance which can’t be so clearly traced back to Moreno. The best known, at least among performance activists, is Augusto Boal’s “Rainbow of Desire.” Boal, a Brazilian theatre director and progressive political activist, developed Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), a dialogic approach to theatre in which the audience is invited to figure out social and political problems through performance with the actors. Today Theatre of the Oppressed is the most influential current in performance activism, and so we will be returning to it again and in more detail. Here I simply touch on the therapeutic application aspects of Boal’s work. Boal developed Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) working in poor communities in Brazil, Argentina, Peru, and Ecuador. After being arrested, imprisoned, and tortured by the military government in Brazil

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and then exiled from a series of other countries in Latin America, Boal settled into exile in France in the early 1980s. In Europe, economic and political oppression was not as immediately obvious and brutalizing as in Latin America, and Boal gradually began to extend his performance work into the engagement of the internalization of oppression, (what he called “The Cop in the Head”). Adrian Jackson, a practitioner of TO and the major translator of Boal into English, writes of this aspect of Boal’s work, “…The Rainbow of Desire,’ the name Boal gives to a collection of theatrical techniques and exercises designed to harness the power of ‘the aesthetic space’ (the stage) to examine individual internalized oppressions and to place them within a larger context” (Jackson, 1994, p. xxiii). While Boal participated in a psychodrama in San Paulo in 1967, he maintained it had little influence on his work (Feldhendler, 1994, p. 89). Specifically, Boal, like many other Marxists of his time, maintained that Moreno’s work, as psychology in general, was designed to adapt people to existing conditions while his work was directed toward empowering people to challenge existing conditions (Boal as cited by Feldhendler, 1994, p. 89). That said, psychodrama and the Rainbow of Desire share a number of characteristics, including that the focus of the workshop is on a “protagonist,” the group’s improv is intended to explore the protagonist’s issue(s), and there is a period at the end of the workshop for discussing and relating observations back to the protagonist. In addition to the similarities in the structure of the workshops, the assumptions of mainstream psychology (and the individualistic bias of our larger culture) remain present. In particular, the Rainbow of Desire doesn’t question the assumption of emotionality being primarily located in the individual. Although it speaks of the “Cop-in-the-Head” being imposed by the larger society, it focuses on helping the individual protagonist engage and/or escape the “cop.” In addition, Rainbow of Desire embraces psychology’s emphasis on delving into the past in order to reexam (analyze) it. In his book The Rainbow of Desire, Boal writes, “…the protagonist … join[s] forces with the therapist and, possibly, with other members of the group, who together will be able to observe the ‘I-before’ still present to an extent in the ‘I-now’—which is, after a fashion, an ‘I-again’. But the very process which enables the I-before to be observed, distances it. I see myself yesterday. I am today, yesterday is someone else, an other. It is one part of me which detaches itself from me that I may see it. This part is an object of analysis, of study, aesthetically reified” (Boal, 1994, p. 26).

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Performance and therapy remain in an ongoing and developing relationship within performance activism. In addition to the PsychodramaDrama Therapy-Playback Theatre continuum, and Boal’s Rainbow of Desire, all of which share historical and philosophical roots with psychoanalysis, there is a current within performance activism with roots in another, distinct, approach to psychology—Cultural Historic Activity Theory (CHAT). As summarized by Kirsten Foot, CHAT “…centers on three core ideas: (1) humans act collectively, learn by doing, and communicate in and via their actions; (2) humans make, employ, and adapt tools of all kinds to learn and communicate; and (3) community is central to the process of making and interpreting meaning—and thus to all forms of learning, communicating, and acting” (Foot, 2013, p. 329). CHAT focuses on the social dynamics of human development and emotionality, and not the atomized, alienated individual of the dominant psychology. CHAT has its roots in the work of the early Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky (Vygotsky, 1978). Vygotsky, a Marxist, observed that children learn language, and all other cultural skills socially, that is, by playing and performing with adults and older children. Human development, including emotional development, according to Vygotsky and those who have followed in his footsteps, is not primarily an intrapsychic phenonium. That is, it doesn’t exist/take place primarily in an individual’s “head.” Development and emotionality are primarily social activities; they exist/take place primarily between people. Thus, our emotionality, like all other aspects of human culture, are socially created by human beings over generations and centuries. They are not unchanging internal maps, as with Freud, or simply a matter of chemical balances and imbalances, as with much of contemporary medicalized psychology. Emotionality has been socially created and can thus be recreated (reorganized) (Newman & Holzman, 2014; Vygotsky, 1978). This is a qualitatively different understanding of psychology and, for that matter, of what it means to be human than that offered by mainstream psychology and psychotherapy, and their influence on psychodrama and the Rainbow of Desire. For the most part, CHAT has been understood/practiced as an approach to developmental (not clinical) psychology and applied mostly in educational contexts. However, in the 1970s, Fred Newman, who would go on to become the artistic director of the Castillo Theatre and a significant pioneer of performance activism, and his intellectual partner Lois Holzman, began to develop a Cultural Historical Activity-based therapy, social therapy, which in the

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1980s and ’90s evolved into performance-based social therapeutics with applications/implications far beyond therapy per se. Holzman describes social therapy and its evolution into social therapeutics as, “A particular social and group-oriented approach to psychotherapy, to help people grow and develop rather than to deal with symptoms or relate to them as having mental illness or problems. Over the last 30 or 35 years, though, we expanded and our approach, which we now call social therapeutics, which is an approach to human learning and development that uses the fact that human beings are players and performers to help people grow and develop their communities, to deal with social problems, to deal with the lack of learning that goes on in schools, and so on” (L. Holzman, personal communication, October 26, 2017). Social therapeutics would emerge in the 1990s as another road on which performance would travel from the therapy office to schools, workplaces, and homes, that is, into daily life. We will revisit it in Part III.

References Blatner, A., & Cukier, R. (2007). Moreno’s basic concepts. In B. Clark, J. Burmeister & M. Maciel (Eds.), Psychodrama: Advances in theory and practice (pp. 293–306). Routledge. Boal, A. (1994). The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy. Routledge. Feldhendler, D. (1994). Augusto Boal and Jacob Moreno: Theatre and therapy. In M. Schutzman & J. Cohen-Cruz (Eds.), Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism (pp. 87–109). Routledge. Foot, K. (2013). Cultural-historical activity theory: Exploring a theory to inform practice and research. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 24(3), 329–347. Fox, J. (2010). Playback theatre compared to psychodrama and theatre of the oppressed. Centre for Playback Theatre. https://www.playbacktheatre.org/wpcontent/uploads/2010/05/PT_Compared.pdf Jackson, A. (1994). Translator’s introduction. In A. Boal (ed.), The rainbow of desire: The Boal method of theatre and therapy (pp. xviii–xxvi). Routledge. Johnson, D. R., & Emunah, R. (Eds.). (2009). Current approaches in drama therapy. Charles Thomas. Jones, P. (2002). Drama as therapy volume one: Theory, practice and research. Routledge. Landy, R. J., & Montgomery, D. T. (2012). Theatre for change: Education, social action and therapy. Palgrave Macmillan. Levy, J. (1946). Psychodrama, volume 1. Beacon House.

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Mackinnon, C. (2012). Shamanism and spirtuality in therapeutic practice: An introduction. Singing Dragon. Marineau, R. F. (1989). Jacob Levy Moreno, 1889–1974: Father of psychodrama, sociometry, and group psychotherapy. Tavistock/Routledge. Moreno, J. L. (2008). The essential Moreno: Writings on psychodrama, group method and spontaneity (J. Fox, Ed.). Tusital Publishing. Moreno, J. L. (2011). The autobiography of J.L. Moreno, M.D. (Abridged) (J.D. Moreno, Ed.). The North-West Psychodrama Association. Moreno, Z. T. (2000). Forward. In P. Sternberg & A. Garcia (Eds.), Sociodrama: Who’s in your shoes? (pp. xvii–xviii). Praeger Publishers. Needa, V. (2015). An introduction to Playback Theatre. http://static1.square space.com/static/55e46f2be4b0e4feabf8160e/t/56811efaa976af5d46193 f08/1451302650077/INTRODUCING+PLAYBACK+THEATRE+-+Dec+ 2015+.pdf Newman, F., & Holzman, L. (2014). Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary scientist. Taylor and Francis. Pendzik, S. (1988). Drama therapy as a form of modern shamanism. The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 20(1), 81–91. Salas, J. (2013). Improvising real life (20th anniversary edition): Personal story in Playback Theatre. Tusitala Publishing. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. Weiner, D. J. (1994). Rehearsal for growth: Theatre improvisation for psychotherapists. Norton. Yablonsky, L. (1981). Psychodrama: Resolving emotional problems through roleplaying. Gardner.

CHAPTER 6

Happenings, Be-Ins, and Flash Mobs

The next impactful challenge to the established assumption of performance as acting, that is, as limited to the activity of trained professionals performing characters other than themselves, enacting stories in front of audiences, came from the visual arts. In the late 1950s and early 1960s a small group of painters and sculptors working in New York City began to experiment with extending their art outside of the picture frame and off the wall into the gallery space as a whole. These artists were influenced by Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and other abstract expressionist painters of the 1940s and ’50s, who art critic Harold Rosenberg dubbed “action painters,” because, at least to his understanding, they felt that the activity of creating the painting as important as the finished painting. Rosenberg, in his influential essay “The American Action Painters,” published in 1952, wrote that, “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act… What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event” (Rosenberg, 1952). In contemporary language, we might speak of this as an awareness of the “performance of painting.” While this insight/approach didn’t have a lasting influence on the visual arts per se, it contributed to the emergence of a new performance art and, more to the concerns of this study, an important expansion of the concept of performance itself. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_6

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The ways in which visual arts creation expanded beyond the wall into the hall and refocused on process relative to product is laid out in some detail by Allan Kaprow. His event, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, produced at the Reuben Gallery in what is now called the East Village in New York City in 1959, is generally considered the first Happening. Writing six years later, he recalled: I developed a kind of action-collage technique, following my interest in Pollock. … The action-collage then became bigger and I introduced flashing lights and thicker hunks of matter. These parts projected farther and farther from the wall and into the room, and included more and more audible elements, sounds of ringing buzzers, bells, toys, etc. Now I just simply filled the whole gallery up, starting from one wall and ending with the other. … I immediately saw that every visitor to the Environment was part of it. I had not really thought of that before. And so I gave him occupations like moving something, turning switches on—just a few things. … This suggested a more ‘scored’ responsibility for the visitor. I offered him more and more to do, until there developed the Happening. (Kaprow, 1965, pp. 44–46)

While Happenings, during their brief flowering in New York and beyond1 remained primarily visual/environmental experiences within art galleries and lofts, they did quickly develop space for human performance beyond giving visitors “occupations like moving something.” Performers were soon being pre-selected and rehearsed to do designated tasks at predetermined times—sometimes silent physical tasks, at other times speaking, sometimes even engaging in dialogue with other performers. Michael Kirby, an early advocate of Happenings who would later become one of the pioneers of Performance Studies as an academic discipline, wrote in the first book about Happenings, “Although some of their advocates claim they are not, Happenings, like musicals and plays, are a form of theatre. Happenings are a new form of theatre, just as collage is a new form of visual art, and they can be created in various styles, just as collages (and plays) are” (Kirby, 1965, p. 11). Kirby outlines three differences (or innovations) that distinguished Happenings from traditional theatre. First, the audience doesn’t sit and 1 There were Happenings produced in Paris and Milan as well (Carlson, 2004, p. 108) and in New Orleans (Schechner, 1973, pp. 67–68; R. Schechner, personal communication, December 4, 2019).

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watch; it moves through the built-space (the environment, the art work, or, in traditional theatre language, the “set”) which was often divided into various rooms or enclosures. Some Happenings offered different activities going on simultaneously in different parts of the space. Happenings, in Kirby’s words, “rejected the proscenium stage and the conceit that everyone in the auditorium sees the same ‘picture.’ In many Happenings there is a great difference in … in what is seen by different spectators” (Kirby, 1965, p. 12). The simultaneous action of many Happenings echoed the way performance is experienced in a traditional three ring circus. Indeed, Red Grooms, among the creators of Happenings during this period, who today is known as a pioneer of site-specific sculpture, recalls, “When I was a kid the big influence on me was Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey and the Cavalcade of Amusement which would roll in every year for the Tennessee State Fair” (Kirby, p. 119). The Happenings’ immersion of visitors in the environment anticipated Environmental Theatre and its descendent, Site-Specific Theatre, which was beginning to emerge at about the same time and that would flower about ten years later with Richard Schechner’s Performance Group, which we will be examining in more depth soon. The second innovation of the Happening which continues to reverberate powerfully in contemporary theatre is its structure. Whatever the specific sequence of actions, the structure of Happenings had nothing to do with plot or narrative and had no need for or interest in logic. “Happenings,” writes Kirby, “have abandoned the plot or story structure that is the foundation of our traditional theatre. Gone are the clichés of exposition, development, climax and conclusion. … the conflicts of personality, the revelatory monologue of character. Gone are all events needed for the presentation of a cause-and-effect plot or even the simple sequence of events that would tell a story” (Kirby, 1965, p. 13). He calls the frame of traditional theatre “informational” by which he means it is dependent on the transmission of information from scene to scene and from stage to the auditorium. The frame of the Happening, in contrast, Kirby calls “compartmentalized.” Each “theatrical unit,” some of which includes performers, some not, some which use words, some not, “are completely self-contained and hermetic. No information is passed from one discrete theatrical unit—or compartment—to another. The compartments may be arranged sequentially or simultaneously” (Kirby, 1965, p. 13). This compartmentalized structured influenced some of the most

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impactful productions of the Living Theatre in the late sixties—in particular Mysteries and Smaller Pieces and Paradise Now—and has continued to expand in the contemporary theatre. It can be experienced in the work of, among others, director Robert Wilson (who also started out in the visual arts, as an architect), and in the work of playwrights such as Heiner Müller, Elfriede Jelinek (in the German language theatre), Sarah Kane, Adenine Kennedy and, in at least some of her plays, Suzan Lori-Parks (in the English-speaking theatre). The third innovation of the Happening, and the one with the most relevance to our study, was its view of/approach to performance itself. With a decade’s hindsight, Kirby wrote, “Acting means to feign, to stimulate, to represent, to impersonate. As Happenings demonstrated, not all performing is acting. Although acting was sometimes used, the performers in Happenings generally tended to ‘be’ nobody or nothing other than themselves; nor did they represent or pretend to be in a time or place different than that of the spectator. They walked, ran, sang, washed dishes, swept, operated machines and stage devices, and so forth, but they did not feign or impersonate” (Kirby, 1972, p. 3). Allan Kaprowrecalls, “In the first Happenings, I looked for friends to perform, anybody who would help me out, and they tended to be the artists, poets, musicians that I knew. Since I knew very few actors, I did not turn to them except when Julian Beck [co-founder of the Living Theatrewho was also a painter] recommended a few, who immediately turned out to be useless to me because they wanted to act” (Kaprow, 1965, p. 48). This shift from “acting” to “performance,” was a profound practical and conceptual shift—and would open up possibilities beyond the world of experimental theatre. Kirby in 1972 published an essay, “On Acting and Not-Acting,” which made the case that performance was a continuum that ranged from what he called “complex acting” to “non-matrixed performing.” Complex acting, according to Kirby, is highly matrixed, that is, it is contained within the frame of a play, film, TV show, etc., a frame that assumes the shared pretense of character, narrative, and feigned time and place. “Non-Matrixed Performing” is performance outside of such preconstructed frames. Even earlier, in his “Introduction” to the first collection of Happening scenarios in 1965, Kirby wrote, “A great variety of non-matrixed performance takes place outside of the theatre. In the classroom, at sporting events, at any number of private gatherings and public presentations. … The public speaker can function in front of an audience without creating and projecting an artificial context

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of personality … [as can] the football player making a tackle, the train conductor calling out stops, even the construction worker with his audience of sidewalk supervisors” (Kirby, 1965, p. 15). As he concluded in “On Acting and Not Acting,” “The various degrees of representation and personification are colors in the spectrum of human performance” (Kirby, 1972, p. 15). Kirby’s reflections, growing out the changes in the nature of performance he perceived in Happenings, helped conceptually to open the door to what would become Performance Studies (the study of performance as a universal human activity that goes on in many, if not all, aspects of social life) and, at least by implication, to the use of performance beyond the theatre to engage social and political issues, that is, to what we are calling performance activism.

Be-Ins Be-Ins were a mass phenomenon in the late sixties in the United States. Inspired by the sit-ins of the Labor and Civil Rights Movements and the Teach-Ins of the Anti-War Movement, at Be-ins thousands of mostly young people would gather in urban parks on weekend afternoons, dressed up in their “hippie” costumes to play music, dance, smoke pot (in some cases, drop acid) and socialize. These were not demonstrations for or against any specific political issues, but they were demonstrations that a different way of being in the world (a “counter culture”) was being experimented with. People were there to put themselves on display, to perform a new version of themselves. To some, this new performance became a life choice, for others it was put aside, at least temporarily, when they returned to their suburban homes and high schools. The first Be-In took place in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on January 14, 1967 and was attended between 20,000 and 30,000 people. (Cohen, n.d.). Be-Ins took place in New York City’s Central Park at least once a year between 1967 and 1970. Here is a description by Don McNeill writing in the Village Voice, then the preeminent left-liberal cultural paper in New York City, of the first Be-In in Central Park on Easter Day of 1967 (which I attended/participated in as a 17-year-old). Laden with daffodils, ecstatic in vibrant costumes and painted faces, troupes of hippies gathered on a hill overlooking Central Park’s Sheep Meadow to Be-In. By sunset, 10,000 celebrants swarmed in great rushes across the meadow, and thousands more were dispersed throughout the

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rest of the park. Bonfires burned on the hills, their smoke mixing with bright balloons among the barren trees and high, high above kites wafted in the air. Rhythms and music and mantras from all corners of the meadow echoed in exquisite harmony, and thousands of lovers vibrated into the night. It was miraculous. … Layers of inhibitions were peeled away and, for many, love and laughter became suddenly fresh. (D. McNeill in Ortega, 2010)

While there is no direct line to be traced between the artists who created Happenings and the cultural activists who organized and participated in the Be-Ins, in retrospect, it’s clear that they shared an implicit understanding of being able to perform oneself—either as an artistic or a political statement.

Flash Mobs Echoes of Happenings and Be-Ins are clearly audible in the “flash mobs” that flourished in the first decade of the twenty-first century and continue, albeit at diminished pace, today. Enabled by the Internet, Flash Mobs involve groups of people gathering at a predetermined public space at a predetermined time for an often-absurd public performance. The first Flash Mob, initiated by Bill Wasik, an editor of Harper’s Magazine, consisted of 200 people descending on the rug department of Macy’s department store in Manhattan where, in his words, they, wandered over to the carpet in the back left corner and, as instructed, informed clerks that they all lived together in a Long Island City commune and were looking for a “love rug” (Wasik, 2006). Another early Flash Mob that Wasik organized involved hundreds of people slipping, by ones and twos, into the Grand Hyatt Hotel next to Grand Central Station, taking elevators and escalators to the mezzanine that surround the hotel’s lush lobby and staring down at the lobby for five minutes, after which, “the ring erupted into precisely fifteen seconds of tumultuous applause—for itself— after which it scattered back downstairs and out the door, just as the police cruisers were rolling up, flashers on” (Wasik). Flash Mobs rapidly proliferated around the United States and Europe and evolved into more complex aesthetic projects such as dances that were rehearsed beforehand. Some have branched off into pragmatic ends, such as staging public marriage proposals. Indeed, there are now Flash Mob production companies that charge money to organize mobs (Flash Mob

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America, n.d.). Although he has not indicated an awareness of there being precursors to his innovation, Wasik’s description of his intentionality in launching Flash Mobs reveals a clear affinity to Happenings, “…seeing how all culture in New York was demonstrably commingled with scenesterism, the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender, it should theoretically be possible to create an art project consisting of pure scene—meaning the scene would be the entire point of the work, and indeed would itself constitute the work” (Flash Mob America). Flash Mobs have not, for the most part, been approached as a form of political activism. Indeed, when the term was first introduced in 2004 to the 11th Edition of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, it was defined as an “unusual pointless act.” Those Flash Mobs that were subsequently organized to draw attention to particular political/social issues quickly earned a new label, “Smart Mobs.” A striking example of a Smart Mob was organized in 2013 by Maria José Contreras in Santiago, Chile. Using Facebook, she sent out a call for 1210 people to lie down, head to foot, along the city’s main avenue on the eve of the 40th Anniversary of the military coup that violently overthrew Chile’s democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. The number 1210 was for each person kill or “disappeared” under the ensuing dictatorship. The requested number of people appeared and laid down for exactly eleven minutes, dispersing before anyone could be arrested (Taylor, 2016, pp. 20–22). The performance activist nature of that Smart Mob is obvious. Yet even when the initiators of a Flash Mob insist on its apolitical intent, it’s worth considering that the “unusual” is based on disruption of what is usual, and that a “pointless” break with purposeful business-as-usual is implicitly making a social statement. Wasik himself points out that Flash Mobs generate, “…a sort of fundamental joy at seeing society overtaken, order stymied; at silently infiltrating this pseudopublic space, this corporate space, these chain stores and shopping malls, and then rising at once to overrun them” (Wasik, 2006, p. 9). In this regard, the Flash Mob harks back to the “fundamental joy” of the Be-In and, in a significant way, parallels the explicit performance activism of groups like Improv Everywhere, which stage disruptive scenes in public spaces. What is evident in all these activities, however political or not their motive, is performance outside of a theatre building and the

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presumption that one can perform oneself , as distinct from a character, and as independent of a written script—both of which can be traced back, in terms of art, to the Happening. They also share the implication of a tear in, or at least a smudge on, the dominate cultural fabric, in particular, relative to the assumptions about the proper use of public spaces. In this regard they become, in fact, a form of performance-based activism.

References Carlson, M. (2004). Performance: A critical introduction. Routledge. Cohen, A. (n.d.). About the human be-in. Allen Cohen. http://s91990482.onl inehome.us/allencohen/be-in.html Flash Mob America. (n.d.). Who we are. http://www.flashmobamerica.com/ who-we-are/ Kaprow, A. (1965). A statement. In M. Kirby (Ed.), Happenings: An illustrated anthology (pp. 44–46). E.P. Dutton. Kirby, M. (1965). Happenings: An illustrated anthology. E.P. Dutton. Kirby, M. (1972). On acting and not acting. The Drama Review: TDR, 6(1), 3–15. Ortega, T. (2010, February 5). The 1967 Central Park be-in: A ‘medieval pageant.’ Village Voice, XII (24). https://www.villagevoice.com Rosenberg, H. (1952). The American action painters. Art News, 51(8), 22–50. Schechner, R. (1973). Environmental theater. Hawthorn Books. Taylor, D. (2016). Performance. Duke University Press. Wasik, B. (2006, March). My crowd or phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob. Harper’s Magazine. https://harpers.org

CHAPTER 7

Performance Art

Performance Art emerged as a distinct art form in the wake of Happenings and Be-Ins, and amidst Second Wave Feminism and the general performatory context of the 1960s counter-culture. Performance Art has since taken many forms—from the framing of everyday events as performance to publicly performed self-mutilation—and wrestled with a wide variety of content—from the intensely autobiographical to intensely political. Some of the earliest performance artists, like the creators of Happenings, started out as painters. In 1963, Carolee Schneemann, recently arrived in New York with an MFA from the University of Illinois, created Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, in which she had photographs taken of her naked—her body painted to reinforce the connection between paint strokes and her body—posing among various materials, inanimate and animate, including feathers, mirror shards, and snakes. “I wanted my actual body to be combined with the work as an integral material,” she later wrote (Breitwieser, 2016, p. 116). Another pioneer of Performance Art, Yoko Ono (yes, the Yoko Ono who later married John Lennon) said she came to Performance Art because, “I thought art was a verb, rather than a noun” (The Art Story, n.d.). Among her early Performance Art events were Cut Piece, which was first performed at Yamachi Concert Hall in Kyoto, Japan in 1964. Ono sat passively on the stage with a pair © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_7

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of scissors in front of her and invited audience members to come up and snip small pieces of her clothing off until she was naked (Concannon, 2008). The centrality of the individual body in both these pieces is clear, as is the fact that both artists were women. Each of these (interrelated) facts would be significant in the evolution of Performance Art. Relative to the centrality of the individual body in Performance Art, Schechner points out, “Performance art evolved to some degree from painting, therefore, unlike theatre, dance and music, much of performance art was and is the work of individual artists using their own selves— bodies, psyches, experiences, notebooks—as material” (Schechner, 2002, p. 139). From the perspective of the unmooring of performance from the theatre, and with an eye toward emergent performance activism, this focus on performing oneself as distinct from a character was important for at least two reasons. First, it re-enforced what Agit-Prop, Improv, and Happenings had posited that, “Everyone can act. Everyone can improvise” (Spolin, 1999, p. 3). Secondly, performance artists, in approaching themselves and their lives as (performance) art, were also challenging, through their practice, the assumption that performance was an activity distinct from daily life. Indeed, a number of early performance artists made a point of fore-fronting mundane daily activity. Tom Marioni in 1969 organized a beer party at the Oakland (California) Museum, and called it, “The Act of Drinking Beer with Friends is the Highest Form of Art.” Bonny Sherk’s “Sitting Still” (1970), consisted of her doing just that, sitting still in a formal evening gown in places such as a garbage dump or near the road leading to the Golden Gate Bridge (Loeffler & Tong, 1989, pp. 380–381; React Feminism, n.d.). For her “Cleaning the Griddle” (1973), Sherk gathered people to watch her clean the griddle at Andy’s Donuts in San Francisco where she was working as a short order cook. Implicit in this was the notion of framing. The stage has been the dominate frame through which we identified performance—what happened on stage was performance; what we did off stage was not. However, gathering in Andy’s Donuts to watch Sherk clean the griddle is also a socially constructed frame for viewing people’s actions as performance. Some early Performance Artists were explicit in their manipulation of the framing activity. Art and theatre critic Linda Frye Brunham, reports that Linda Montano, “…cordoned off whole sections of her life as art, in which every act she performs is to be seen as an art work simply because she has declared it so. In ‘Home Endurance’ (1973) she stayed

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home for a week and asked friends to visit her, documenting all thoughts, foods, phone calls and visits.” Thus, her domestic life—cooking, cleaning, chatting—was framed as a performance (Burnham, 1986, p. 40). Sherk later described her early works as “… theoretical and practical. The theory had to do with being who you are and being able to be playful in situations it’s a style of existence” (Loeffler & Tong, 1989, p. 380). Performance as a “style of existence” is quite different from the then prevailing understanding of performance as (only) a highly skilled activity requiring talent and training that takes place on a stage. In an essay tellingly entitled “Performing Life” penned in 1979, Allan Kaprow, the innovator of the Happening, wrote, “Of course, when you do life consciously, life becomes pretty strange—paying attention changes the thing attended. The new art genre [Performance Art] therefore came about, or more accurately, became an art/life genre, reflecting equally the artificial aspects of everyday life and the lifelike qualities of created art. For example, it was clear to me how formal and culturally learned the act of shaking hands is; just try to pump a hand five or six times instead of two and you’ll cause instant anxiety” (Kaprow, 2003, p. 195). Like Sherk’s “style of existence,” Kaprow here talks of performance as a “life genre,” each of them groping toward a vocabulary for consciously living life as a performance, a concept/activity which, as we will see, was not only emerging in the art world of the 1960s but also in the politics of life as lived in the counter culture of the time. Relative to the emergence of what, later, would be called performance activism, the other important contribution of Performance Art was the fact that women pioneered the art and were predominate among its practitioners. In the United States, the woman’s movement and Performance Art emerged hand-in-hand. It’s the woman’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s that gave us the slogan/concept of “the personal is the political”—that how we see ourselves (and others) and how we live our personal lives are not primarily a matter of individual choice but are shaped by historical forces and social conventions beyond the individual’s will. Therefore, choosing to live one’s “personal” life differently—particularly if that choice involves rejecting or resisting oppressive conventions and relationships—has significant “political” implications. An art form that, for the most part, consists of the performance of/on an individual body, particularly the oppressed and repressed female body, lent itself to using that body to make larger social/political challenges to the status quo.

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Writing in 1983, theatre historian Moira Roth, drew the connection this way: Performance art began in the late 1960s at the same time as the women’s movement. … as women plunged into public battles, they also took on, within themselves, private ones. Through consciousness-raising groups, harsh feminist manifestos, poetic evocations in literature and scholarly studies, women—including many early performers—individually explored and collectively validated the substance of their lives. They re-examined and redefined the models on which they had based their self-images. As early feminists recognized that what had previously been designated (and, accordingly, often dismissed) as merely individual experience was, in actuality, an experience shared by many others, they developed the concept that ‘the personal is the political.’ It was this fresh and passionate investigation of self and of identification with other women that created the fervent supportive alliance between the first women performers and their audiences. (Roth, 1983, pp. 16–17)

Perhaps most emblematic of the feminist context/content of much Performance Art was Carolee Schneemann’s 1975 performance “Interior Scroll.” In East Hampton, New York, before an audience consisting mostly of other women artists, Schneemann climbed on a table naked, struck a series of poses that nude life models often do for painters. She then reached into her vagina and slowly pulled out a scroll of paper and read what was written on it, a text consisting of a male critic’s critique of her work as being among, other things, full of “personal clutter,” self-indulgence, overly emotional, and “primitive” (Schechner, 2002, pp. 137–138). Nevertheless, it should be noted that not all Performance Art was/is created/performed by women (far from it) and its politic has hardly been homogeneous. Focusing on the individual human body also brought to the surface (or, perhaps more accurately, into performance) some violent, often masochistic, impulses for some male performance artists. Chris Burdon in “Shot” (1971) had a friend shoot him in the left arm with a 0.22 caliber rifle. In “Fire Roll” (1973), he set his pants on fire and rolled around on the floor to put out the flames. In “Trans-fixed” (1974) he had himself crucified, with nails through his hands, to the outside of a Volkswagen (Carlson, 2004, pp. 113–113). Bob Flanagan in “Nailed” (1989) nailed his penis to a board while singing, “If I Had a Hammer” (Sandahl, 2000). In another performance, Flanagan sewed

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up his lips. Occasionally, the self-mutilation was done to make an explicit political point. In 1989, Las Yeguas del Apocalipsis, a Chilean performance arts duo consisting of Pedro Segundo Mardones Lemebel and Francisco Casas Silva, performed “The Conquest.” Created for Dia de la raza (Indigenous Peoples Day) the pair danced a cueca, the national dance of Chile, barefoot on broken Coke-a-Cola bottles and then, walked their bleeding feet all over a map of Latin America to, in their words, draw, “a parallel between the colonial process of ‘The Conquest’ and the support that North American imperialism has provided Latin American military governments” (Yeguas del Apocalipsis, n.d.). There has been enough this kind of performance, almost exclusively by men, that performance scholar Kathy O’Dell has dubbed it a Performance Art subgenre, “Masochistic Performance” (O’Dell, 1998, p. 2). Performance Art has been an international phenomenon since its inception, appearing virtually simultaneously in the United States, Europe, and Japan. It has since spread around the world, particularly to Latin America, where, for the most part, while remaining focused on the individual body, it has often taken a more outward facing political stance. For example, Gabriela Salgado reports on a Performance Art event in Mexico City, “Ema Villanueva walks nude the 46-km-long Avenue of Insurgentes. She asks the passersby to write their opinions about the student revolt with felt pens on her body. No one touches her inappropriately. By the time she finishes her walk, her body is a billboard of citizen opinion” (Salgado & Gómez-Peña, 2012). This description contains much to contrast with North American Performance Art. The individual body remains the focus, as does the reframing of the activity as a performance. However, the performance takes place in a public space not in a gallery. The body is turned into a vehicle for an open discussion of the student movement, not as a means to attack an art critic. The performance is done for everyone Villanueva passes on the street, not for a small group of invited fellow artists. In this sense, Performance Art in much of Latin America has morphed into a form of performance activism as we are coming to understand it here.1 How and to what extent this divergence has taken place is beyond the scope of this discussion. Suffice it to say, that the political situation in Latin America over the last fifty years has been more nakedly repressive and violent 1 For an overview of Latin American Performance Art see Taylor and Costantino (2003).

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than that of the United States and arts funding is virtually non-existent. Guillermo Gomez-Peña, a Mexican-born Performance Artist, based in the United States since 1978, reflects that while in the United States, “My artist colleagues survive largely from grants, commissions, and part-time academia,” his artist friends in Latin America earn a living doing non-art related jobs while creating their Performance Art on the side (Salgado & Gómez-Peña, 2012). Performance Art was also aligned with the emerging academic disciple of Performance Studies. Marvin Carlson, theatre and performance historian writes, “…the rise of performance studies in the academy was paralleled by the rise of a new genre in the art and theatre world called ‘performance’ or ‘performance art,’ which, like the historical study of performance, placed its emphasis upon the present body instead of on the absent text of traditional theatre” (Carlson, 2004, p. 83). The founding by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta of Performing Arts Journal in 1976, and the steady shift of The Drama Review (TDR), under Richard Schechner’s leadership, from a focus on drama (that is, scripted theatre) to the much broader frame of performance provided platforms for emerging performance studies researchers and scholars—and, not surprisingly, what they often researched and wrote about was “performance art.” This, in turn, provided validation to the performance artists and made their work widely known, at least in academia. Performance Art’s focus on the human body itself as the work of art/the means of expression continues the thread seen in agit-prop, improv, and, to some extent, in Happenings in opening performance to non-actors and creating performance without the accruements of theatre. As Schechner, put it, “… performance artists have explored many ways of performing themselves” (Schechner, 2002, p. 64). The phrase “performing themselves,” was not a concept current in popular (or, for that matter, “high”) culture until the emergence of Happenings. On Kirby’s spectrum of “matrixed performance,” performance artists, lacking a text, character, or formal stage, are far less matrixed than theatre actors. Perhaps the most original and radical contribution of performance art has been its capacity to reframe performance, that is, to see performance in everyday life, and the spread of that concept to academia and politics.

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References The Art Story. (n.d.). Yoko Ono. https://www.theartstory.org/artist/ono-yoko/ Breitwieser, S. (Ed.). (2016). Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic painting. Museum der Moderne. Burnham, L. F. (1986). High performance, performance art and me. The Drama Review: TDR, 30(1), 15–51. Carlson, M. (2004). Performance: A critical introduction. Routledge. Concannon, K. (2008). Yoko Ono’s CUT PIECE: From text to performance and back again. Imagine Peace. http://imaginepeace.com/archives/2680 Kaprow, A. (2003). Performing life. In A. Kapow & J. Kelly (Eds.), Essays on the blurring of art and life (pp. 195–200). University of California Press. Loeffler, C. E., & Tong, D. (Eds.). (1989). Performance anthology: Source book of California performance art. Last Gasp Press and Contemporary Arts Press. O’Dell, K. (1998). Contract with the skin: Masochism, performance art, and the 1970s. University of Minnesota Press. React Feminism. (n.d.). Bonnie Ora Sherk (USA). http://www.reactfeminism. org/nr1/artists/sherk_en.html Roth, M. (Ed.). (1983). The amazing decade: Women and performance art in America, 1970–1980. Astro Artz. Salgado, G., & Gómez-Peña, G. (2012, March 14). The forbidden body: Notes on the Latin American live art scene. Art Practical. https://www.artpractical. com/feature/the_forbidden_body Sandahl, C. (2000). Bob Flanagan: Taking it like a man. Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, XV (1), 97–105. Schechner, R. (2002). Performance studies: An introduction. Routledge. Spolin, V. (1999). Improvisation for the theatre: A handbook of teaching and directing techniques (3rd ed.). Northwestern University Press. Taylor, D., & Costantino, R. (Eds.). (2003). Holy terrors: Latin American women perform. Duke University Press. Yeguas del Apocalipsis. (n.d.). 1989 / The Conquest of America. http://english. yeguasdelapocalipsis.cl/1989-the-conquest-of-america/

CHAPTER 8

Avant-Garde Theatre

As we have seen, much of the activity in the first half of the twentieth Century that loosened performance from its confines in the theatre came from outside the theatre—revolutionary political upheavals in Russia and Germany, a settlement house in Chicago, the emerging practice of psychology in Vienna, and, most recently, from the visual arts. This is hardly surprising. Institutions are, by their nature, conservative. They come into being to achieve certain ends and establish structures, conventions, traditions, and their own languages shaped toward those ends. Theatre is, among other things, an institution stretching back more than 2,000 years. Like other institutions, it’s slow to change its core function, and despite its multitude of forms and styles, at the core of the theatre is the dynamic of a passive audience watching social conflict performed by live actors (or, in some cases, puppets) on some sort of stage or another. Yet, over the last century or so, even as these outside forces have asserted their influences on it, there has been a civil war being waged within the institution of the theatre itself. The insurgents have tried many tactics and been known by many names. However varied the attempts to shake up or transform the theatre, they can all be viewed as part of an ongoing insurgency generally referred to in the theatre and in scholarship and literature about the theatre as the “avant-garde.” In the battles waged in this institutional civil war, the avant-garde has generated a number of significant © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_8

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challenges to the theatre’s institutional assumptions, in particular, to the assumed relationship between actors and audiences, challenges that have helped prepare the ground for performance activism. The term—French for the “advance guard”—harks back to the journal L’Avant-Garde founded in 1878 by the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin (Innes, 1993, p. 6). Indeed, the avant-garde in the arts (for it was never a term limited just to the theatre), has usually, although not universally, been associated with the Left, with the anarchist, socialist, and communist movements whose challenges to capitalism and its culture have, in many ways, defined the political history of the last 150 years. This is not to say that most avant-garde artists were political activists or organizers, most were not. Although, for example, the German playwright and director Bertolt Brecht openly supported and worked with the communist movement and Judith Malina and Julian Beck, the founders of the Living Theatre in the United States, were anarchists and pacifists who regularly participated in non-violent civil disobedience, most avant-garde theatre people thought of themselves first and foremost as artists, artists who, no doubt, identified with the utopian ideals of the Left but who saw their contribution to changing the world as being embodied in their theatre work. The avant-garde, since its emergence around the turn of the twentieth Century, has gone through many “movements,” some short lived, others with longer-lasting influence. Symbolism, Expressionism, Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, Epic Theatre, Theatre of the Absurd, are a few of them. What they had/have in common is the assumption that challenging our accepted ways of seeing and behaving was their role as artists in the historic task of social and cultural transformation. Theatre historian Arnold Aronson, describes this common ground: Avant-garde performance strives toward a radical restructuring of the way in which an audience views and experiences the very act of theatre, which in turn must transform the way in which the spectators view themselves and their world. Traditional ways of seeing are disrupted so that habitual patterns, which inevitably reinforce social norms, are broken. A change in an individual’s attitudes, associations, or beliefs is effected not through a straightforward presentation of ideas but through a fundamental restructuring of perception and understanding. In other words, the very notion of what is theatre is brought into question. (Aronson, 2005, p. 7)

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Although much avant-garde theatre rapidly calcified into affected stylized niches of the institutional theatre, at its best the avant-garde, did, indeed, bring “the very notion of what is theatre” into question. That is the avantgarde’s link to and legacy for performance activism.

Dadaism Relative to the emergence of performance activism, the three most significant early precursors within the avant-garde were the Dadaists, the Futurists, and Epic Theatre. Dadaism, which emerged in Zurich, Switzerland during World War I, rapidly (and briefly) spread to Berlin and other German cities, Paris, New York, even Tokyo in the years after the war. It was a cultural/political reaction to what its artists considered the totally senseless slaughter of World War I in which 10 million people were killed and 20 million wounded. Hugo Ball, a German actor who fled to Switzerland because of his opposition to the war, was one of the original Zurich Dadaists. In addition to his artistic work, during his time in Zurich he translated the works of the Russian anarchist Bakunin into German. He said Dada—deliberately irrational and provocative—was meant to shock those who regarded, “… all this civilized carnage as a triumph of European intelligence” (Trachtman, 2006). Ball also created one of the most famous Dada performances. In 1916 at the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich he recited a long nonsense poem, “Karawane,” while dressed in a costume of his own creation, “My legs were in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, which came up to my hips so that I looked like an obelisk. Over it I wore a huge coat collar cut out of carboard (sic), scarlet inside and gold outside. It was fastened in the neck in such a way that I could give the impression of a winglike movement by raising and lowering my elbows. I also wore a high, blue-and-white-striped witchdoctor’s hat” (Hugo Ball quoted in Melzer, 1994, pp. 62–63). Relative to our inquiry, what’s notable in the performances of Ball and the other Dadaists is that, in the words of theatre historian Julie Rongved Amundsen, “In this performance Ball did not represent anything outside himself although he took a different form than he would have outside of the performance situation” (Amundsen, 2013). The foreshadowing of the approach to performance in Happenings and in Performance Art is clear. Kirby, in 1965, when looking back and the precursors of the Happenings, notes, “It is in Dada that we find the origins of nonmatrixed performing” (Kirby, 1965, p. 29).

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The Dadaists also used non-theatrical spaces for performances and generated simultaneous performances that were unconnected to each other or to a narrative. In Cologne in 1921, they held an art exhibit in a small court behind a café. The court could only be reached by walking through a public urinal. At the opening of the urinal, a young woman in a communion dress recited obscene poetry. In Paris that same year, a gallery opening for an exhibit of collages by Dada artist Max Ernst, was turned into a performance event. Two of the Dadaists stood in the middle of the gallery and shook hands repeatedly. Another meowed like a cat throughout the opening. A voice in a closet improvised shouted insults. Yet another Dadaist performer repeatedly yelled, “It’s raining on a skull!” (Kirby, 1965, pp. 29–30). In events like these we can ascertain elements of the disruptive spirit of Flash Mobs. In Berlin, some Dadaists took their disruptive performances into institutions of authority. Johannes Baader attended a Catholic mass in order to interrupt the priest by shouting out questions about how much he actually cared about Jesus. Baader was quickly arrested. He also visited the Weimar Parliament where he interrupted the proceedings and handed out Dada pamphlets (Amundsen, 2013, p. 27). Erika Fischer-Lichte, a German theatre historian and theorist, points out, “The theatrical actions of the Dadaists at the original sites of bourgeois ritual such as the church and government thus exposed the rituals themselves – religious service, parliamentary session – as theatrical processes. In that theatre was introduced into life this way, life was denounced – or discovered? – as theatre” (Fischer-Lichte, 1997, p. 51). What Baader and his fellow Dadaist were doing resembles what Abbie Hoffman did in 1967 when he and others, from the observation deck, threw dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and watched the stock brokers scramble to pick them up. In the 1960s this would come to be called guerrilla theatre; Baader and his fellow Dadaists, in these actions, could be considered among the first performance activists.

Futurism The Futurists were distinct from the Dadaists in that they were not a leftist response to the “Great War.” Futurism pre-dated the war—Filippo Tammaso Marinetti, published the “Futurist Manifesto” in 1909—and expressed an enthusiastic embrace of modernism, which to the Futurists meant speed, technology, machines (especially planes and autos) and

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a scornful rejection of tradition. The movement was strongest in Italy and Russia, both countries then primarily agrarian, semi-feudal countries experiencing their first major burst of modern industrialization, which may help explain the movement’s attraction to young urban, upper-middle class men eager to reject tradition. They were almost exclusively men. Indeed, Futurism, particularly the Italian variant, contained a strong dose of what might, charitably, be termed hyper-masculinity, including a glorification of violence and misogyny. The Italian Futurists defy the generalization that avant-gardists were on the Left. Marinetti, who wrote the “Futurist Manifesto,” later wrote the “Fascist Manifesto” for Mussolini and many of the Italian Futurists became enthusiastic fascists. Nonetheless, like the Dadaists, they prefigured the directions art in general and some theatre in particular would take in the 1960s. Carlson observes, “The interest of the futurists in movement and change drew them away from the static work of art and provided an important impetus for the general shift in modern artistic interest from product to process, turning even painters and sculptors into performance artists” (Carlson, 2004, p. 98). The Futurists, like the Dadaists, also prefigured the Happenings of the 1960s. Theatre historian Anna Lawton, writes, “The hallmark of Futurist performance was the Futurist ‘evening.’ It consisted of a wild ‘happening’ in which the Futurists declaimed their verses, read manifestos and lectures, performed concerts of ‘noises,’ and exchanged verbal and even physical abuse with the audience. The idea of the evening was to expand the stage, to go beyond the boundaries of the artificially limited performance space, to turn the whole city into a stage and life into a performance” (Lawton, 1988, p. 10). While the Italian Futurists primarily restricted their performances to cabaret stages and coffee houses, the Russian Futurists moved more literarily to “expand the stage.” According to theatre historian Roselee Goldberg, the Russian Futurists, moved their Futurism outside to public spaces. In so doing they were, among other things, performing for other than their fellow artists; they were performing for whoever they encountered. “They walked the streets in outrageous attire, their faces painted, sporting top hats, velvet jackets, earrings, and radishes or spoons in their button-holes” (Goldberg, 2001, p. 32). The resemblance to 1960s BeIns and turn of the twenty-first Century Flash Mobs, as well as to, for example, Ema Villanueva walking nude along the Avenue of Insurgentes in Mexico City is clear. As in Italy, Russian Futurism pre-dated World War

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I and the Soviet Revolution and aggressively advocated for a dynamic and provocative modernism. However, given the very different political roads followed by Italy and Russia in the 1920s and ’30s, it is perhaps not surprising that the Russian Futurists took a left turn and threw their lot with the Bolsheviks. In December, 1917, one month after the outbreak of the Communist-led revolution Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Education Commissioner of the new government, invited one hundred and twenty well know writers, painters, and actors to a conference on the arts under the new regime. Only five showed up. One of the five was Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (Slonim, 1961, p. 229). He reflected later, “To accept or not to accept? There was no question for me. It was my revolution” (Deák, 1973, p. 47). Mayakovsky and his fellow Futurists embraced the Revolution and the Revolution embraced the Futurists. They went on to play an influential role in the Soviet Union’s cultural flowering in the 1920s. Mayakovsky was the most popular poet and playwright of the 1920s in the Soviet Union. He drew huge crowds to poetry readings and lectures in factories, workers clubs and public squares (Lawton, 1988, p. 43). It was the first time that avant-garde artists generated massive followings among “ordinary” people. This partnership lasted little more than a decade. As Stalin consolidated power and put the brakes on the revolutionary process (including, or perhaps especially, its cultural components), Futurism—along with Agit-Prop and other innovative cultural efforts—were curtailed and repressed. In 1930 Mayakovsky put a bullet through his head. Lawton notes, “Futurism died together with its most flamboyant representative” (Lawton, p. 48). Like Dadaism, Futurism as an artistic movement didn’t survive the 1920s. Neither, however, was forgotten among avant-garde theatre artists, or among theatre historians.

Epic Theatre Dadaism and Futurism had short shelf lives, they embraced not only theatre but a wide range of arts, and only indirectly impacted on theatre in the years that followed. Epic Theatre, on the other hand, was an explicitly theatre movement and, primarily through it most well-known advocate, the playwright, director and theatre theorist Bertolt Brecht, had a direct impact not only on the experimental theatre of the 1960s but is also directly linked to the creation of Theatre of the Oppressed. Epic Theatre was born of the intercourse between radicalized German theatre professionals and the Agit-Prop movement, and that union was

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first embodied in the work of Erwin Piscator. As an actor drafted into the army, he served two years in the infantry on the Western Front and then was assigned to an army theatre group that performed popular comedies for the troops. Demobilized in 1917, he moved to Berlin where he was introduced to both Marxism and Dada. When, in 1919, the short-lived Spartacist (Communist) Revolt was defeated and its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, assassinated, Piscator joined the newly formed Communist Party and became the first professionally trained theatre artist to embrace Agit-Prop. His Proletarisches Theatre (Proletarian Theatre) was mobile, composed primarily of amateur working-class actors and performed for union and political meetings and in beer halls in industrial areas of the city. Although the Proletarisches Theatre lasted just a little under two years, Piscator’s impact on the German Agit-Prop movement and its influence on him, was lasting. The theatrical skill and energy that he brought to political rallies and meetings inspired the formation of other Agit-Prop troupes. Indeed, theatre historian Christopher Innes claims, “It was only after Piscator had proved the practical use of the theatre as an instrument for propaganda that the K.P.D., the German Communist Party, began to sponsor permanent Agitprop Troupes” (Innes, 1972, p. 24). Once Piscator began directing professionally, his audiences were drawn from the millions of socialist and communist supporters in Germany in the 1920s. Piscator’s Epic Theatre, like Agit-Prop, was not interested in the “realistic” details of daily life. He sought ways to bring the bigger frame of social structure, class dynamics, and of history to the stage. Once the resources of the professional theatre became available to him, the means for expanding the stage toward those ends multiplied. Piscator was the first to bring slides, film clips, statistical charts, and recorded voices to the theatre. This technology allowed him to expand the action beyond individual characters and illusionary sets. For example, in Konjunktur (Economic Competition) (1928) by Leo Lania, oil derricks were built on stage by the actors while the audience watched the play’s through line—competition for oil fields in Albania—unfold. At one point, while a fight between two characters for the possession of the oilfields was happening on stage, on the screen in the background warships were being launched in preparation for taking the oilfields out of commission (Brecht & Willet, 1964, pp. 77–78; Innes, 1972, pp. 85–86). Piscator also adapted Agit-Prop’s montage structure. The most famous example of this is The Red Revue, created and performed for the Tenth Party

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Conference of the German Communist Party in 1925. It had no plot but was unified through its projection of the history and politics of the party. It consisted of fourteen scenes that varied widely in terms of style and content. It included slide projections and film, music and song, dance and acrobatics, action painting, and agit-prop style (non-realist) acting (Innes, 1972, p. 44). Piscator had to flee after Hitler’s election, eventually, winding up in New York City. Starting in 1940, he taught theatre at the New School for Social Research, established by progressive German academics and intellectuals who had escaped the Nazis. Among his students were Harry Belafonte, Marlon Bando, and, most significantly relative to our story, Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theatre.1 In the face of the persecution of leftists in the United States in the late 1940s, Piscator returned to (West) Germany in 1951. By this point, he was more a social democrat than a communist and in 1964 he became the director of the Frei Volksbühne (Free People’s Theatre) in Berlin where he had directed many of his most impactful productions in the 1920s. There he pioneered documentary drama—plays complied entirely from actual transcripts, letters, speeches, etc.—including two with significant international impact: The Case of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Heinar Kipphardt and The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth. Despite the communist content of his 1920s productions, Piscator’s technological innovations, however radical at the time, have since been integrated into the mainstream of theatre. On Broadway, for example, in the 2000s and 2010s, the Belgian director Ivo van Hove utilized film and simultaneous video in Network, a conventional realist drama based on the film of the same name, and a revival of the classic American musical West Side Story. Epic Theatre’s lasting influence owes more to Piscator’s colleague Bertolt Brecht. Like Piscator, Brecht was a Communist and, unlike Piscator, he remained so until his death in East Berlin in 1956. For him, Epic Theatre, which he adopted from Piscator and went on to develop considerably, was nothing less than an effort to change the nature of the theatre itself and that change was, to his thinking, inexorably linked to the political struggle to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism. While he was a skilled director, Brecht was also a poet, playwright, and theatre 1 For a discussion of Piscator’s influence on Malina and the Living Theatre, see Malina (2012).

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theorist. His play scripts and theoretical writings provided him with a platform that far surpassed that of Piscator. His version of Epic Theatre has spanned the globe and its impact continues to this day. Starting as a medical student in Munich during the war, Brecht served in a year in an army hospital. During the Spartacist Uprising he was elected a member of the short-lived Munich Soviet. His first few plays were in the Expressionist style then popular in the German theatre, which featured extreme emotion (and acting), particularly anxiety and rage, along with the subjective viewpoint of a (usually) middle class young man. In 1924 Brecht moved to Berlin where he encountered Dada, cabaret, Agit-Prop, and Piscator. In 1928, he worked as Piscator’s co-director in the production of The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweik by Max Brod and Hans Reimann, a comic anti-war piece about a Czech “Everyman” drafted into the war. Brecht’s plays proved popular in the politically pumped Berlin theatre of the 1920s. His musical, The Threepenny Opera (1928) with music by Kurt Weil, catapulted him to international fame and fortune, with productions in France and the Soviet Union in 1930 and a Broadway run in 1933. Over the course of the decade, he left the subjectivity of Expressionism behind as he began to study Marxism and develop his own version of Epic Theatre. Brecht maintained that the Epic Theatre was a challenge to the very premises of western theatre, in particular to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis, which was, for Brecht, essentially conservative. It was, he argued, tied to a passive audience that identified and empathized with the major character(s). This left the audience with no agency and re-enforced acceptance of the world-as-it-is. For Brecht, the mainstream theatre had become, a branch of the “…drug traffic conducted by bourgeois show business” (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 89). Here’s how he described the typical audience of his time, “We see entire rows of human beings transported into a peculiar doped state, wholly passive, sunk without trace, seemingly in the grip of a severe poisoning attack” (Brecht & Willet, p. 89). What Brecht wanted, and what he maintained would give theatre an active progressive role, was an audience that was encouraged to think critically. To achieve this, the audience needed to get out of the swamp of sentimentality generated by the traditional theatre, see beyond the psychology of the individual characters and the surfaces of events. “What is ‘natural,’” he wrote, “must have the force of what is startling. This is the only way to expose the laws of cause and effect. People’s activity must simultaneously be so and be capable of being different” (Brecht & Willet, p. 71).

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He pointed to the distinction Aristotle (and many following him) made between dramatic poetry and epic poetry. The latter told a wider-ranging story with an emphasis on narrative. While Brecht embraced Piscator’s innovations in stage technology, the “epic” in his Epic Theatre was derived not from the machinery of the stage, but from what he considered its affinity to epic poetry, its ability to tell a larger tale, distance itself from the action and encourage reflection as distinct from identification, emotionality, and catharsis. For Brecht, the basic means of making the “natural” startling is what he called Verfremdungseffekt, the “making-strange-effect” Verfremdungseffekt was unfortunately rendered as the “alienation effect” by John Willet, the first to translate Brecht’s major theoretical works into English. Unfortunate, to my thinking, because of the negative implications of the word “alienation” has in both Marxism and mainstream psychology. Verfremdungseffekt has also been translated as the “distancing effect,” the “estrangement effect,” and the “making-strange-effect.” I prefer the last because it uses the active verb “making” and the simple, straight-forward adjective, “strange.”2 Brecht described the impact of the “making-strange-effect” this way: “A common use of the A[lienation]effect is when someone says, ‘Have you ever really looked carefully at your watch?’ The questioner knows that I’ve looked at it often enough, and now his question deprives me of the sight which I’ve grown used to and which accordingly has nothing more to say to me. I used to look at it to see the time, and now when he asks me in this importunate way I realize that I have given up seeing the watch itself with an astonished eye; and it is in many ways an astonishing piece of machinery” (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 144). For Brecht, working to create the conditions for empowering the audience to see with “an astonished eye” involved a systematic reform of the theatre, and the making-strange-effect was the means of that reform. In terms of dramatic structure, while he still told stories on stage, he rejected the “well-made” realist play, with its logical build of suspense toward a climax, in favor of an episodic structure in which action could make big jumps in time and space. Thanks to the influence of film and television, 2 The concept of Verfremdungseffekt predates Brecht. The Soviet literary critic Victor Shklovsky in his 1925 book Theory of Prose wrote that “estranging,” or making strange, is the essence of all art, in that it pushes (or empowers) us to see in new ways (Shklovsky, 1990, p. 6).

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this is far more common today than it was during Brecht’s time, but for him it was a way of challenging the established template for viewing human conflict and getting past the pat resolutions of the mainstream theatre. In particular, Brecht was interested in eliminating suspense from the theatre. Borrowing from Piscator, he often used slides to project the title that he gave to each scene, titles which often revealed what was to happen in the scene. He wanted the audience to focus not on what was going to happen, but how it would happen. Brecht also passionately opposed the illusionism of realist theatre, which asked actors and audiences to pretend that what was happening on the stage for the duration was “real.” To remind everyone that the play was just that—“play,” performance, pretense—he wanted the sets distinctly unrealistic and functional (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 212). For similar reasons, he advocated that the lighting sources be visible to all. “There is a point in showing the lighting apparatus openly, as it is one of the means of preventing an unwanted element of illusion,” he wrote “… No one would expect the lighting to be hidden at a sporting event, a boxing match for instance” (Brecht & Willet, p. 141). When it came to music—and most of his plays included songs—he wanted the music and the lyrics to clash. For example, if the lyrics were sad the music should be happy and visa-versa. This, he felt, prevented the audience from being carried away by sentimentality and allowed them to approach the song critically. It follows that Brecht used his songs not to heighten the emotionality of the moment as in traditional opera and the American musical but to comment on the action. All of these techniques have, to various degrees, been integrated into the theatre over the last one hundred years without having the political impact that Brecht hoped for. What was strange in 1930 is rather familiar in 2020. This is perhaps evidence of the ongoing need for new avant-gardes within the theatre, and, on a broader level, as the emergence of performance activism suggests, that theatre qua theatre isn’t able to transcend its institutional imperatives and become a force for social change. However, there is at least one aspect of the making-strange-effect, perhaps the key one, that has escaped commodification into a technique or style and that has reverberated beyond the theatre—Brecht’s approach to acting. Both for anti-illusionist reasons and because he thought it engendered critical thought, Brecht insisted that actors should not entirely identify with the characters they are playing, making it clear

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to the audience (and to themselves) that they are simultaneously the character and themselves. “The actor doesn’t have to be the man he portrays,” he told an interviewer in Denmark in 1934. “He has to describe his character just as it would be described in a book” (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 68). The understanding that an actor is both herself and not herself when performing in a play was not, of course, new to Brecht. It goes back, in terms of intellectual discourse, to at least the enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot who in 1773 wrote The Paradox of Acting, in which he said, “He [the actor] is not the person he represents; he plays it, and plays it so well that you think he is the person; the deception is all on your side; he knows well enough that he is not the person” (Diderot, 1883, p. 17). None-the-less, Brecht is the first major theatre artist to forefront that paradox. He did so in the name eliminating the “deception” of theatre along with the pull toward empathy that comes with “identification” with a character on stage, all of which he felt compromised the viewer’s ability to think critically. In discussing Brecht’s approach to acting, we can’t leave out (as many have) the influence of Agit-Prop. Agit-Prop, as we’ve seen, was wide spread and popular in working-class communities in Germany in the 1920s and Brecht was well aware of it. Indeed, in an article, “The Popular and the Realistic” (1936), which was essentially a polemic against those then imposing “socialist realism” on the progressive cultural movement, Brecht gave this description of Agit-Prop, and implicitly of its influence on his work: When they themselves [the workers] took to writing and acting they were compellingly original. What was known as “agit-prop” art, which a number of second-rate noses were turned up at, was a mine of novel artistic techniques and ways of expression. Magnificent and long-forgotten elements from periods of truly popular art cropped up there, boldly adapted to the new social ends. Daring cuts and compositions, beautiful simplifications (alongside misconceived ones): in all this there was often an astonishing economy and elegance and a fearless eye for complexity. A lot of it may have been primitive, but it was never primitive with the kind of primitivity that affected the supposedly varied psychological portrayals of bourgeois art. It is very wrong to make a few misconceived stylizations a pretext for rejecting a style of representation which attempts (so often successful) to bring out the essential and to encourage abstraction. The sharp eyes of the workers saw through naturalism’s superficial representation of reality. (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 111)

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The connection between Brecht’s and Agit-Prop’s approach to acting becomes clear when you consider that the Agit-Prop performers never pretended to be other than who they were: amateur worker-performers putting on a show they had devised to teach or make a political point. They were simultaneously and explicitly commentators on and performers in the shows they presented. In this sense, Agit-Prop performers established the relationship with the audience that Brecht strove for. “The spectator,” he wrote, “was no longer in any way allowed to submit to an experience uncritically (and without practical consequences) by means of simple empathy with the characters in a play” (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 71). In a 1950 essay, “The Street Scene: A Basic Model for Epic Theatre,” Brecht uses an example of performance in daily life, one that, he writes, “can be seen at any street corner,” as the model for Epic acting: … an eyewitness demonstrating to a collection of people how a traffic accident took place. The bystanders may not have observed what happened, or they may simply not agree with him, may ‘see things a different way’; the point is that the demonstrator acts the behavior of driver or victim or both in such a way that the bystanders are able to form an opinion about the accident … [T]he incident is clearly very far from what we mean by an artistic one. The demonstrator need not be an artist. The capacities he needs to achieve his aim are in effect universal. Suppose he cannot carry out some particular movement as quickly as the victim he is imitating; all he need do is to explain that he moves three times as fast, and the demonstration neither suffers in essentials nor loses its point. On the contrary it is important that he should not be too perfect … He has to avoid presenting himself in such a way that someone calls out ‘What a lifelike portrayal of a chauffeur!’ He must not ‘cast a spell’ over anyone. … If the scene in the theatre follows the street scene in this respect then the theatre will stop pretending not to be theatre, just as the street corner demonstration admits it is a demonstration (and does not pretend to be the actual event). (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 122)

While Brecht’s concern is obviously with the implications that his observation of the “street scene” have for the theatre, from the vantage point of our inquiry, it is telling that Brecht, although not using the phrase nor lingering on its implications, is clearly acknowledging performance in daily life. Erwin Goffman and other sociologists, began to study and write about performance in daily life later in the 1950s. However, it would not

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become a major interest of theatre artists and scholars until the emergence of Performance Studies in the late 1970s. Brecht was looking at performance in daily life as a way to inform and justify his politics and aesthetics on stage. By the later decades of the twentieth Century, political activists were beginning to look at Brecht’s techniques on the stage—and particular, his fore-fronting of the paradox of acting—to inform their activities as political and community organizers off the stage. In addition to clear family resemblances between Brecht’s and AgitProp’s approach to acting, Agit-Prop, Piscator, and Brecht have something else in common—didacticism. Brecht wrote, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, a series of seven short plays, which were mostly produced outside the professional theatre for primarily working-class audiences organized by the Communist Party and the mass organizations it led. He called these plays Lehrstück, learning plays. He wrote of them, “With the learning play … the stage begins to be didactic. (A word of which I, as a man of many years of experience in the theatre, am not afraid.) The theatre becomes a place for philosophers, and such philosophers as not only wish to explain the world, but wish to change it” (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 80). The casts of the Lehrstüke often consisted of a mix of amateurs and professionals and their production was intended to be a learning experience for the actors as well as the audience members. As Brecht instructed, “When performing a Lehrstüke, you must act like pupils” (Brecht & Willet, 1964, p. 33). Brecht sometimes held discussions or distributed surveys after performances of Lehrsüke. When Hitler seized power, the Communist movement was, of course, ruthlessly crushed and Brecht fled for his life. Without his country and the extensive Communist-led political-cultural movement that supported his work, Brecht no longer had an environment for his learning plays and never wrote another one. Despite Brecht’s attempts at audience engagement, his basic understanding of/approach to pedagogy/learning remained traditional, that is, monologic; the teacher was the knower and the student was there to learn what the teacher, in this case, Brecht, had to teach. Augusto Boal, the creator of Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), was a great admirer of Brecht and shared his antipathy toward Aristotelian theatre and its reliance on empathy and catharsis. (The first chapter of Boal’s seminal book, Theatre of the Oppressed, is titled “Aristotle’s Coercive System of Tragedy.”) Yet it

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was Boal, the disciple, who was the first progressive theatre artist to challenge the master’s one-way pedagogy. “As we know, to speak is to take power; whenever we become the speaker we are empowered,” Boal wrote in the Preface to the 2000 edition of Theatre of the Oppressed. “Even in Brecht it’s the dramatist, not the citizen, who chooses the word. … The spectator, who sits stock still, is encouraged to think in a way which is presented as being the right way of thinking, the Truth. It is the dramatist who tells the Truth, who points the way: he is affirming, not asking. We are a long way from Socratic dialogue and close to the Democratic Centralism of some political parties” (Boal, 2000, p. xx). Boal, who we met earlier during our discussion of psychodrama, studied at Columbia University in New York in the early 1950s with the noted theatre critic John Gassner who introduced him the works of Brecht. Boal started his career as a professional director with the Arena Theatre in Sao Paulo in 1956 directing classics of the Western theatre, which he sometimes adapted to set in a Brazilian context. By 1968, Boal was leading the Arena. His politics had moved steadily to the left, and, in large part due to an ongoing playwriting workshop he initiated, the theatre had expanded its range to new work by Brazilian playwrights. As the Sixties progressed, the right-wing military government which had seized power in coup in 1964, became more and more repressive; scripts were censored, productions closed. In 1968, all the theatres in San Paul were surrounded by soldiers and closed. Boal and his actors went to Santo André to put on their banned play. On the fourth day, the theatres in Santo André were surrounded and shut down. Actors began to be kidnapped by the military. By 1970, Boal had turned to the Living Newspaper of Agit-Prop. He and his actors taught students, church parishioners, members of community groups in the slums how to create their own Living Newspaper skits. They organized some thirty groups that performed, Agit-Prop style, anywhere the police couldn’t find them. In 1971, Boal was kidnapped off the street, arrested, tortured, and eventually sent into exile. (This biographical sketch is drawn from Boal, 2001.) It was during the 15 years of exile that followed that Boal began actively experimenting with what would become Theatre of the Oppressed. While Brecht was his major theatrical influence, in terms of pedagogy his major influence was his fellow Brazilian and fellow socialist, the educator Paulo Friere. Friere had grown up in extreme poverty and

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had been teaching both in high schools and adults in poor communities for decades when in 1968 he published his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In it he critiqued what he called “the banking mode of education”—which remains the dominate mode of education all over the world—in which teaching, “…becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize and repeat. … [T]he scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing and storing deposits” (Freire, 1970, p. 58). This approach to education, “… attempts to control thinking and action, leads men to adjust to the world, and inhibits their creative power” (Freire, p. 64). This critique resonated with Boal’s reservations about Brecht’s one-way theatrical didacticism. The alternative proposed by Freire was to change the method of pedagogy from a monolog of teacher to student, into an active dialogue between student and teacher in the process of which they co-created the learning. “Teachers and students,” he wrote, “co-intent on reality, are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge” (Freire, p. 56). Boal’s breakthrough took place in Peru, one of the countries of his exile after being expelled from Brazil. In the early ’70s, during the leftist military government of Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968–1975), Boal was invited to help with the Integral Literacy Operation, a government program with the goal of bringing literacy to the 20% of the nation who couldn’t read—virtually all of whom lived in extreme poverty, and many of whom were indigenous. During this period, Boal developed the learning play in three significant ways that would subsequently constitute the foundation of his Theatre of the Oppressed. First, was what he called “Simultaneous Dramaturgy.” Boal’s actors would solicit a topic or issue from the audience and improvise a 10 to 20-min scene based on the suggestion. When the problem being enacted reached a point of crisis, they would stop the action and ask the audience to offer solutions, immediately improvising off of all of the suggestions. “Thus,” Boal noted, “while the audience ‘writes’ the work the actors perform it simultaneously. … The action ceases to be presented in a deterministic manner, as something inevitable, as Fate. Man is Man’s fate … All can be changed, and at a moment’s notice” (Boal, 2000, pp. 109, 111).

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Image Theatre took audience involvement a step further asking the audience members on stage to express their views, on subjects ranging from local issues such as access to water and domestic violence to larger concepts like imperialism. This expression was not verbal, but visual. They were asked to “sculpt” the bodies of the other participants into an image. First, they were asked to create an image of the actual situation, then an ideal image of the same situation or concept and then a transitional image “to show how it would be possible to pass from one reality to the next” (Boal, 2000, p. 112). This activity involved all of the “audience” as active creators on stage and provided a prototype for the participatory workshops that are now common among performance activists. The third theatrical activity developed by Boal and his collaborators during this intense period of interaction with the poor of Peru, he called Forum Theatre. As with Simultaneous Dramaturgy, it starts with a short scene on a topic generated by the spectators. However, instead of stopping the action to discuss different possible resolutions to be performed by the actors, it is played through to a conclusion. The audience is then asked if they agree with the solution presented. Inevitably, some disagree. “At this point,” relates Boal, “it is explained that the scene will be performed once more, exactly as it was the first time. But now any participant in the audience has the right to replace any actor and lead the action in the direction that seems to him most appropriate. …. The other actors have to face the newly created situation, responding instantly to all the possibilities that have been created” (Boal, 2000, p. 117). Thus, Friere’s dialogic pedagogy was made manifest in the theatre. The non-actor was invited on stage to perform with the actor giving birth to what Boal called the “spec-actor,” the foundational forms of the Theatre of the Oppressed were invented, and a qualitative step was taken beyond theatre into performance activism. The lineage of the TO can thus be traced back directly to the Epic Theatre, or at least to a subdivision of it, Brecht’s lehrstücke. It shares with Agit-Prop, which preceded it by nearly half a century, roots in the socialist/communist movements, and a commitment to political didacticism. Also, like Agit-Prop, Theatre of the Oppressed involves workers and peasants as performers, although, unlike Agit-Prop it needs trained actors as well, indeed, the interaction between the trained actors (who function as “dialogic” teachers) and the non-actors (who function as activated students) is key to its methodology. In this sense, it does not transcend its roots in and its function as a “learning play.” It’s worth noting that like

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Playback Theatre, which was taking shape in the United States at roughly the same time, TO makes extensive use of improvisation. Indeed, improvisation is the activity that allows the dialogic pedagogy of Theatre of the Oppressed to happen.

References Amundsen, J. R. (2013). Performing ideology: Theatricality and ideology in mass performance [Unpublished master’s thesis]. University of Oslo. Aronson, A. (2005). American avant-garde theatre: A history. Routledge. Boal, A. (2000). Theatre of the oppressed (A. Charles, M. L. McBride, & E. Fryer, Trans.). Pluto Press. Boal, A. (2001). Hamlet and the baker’s son: My life in theatre and politics (A. Jackson & C. Blaker, Trans.). Routledge. Brecht, B., & Willet, J. (Ed.). (1964). Brecht on theatre (J. Willett, Trans.). Hill and Wang. Carlson, M. (2004). Performance: A critical introduction. Routledge. Deák, F. (1973). The agitprop and circus plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. The Drama Review: TDR, 17 (1), 47–52. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144791 Diderot, D. (1883). The paradox of acting (W. H. Pollock, Trans.). Chatto & Windus, Piccadilly. Fischer-Lichte, E. (1997). The show and the gaze: A European perspective. University of Iowa Press. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M. B. Ramos, Trans.). Herder and Herder. Goldberg, R. (2001). Performance art: From futurism to the present. Thames & Hudson. Innes, C. D. (1972). Erwin Piscator’s political theatre: The development of modern German drama. Cambridge University Press. Innes, C. D. (1993). Avant garde theatre, 1892–1992. Routledge. Kirby, M. (1965). Happenings: An illustrated anthology. E.P. Dutton. Lawton, A. (1988). Russian futurism through its manifestos, 1912–1928. Cornell University Press. Malina, J. (2012). The Piscator notebooks. Routledge. Melzer, A. (1994). Dada and surrealist performance. The John Hopkins University Press. Shklovsky, V. (1990). Theory of prose (B. Sher, Trans.). Dalkey Archive Press. (Original work published 1925).

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Slonim, M. (1961). Russian theater: From the empire to the Soviets. World Publishing Company. Trachtman, P. (2006, May). A brief history of Dada: The irreverent, rowdy revolution that set the trajectory of 20th century art. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com

CHAPTER 9

Performativity and the Sixties

With the notable exception of Epic Theatre/Theatre of the Oppressed, the unmooring of performance from the institution of the theatre emerged from outside of the theatre. In the 1960s that dynamic began to shift. The interplay/interface/interaction between the avant-garde—or as it preferred to be called at this point, the “experimental theatre”—and the mass movements of the time was such that they were continuously impacting on each other. The artists who generated these experiments in the theatre were aware of the expanding concepts and uses of performance, particularly of the Happenings and improv; they were also, in various ways, active in the cultural and political upheavals of the time, and finally; they identified with, drew on, and were sanctioned by the legacy of the avant-garde. In the 1960s, due to that cross-fertilization, there was a significant acceleration of the process of performance migrating from the theatre to other aspects of social life. The flow went both ways, with the needs, desires, and values of the political and cultural upheavals impacting strongly on the theatre. A quick note on the phrase, “the Sixties.” When using it, I don’t mean simply the ten years between 1960 and 1970. History doesn’t divide itself into neat slivers of ten. I’m referring to the period of social, political, and cultural upheaval in the United States, Western Europe and, in somewhat different ways, in the rest of the world, that began, roughly, with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_9

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the successful bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 and which extended through the withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam in 1974. Of course, the roots of “the Sixties” extend deep into American and world history and its implications reverberate into our own time and beyond. As our discussion has already made clear, there are no beginnings, and, I would also venture to say, no ends. That said, when I write of the Sixties here, it will refer to that period (1955–1974) during which mass movements questioning and challenging long-held political, social, and most impactfully, cultural norms rippled across the globe. My focus will be on developments in the United States, which at the time was by far the richest and most powerful nation on Earth. Despite this power, wealth, and privilege, or perhaps because of them, the United States became the epicenter of demands for political and economic equality for all its citizens and of a rebellion against the individualistic, greed-centered, competitive yet oppressively conformist culture generated by corporate capitalism. Because of the wealth and power of the United States, events and cultural currents emanating from the States in the Sixties, as they did throughout the twentieth century, impacted disproportionally on virtually every corner of the planet. I will not attempt here a history or analysis of the Sixties per se; that is well beyond the scope of this investigation. What we’ll be looking at are developments within the upheavals of the Sixties that extended the concept and practice of performance beyond the stage and expanded the range of who was allowed to/did perform.

Environmental Theatre In the summer of 1961, when Richard Schechner was still a graduate student at Tulane University, he directed the ancient Greek play, Philoctetes by Sophocles in Provincetown, Rhode Island for a theatre troupe called the East End Players. The play, first produced in 409 B.C., is set during the Trojan War. Philoctetes, a master archer, has been wounded and his foot and leg have become a festering, stinking wound. The Greeks can’t stand the smell and abandon him on a deserted island. The play begins a few years later, when the Greeks realize that they can’t defeat the Trojans without Philoctetes. Odysseus sends a group of soldiers to the island to bring him back. “The way I did it, just south of Provincetown, Philoctetes was alone on the beach,” recalled Schechner a half century later. “His leg was wrapped in cloth soaked in fish blood so there were a

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lot of flies and things. The audience had to walk a mile or so to the beach to sit on the dunes and then a boat came around the bend. They beach the boat and they had the play and then put him on the boat and disappeared” (R. Schechner, personal communication, December 4, 2019). That same summer, he directed a production of When We Dead Awaken by the nineteenth century Norwegian Henrick Ibsen in the Provincetown Town Hall. In the final scene of that play when the lead character and the woman he loves climb to the top of a mountain to escape the constraints of his marriage (to someone else) and of society in general, the actors in Schechner’s production climbed the tower of the Town Hall (R. Schechner, personal communication). These are the first known examples in the United States of what would come to be called Environmental Theatre. Of course, theatre had taken place outside of a theatre building before. Indeed, as we have seen, during the Renaissance, the Commedia dell’arte performed primarily in public squares; Agit-Prop troupes performed at political meetings, rallies, beer halls, and on the street; both the Dadaists and Futurists performed in cafes and galleries; Happenings also “happened” in galleries, lofts, etc. The dancer and choreographer Anna Halprin, who sought to break out of the conventions of modern dance and replace them with the beauty of everyday movement, began, in the late 1950s, to stage dances in California’s Redwood Forest and in other outdoor venues.1 In 1963 her Exposition, performed at the Vienna International Festival of Contemporary Music caused a sensation as her dancers, according to Schechner, “took over the whole theatre and not only performed on stage but in the balconies and the aisles and everything” (R. Schechner, personal communication, December 4, 2019). What Schechner started in Provincetown, and continued to experiment with a few years later with a production of Ionesco’s Victims of Duty in New Orleans, was different in that he was taking dramatic literature originally written to be performed within formal theatre spaces, in particular on proscenium arch stages, and performing them in other, more fluid, environments. In doing so, Schechner was not only rebelling against the “fourth wall” illusion of realist drama, he was including the environment as an aesthetic element in the totality of the production. As he 1 For an overview of Halprin’s work and contribution to performance, see Halprin (1995).

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puts it, relating to the environment in this way allows “the [performance] event to flow freely through space and to design whole spaces entirely for specific performances” (Schechner, 2003, p. 59). When Schechner founded the Performance Group in New York City in 1967, he began to call the work he was directing Environmental Theatre. He says he got the name from Allan Kaprow’s book Assemblage, Environments and Happenings. The Happenings pointed in the direction, says Schechner, that, “…anything can be theatre. I was very impacted by that, that suited me well. I wouldn’t say I learned it from him, but it confirmed the other stuff I had been doing and gave me a further vocabulary for it,” (R. Schechner, personal communication, December 4, 2019 2003). In his earliest experiments, while the performance venues were unusual, the physical separation between the audience, (sitting of the dunes) and the performers (acting on the beach) remained. Once the work of the Performance Group began, that physical (and participatory) separation began to disappear. The Group purchased a permanent home, which they called The Performance Garage, a converted metal stamping flatware shop on Wooster Street in New York’s Soho neighborhood (then a decaying industrial area, not the chic arts district it would become). They reconfigured the space for each production and performed all over it: next to you, behind you, on a platform over you. The stage and the auditorium as distinct spaces were dissolving. In his “6 Axioms for Environmental Theatre,” published the year after the Performance Group was founded, Schechner wrote, “All the space is used for performance; all the space is used for audience” (Schechner, 1968, p. 41). The border between performing and viewing was no longer clear. The viewing itself became more active and challenging. If you were sitting here you saw things a certain way. If you sat there, you saw it in a slightly different way. If the actors were performing behind you, you twisted to see them. If the actors were two feet away from you, they impacted differently than when they were 15 or 20 feet away, or on a platform over your head. In most Performance Group shows you were allowed, sometimes encouraged, to move and sit somewhere else in the space. As with many of Brecht’s innovations in staging, the mainstream commercial theatre has, in the intervening half century, found ways, in Aronson’s words, to, “cannibalize the avant-garde” or to put it more positively, to adapt Schechner’s innovations (Aronson, 2018, p. xx). It only took little over a decade for the first commercial Environmental

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Theatre “hit” to emerge. Tamara by John Krizanc, a mystery melodrama set at the home of the Italian fascist poet Gabriele D’Annunzio in the Twenties opened in a Victorian mansion in Toronto in 1981. It went on to productions in different mansions in Hamilton, Ontario; Hollywood, California; Mexico City; and, eventually, the Seventh Regiment Armory in Manhattan where it ran for five years. “The audience selects different actors to follow,” wrote Steve Nelson of the New York production, “and moves with the performers though ten different rooms on three floors … which has been decorated to resemble an Italian villa in 1927” (Nelson, 1989, p. 73). In 1988, Tony ‘n’ Tina’s Wedding, a comic (and to some, offensive) take on a stereotypical working-class Italian-American wedding, opened in New York. The audience starts out as guests at the ceremony staged in one location and then joined the actors in traveling to the reception a few blocks away where they ate, drank, and celebrated with the performers. It became the longest running play (as distinct from a musical) in Off-Broadway history. A string of environmentally staged commercial productions was successful in subsequent decades, including Sleep No More, an adaption of Macbeth, which opened in New York in 2011 and in Shanghai in 2016, and was still going strong in both cities when forced to close due to the COVD-19 virus in early 2020. By 1989, Nelson had noted, “Today’s environmental productions lack the urgent political and artistic agendas that typified such efforts in the ’60s. … Radically altering the audience/performer contract is no longer the concern. People walk about and get close physically, but the barrier between actor and spectator remains intact. Today’s environmental theatre may move the fourth wall around a bit, but no one is put up or through it” (Nelson, 1989, p. 72). As it has become a niche in the commercial theatres of New York and London and a stylistic approach in the toolbox experimental theatre, it has, for the most part, shed the name “Environmental” and became “Site Specific” Theatre, the term usually used when the site of the performance is chosen for its aesthetic and/or historical interest, or “Immersive” Theatre, to indicate the co-mingling of actors and audience in a shared space.2

2 As of this writing there are a number of production companies dedicated to Environmental/Site Specific/Immersive Theatre. Among the best known are: punchdrunk and dreamthinkspeak, both in the U.K.; En Gard Arts and The Industry (immersive opera) in the U.S.A.; and Teatro da Vertigem in Brazil. For an overview of the history of Environmental Theatre, see Aronson (2018) and Pearson (2010).

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It would, however, be a mistake to thus dismiss the environmental scenography sparked by the Performance Group as simply an aesthetic technique absorbed into the mainstream theatre. In opening up the space within which to conceive of performance, it allowed for the generation of new ways of creative interplay between the theatre creators and their audiences. Despite its name, what was most important about Environmental Theatre was not its radical scenography per se, but the fact that expanding the performance beyond the stage opened up new possibilities for audience members and theatre makers to interface. It was not the new environment, but what could happen in the new environment that was at the core of Schechner’s concerns. He was asking, “What happens to a performance when the usual agreements between performer and spectator are broken?” (Schechner, 1973, p. 40). Schechner was not alone in asking this question. A challenge to the relationship between actor and spectator informs almost all the precursors to performance activism. Activating the spectator is at the heart of both Playback Theatre and Theatre of the Oppressed. (Neither of which had yet come into existence.) Playback has a therapeutic focus, and Theatre of the Oppressed is explicitly didactic. Each is clearly a tool designed for a particular result. Environmental Theatre, and much of the other experimental theatre activity of the Sixties, was less a tool looking for a particular result, than an open-ended invitation. It was more visceral/experiential than reflective or cognitive. It wasn’t about bringing the spectator onto the stage; it brought the stage to the spectator. It was attempting to change not simply the spectator’s relationship to the stage, but the nature of the stage itself. This, relative to the loosening of performance from the theatre, was a qualitative difference; it was a reimaging of where performance could take place in a way that neither Playback nor Theatre of the Oppressed does. “If art and play are related to each other,” wrote Schechner, “then orthodox theater excludes one of art’s most precious elements: getting back from the other player a version of oneself” (Schechner, 1973, p. 72). Instead of including more people as participants in the theatre, Environmental Theatre in particular and much of the experimental theatre of the Sixties in general, was expanding the theatre beyond itself into play—not “a play” but the social activity of play. In this sense, it was a groping beyond theatre as primarily an aesthetic experience toward performance as primarily a community experience.

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This was not taking place in a vacuum. The counter culture of the time was bringing performance (and the social activity of play) into public spaces, as with the Be-Ins and vast performatory demonstrations, such as the attempt to levitate the Pentagon during the massive antiwar march on Washington, DC. On the October 21, 1967 when some 30,000 people, this writer among them, broke off from the main rally and attempted to encircle the Pentagon and by chanting Aramaic exorcism rites levitate the U.S. military headquarters. In his permit for the demonstration/performance, Abby Hoffman sought a permit to raise the Pentagon 300 feet “into the air, turn orange and vibrate until all evil emissions had fled. The war would end forthwith.” The General Services Administrator granted the permit, but it only allowed for a maximum levitation of 10 feet. The stakes were very high, but everyone was playing (Buck, 2017). Schechner himself was very much a part of the movements of the time. He was involved from his college days with the Civil Rights Movement. In 1957 he was in Little Rock, Arkansas to witness the forced integration of Little Rock Central High School. During his time as a professor at Tulane University in New Orleans (1962–1966) he organized the first Anti-War Teach-Ins in the South and helped to launch the Free Southern Theatre. “The Free Southern Theatre was a theatre for those who had no theater,” he recalls. “So by necessity, we were doing plays but we were doing them in churches, in front yards. We were doing them in places where there was no theatre as normally defined. At that time also I attended many Black churches in the Deep South where preaching and singing and dancing and declaring and political organizing were all of a piece. It wasn’t like you went to church on Sunday morning as a way a way of getting away from life, it was the heart of the community’s life” (R. Schechner, personal communication, December 4, 2019). All of this informed Schechner’s work when he arrived in New York in 1967. For The Performance Group, the challenge wasn’t bringing the spectator into the closed institution of theatre but dismantling that closed system. “Participation is not about ‘doing a play’ but undoing it,” Schechner wrote, “transforming an aesthetic event into a social event—or shifting the focus from art-and-illusion to the potential or actual solidarity among everyone in the theatre, performers and spectators alike” (Schechner, 1973, p. 45). The Performance Group’s first, and signature, production was Dionysus in 69. It was a deconstruction/reconstruction of the ancient Greek play

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The Bacchae by Euripides, first produced in 405 B.C. The god Dionysus, who embodied the joys of wine and lust, celebration and (later) theatre, is angry that the mortal side of his family, headed up by King Pentheus of Thebes, does not recognize him as a god. (Dionysus was half human; the Greek gods were promiscuous that way.) The play begins with Dionysus arriving in Thebes to teach his relatives a lesson. It differed from other ancient Greek plays in that the chorus doesn’t stand aside from the action and comment on it, but is integrated into the plot. In fact, they’re the Bacchae of the original play’s title, the female followers of Dionysus who, during his festivals, would engage in ecstatic libidinous rituals often to the point of delirium. In addition, The Bacchae was unusual among the Greek plays of antiquity in that the god is not a distant figure only referred to by others or brought in at the end to resolve things, but an active character in the plot. Both of these elements suggested an activistic approach to its production, with the chorus consisting of the entire cast from which specific characters emerged from and returned. Schechner had, by this point, also begun his study of anthropology (which would go on to help pave his path toward Performance Studies) and he introduced a number of borrowed and modified rituals into the production. For example, audience members were carried by the actors one-by-one into the performance space in imitation of various initiation rites from a number of tribal cultures which Schechner had learned from the pioneering anthropologist and folklorist Arnold Van Gennep.3 (Schechner, 1973, p. 253). A ritual borrowed from New Guinea consisted of naked men laying on the floor while naked women stood straddling them from shoulder to buttock to form a “birth canal” through which the actor playing Dionysus was “reborn” as the god. Later, near the end of the performance, the ritual was re-enacted to have Pentheus symbolically reborn/reintegrated into the community that he had tried to dominate by repressing the rites of Dionysus. (In the original his head and limbs were torn off by the Bacchae, including his mother.) The introduction of these expropriated rituals is important to note. They opened moments for shared experience for performers and spectators, they are the “social events” to which Schechner refers. They also highlight a reaching out of the theatre toward ritual that, as we shall we see, would quickly escalate in the experimental theatre of the United States and Europe.

3 For the work that influenced this, see Van Gennep (1960).

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I have gone into some detail relative to Dionysus in 69 because these specifics create a context in which to look at the moments when, in Schechner’s words, the “aesthetic event” transformed into a “social event.” One night, for example, a group of students from Queens College kidnapped Pentheus, preventing his sacrifice to Dionysus. The actor playing the god attempted to block them from leaving the Performance Garage, accusing them of planning the whole thing in advance, to which they replied, in essence, that of course they had, just as the Performance Group had planned their performance in advance. The kidnappers took the actor out on the street and left him there unharmed. The actor, William Shephard, however, refused to return to the play, “I was taken out of it and that’s that,” Schechner reports him as saying. The play finally resumed when a 16-year-old boy who had seen the play five times volunteered to take on the role of Pentheus, and did so, improvising the lines (Schechner, 1973, p. 41). Another example: the character Pentheus let the audience know during every performance that if a woman in the audience would copulate with him, it would liberate him from the power of Dionysus. No one ever took him up on the offer. Until one night someone did. The actor playing Pentheus left the theatre with the woman. The actor playing Dionysus proclaimed, “Tonight for the first time since the play has been running, Pentheus, a man, has won over Dionysus, the god. The play is over.” And it was; the audience reportedly cheered wildly (Performance Group, 1970). In another Performance Group production, Commune (1970– 1972), spectators were selected at each performance to play victims of the infamous Mei Lai Massacre during which a whole village was slaughtered by American soldiers during the Vietnam War. One night the group selected refused to perform as victims and a heated conversation with the cast and the rest of audience went on for three hours (Innes, 1993, p. 176). As these examples illustrate, Environmental Theatre, at least as practiced by The Performance Group, played at the borders of theatre, activism (social event), and the reintroduction of explicit ritual into the theatre. All this could happen because during the Sixties millions of people were looking for ways to break through alienation, participate in the world in more meaningful ways, to exercise power, to find, and/or build community. They were doing so all over the country: forming radical political organizations; joining (and creating) unorthodox religious groups; setting up food co-ops, and establishing urban and rural

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communes where they could live more co-operatively and communally. “Many spectators thought TPG [The Performance Group] was a community, even a religious community,” writes Schechner. “… in retrospect, I know that often people were projecting—they wanted to find a community so they found one in us. … [and] The audience was not altogether wrong. Members of the Group shared the needs of the audience. What the audience projected onto the play was matched by what the players projected onto the audience” (Schechner, 1973, p. 43).

Ritualist Theatre The Performance Group was not the only theatre ensemble responding to/participating in the counter culture’s search for community. There was a general shift during this period from organizing new theatres as small businesses toward organizing them as artistic/political collectives. To many, this meant not only working/creating collectively, but also living together co-operatively in social units that transcended the traditional nuclear family. Many of the experimental theatres of the late Sixties actually functioned as artistic/political communities (or as they were often referred to at the time, “hippie communes”). Among the better known in the United States were the Bread and Puppet Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, the Open Theatre, and the Living Theatre, which we will soon look at in some detail; Jerzy Grotowski Theatre Lab in Poland; Eugenio Barba and the Odin Theatre in Denmark; and Théâtre du Soleil in France. Ariane Mnouchkine, the founder of Théâtre du Soleil’s, which survives to this day, summarized the philosophy of these theatre collectives when she said of her own organization, “Theatre du Soleil is the dream of living, working, being happy and searching for beauty and for goodness. … It’s trying to live for higher purposes, not for riches. It’s very simple, really” (Rockwell, 1992). In 1961, the German dancer and sculptor Peter Schumann immigrated from Silesia to the Lower East Side, one of New York City’s perpetual slums. Two years later, drawing on deeply rooted traditions of German folk art and his own skills as a sculptor and dancer/mover, he began making puppets and creating puppet shows at first for children in his adopted community, and soon, for the adults as well. “The concerns of the first productions were,” Schuman recalls, “rents, rats, police and other concerns of the neighborhood” (Bread and Puppet Theater, n.d.). The concerns of his puppet theatre and the size of his puppets expanded

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rapidly. Within a few years his Bread and Puppet Theatre, involving scores of puppeteers, was performing with 16-foot puppets on many topical issues of the day, particularly the war in Vietnam. Bread and Puppet went on to become a fixture in the anti-war demonstrations of the time and the pageants they worked up for Christmas, Easter, and other holidays became a regular part of life in lower Manhattan, and well beyond. Schumann was the first to explicitly introduce ritual into the American theatre. Starting early in the group’s history, the puppeteers (who were also, for the most part, the puppet makers) began, before each performance, to share with everyone gathered for the show, the sourdough rye bread they had baked beforehand. “Our bread and theatre belong together,” Schumann wrote in 1971. “For a long time the theatre arts have been separate from the stomach. Theatre was entertainment. Entertainment was meant for the skin. Bread was meant for the stomach. … The bread shall remind you of the sacrament of eating. We want you to understand that theatre is not yet an established form, not the place of commerce you think it is, where you pay and get something. Theatre is different. It is more like bread, more like necessity. Theatre is a form of religion” (Schumann, 1970, p. 35). It was a simple ritual, rooted in the Catholic mass, and while it didn’t directly impact on the performance itself, its introduction opened up a corridor between theatre and mundane daily life (like eating) that performance activism continues to walk through. Breaking bread before a puppet show was a modest precursor to the experimentation with ritualized theatre productions that were to follow, a trend which was brought to an apex in the work of the Living Theatre in the late Sixties and early 1970s. The Living Theatre was founded by Judith Malina and Julian Beck in 1947. Malina, brought to New York as a two-year-old, was the daughter of a rabbi and grew up on the Lower East Side. Beck was from a well-to-do family of German Jews who had immigrated to New York in the mid-nineteenth century. He grew up in a spacious apartment in the city’s middle-class neighborhood of the Upper West Side. When they met, Beck was an abstract expressionist painter who had dropped out of Yale and was traveling in the circle of the wealthy arts patron Peggy Guggenheim. Malina, as I have mentioned, was studying theatre with Piscator at the New School and was supporting herself as a waitress at the Beggar’s Bar in Greenwich Village run by German cabaret performer and actor Valeska Gert (Aronson, 2005, p. 49). They shared

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a passion for theatre and each other, remaining co-leaders of the Living Theatre and life partners until Beck’s death from cancer in 1985. During the theatre’s first decade and a half it was experimental in the most literal sense, producing everything from Japanese Noh and medieval mystery plays, to the first script to be labeled “avant-garde,” Ubu roi by Alfred Jarry (first produced in Paris in 1896); from surrealists, such as André Breton, to Brecht; along with poetic dramas by Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, and Picasso. The common thread in this early work was an opposition to the realism and naturalism that then dominated the American theatre (and, to a large extent, still does). At the same time, Malina and Beck, influenced by, among others, their friend Paul Goodman, were embracing both anarchism and pacifism, becoming active with the War Resisters League and the Ban the [Nuclear] Bomb Movement. In 1957, Judith spent a month in the Manhattan’s Women’s House of Detention with cellmate Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement. They had both been arrested for refusing to take cover during an air raid drill. By 1963, Malina and Beck had been arrested six times for participating in civil disobedience at peace demonstrations (Aronson, 2005, p. 53). According to Beck, he and Malina had been “confirmed theoretical anarchists and activists,” since the late 1940s, but through the 1950s they remained under the influence of, “that critical attitude toward art which said: you cannot mix art and politics … they don’t go together; they degrade each other. … I don’t think that we came to a breakthrough in the theatre until we became frankly political. And when we insisted on saying politically what we wanted to say politically, we felt free enough to discover breakthrough ways of doing it” (Malina et al., 1969, p. 37). Those breakthroughs happened when the Living Theatre fled to Europe in 1964. Depending on which story you go with—either because, as anarchists, they refused on principle to pay taxes or because of fiscal ineptitude—the theatre owed thousands of dollars in back taxes to the Internal Revenue Service, which padlocked the Living Theatre’s performance space on 14th Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. The Living responded with a sit-in, with the actors refusing to leave, audiences climbing over rooftops and entering through an open window, and supporters demonstrating on the sidewalk below. Eventually, the Living Theatre was forced out of the building and left the United States to fulfill a touring obligation in Europe. A few months later, when the tour was over, as had been agreed at the initial court hearing, Beck and Malina returned to the States and turned themselves in. They were both

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convicted of “impeding agents of the Internal Revenue Service.” Beck was sentenced to 60 days in the Federal Detention Headquarters and Malina spent her second 30-day confinement in the Women’s House of Detention (“Becks Surrender”, 1964, p. 50). Upon their release, they returned to Europe to join the rest of the theatre in four years of self-exile, constant touring, and significant artistic transformation. In the years immediately preceding this turn of events, the Living had produced two plays—The Brig by Kenneth Brown and The Connection by Jack Gilbert—that, for lack of a better term, might be called “hyperrealist.” The Brig took place in a U.S. Marine prison. The Connection focused on a group of drug addicts, some of them jazz musicians, who are waiting for their heroin connection to arrive. During intermission, the actors, in character, co-mingled with the audience, some asking for handouts. In the second act, the dealer arrives and the characters shootup. The level of realism was such that during the run, according to Beck, fifty spectators, interestingly all men, fainted or left the theatre at that point (Lahr, 1970, p. 166). These productions proved a turning point for the Living. Their remarkable success at illusion made obvious to them the deception at the core of theatre—and they didn’t like it. “Here we were, night after night, lying to the audience,” Beck said later. “We were lying to the audience that this was a bunch of junkies who were haphazardly collected on stage to make a movie … And in fact many members of the audience were taken in; that was the worst of it” (quoted by Aronson 2000, p. 61). Malina put it in a more positive light. It was, she said, “a very important advance for us … from then on, the actors began to play themselves. … I don’t want to be Antigone. I am and want to be Judith Malina” (Kott & Czerwinski, 1969, p. 23). Aronson writes of this pivotal moment, “Thus the irony of The Connection was that while it was one of the most illusionistic pieces of American theatre ever produced, it launched the Living Theatre on its journey toward the elimination of fictional characters and space on the stage” (Innes, 1993, p. 61). Of course, none of this was new; we need only to recall Agit-Prop, Brecht and Happenings, not to mention much of pre-modern Western theatre. However, given the growing cultural and political movements then sweeping North America and Western Europe, this realization cleared the boards, so to speak, for the emergence of a new kind/new organization of performance striving for a new kind of relationship to its audience-in-rebellion.

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There is no agreed-upon label for the type of theatre that the Living Theatre, the Performance Group, the Open Theatre, and others were beginning to create. Schechner, at least initially, claimed it all under the rubric of Environmental Theatre (Schechner, 1973, p. vii) and certainly a prerequisite for all of it was the opening up of the space. However, here I’ll be calling it “ritualized theatre” because from the perspective of the unmooring of performance from the institution of the theatre, what is most significant is the use performance was being put to, not spatial relations per se. In all of this work, performance was being pulled/pushed/invited toward the creation of new rituals inspired by and designed to consolidate the emerging counter cultural/radical political community. Schechner, as we have seen, called the goal of his performance work, at this point, a social (as distinct from an aesthetic) event. Malina, said, “I would like to see the whole thing [the performance] as one big game with rules” ( Living Theatre, 1969, p. 91). Beck said, “…we wanted to make a play which would no longer be enactment but would be the act itself” (Malina et al., 1969, pp. 24, 25). Living Theatre actor Steven ben Israel said, in 1969, that the Living Theatre’s job was, “…to create a ritual that redeems the earth” (Living Theatre, p. 94). When the Living Theatre returned to the States for a triumphant tour in 1968 they brought with them three performances of this type that they had developed in Europe: Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Frankenstein, and Paradise Now. It is with Paradise Now that the ritualistic theatre of the Living had its most impact. First off, with scores of semiclade performers using the entire space of whatever theatre or arena they were performing in, Paradise Now presented a massive spectacle not seen in the avant-garde theatre since Piscator’s Epic productions of the 1920s. Paradise Nowbegan with performers walking through the audience shouting, belligerently “I’m not allowed to travel without a passport.” “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana.” “I’m not allowed to take my clothes off.” No matter the response of the audience members, the actors’ shouting increased in urgency and anger, designed according to the written text published in 1971, “to increase his [the performer’s] expression of the frustration at the taboos and inhibitions imposed on him by the world around him” (Living Theatre, 1971, p. 15). Although the event always involved a great deal of improvisation by both the actors and the spectator-performers, Paradise Now was structured as a series of eight “Rungs.” Each Rung was sub-divided into: a “Rite” during which contact was established between performers and audience members; a “Vision”

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which was performed by the actors only and; an “Action” which was to be done only by the audience. The entire cycle was, as Innes explains it, “conceived as a ‘spiritual voyage and a political voyage’ … designed to transform [its initial outrage and alienation] into its opposite, physical unity, in the ‘Rite of Universal Intercourse.’ Here naked spectators and actors embraced indiscriminately, even copulating—the ultimate extension of the involvement and liberation of man’s instinctive nature.” Then the naked actors led those audience members who would follow, naked or clothed, into the streets (Innes, 1993, pp. 185, 187). While the Living Theatre initially anticipated resistance from the audience to this new kind of performance that demanded their active participation in violation of social taboos, it became clear almost from the start that they had created a performance/event/ritual that was in sync with, and quickly embraced by, the swelling counter culturists and radical political activists of the time. The premier of Paradise Now took place in Paris during the July 1968 worker-student uprising which, at least to its participants, briefly felt like the beginning of a revolution. The premier was set to happen at the Avignon Festival in Paris. The festival had given the Living an old high school in which to rehearse and sleep. During the rehearsal/devising process, “A couple of hundred kids came to live there [with us],” recalled Beck. “There were many who argued with us about Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, anarchism, various revolutionary viewpoints and certainly the whole question of violence-non-violence was a very, very rough one. But [opening night] that was simply an exalting night and every scene kept going into revolutionary paradise because they understood the thing, saw the thing, dug the thing and went with it” (Malina et al., 1969, p. 33). That was certainly not always the case. In Amsterdam, for example, the audience carried the actors out of the theatre with the intention of dropping them in a canal (Malina et al., 1969, p. 34). Overall, however, audiences embraced the ritual. Innes reports, “From Brooklyn all the way to Berkley in their 1968–1969 American tour, whenever the actors announced they were not allowed to smoke marijuana, the audience lit up joints and filled the house with the pungent smell of hashish. As the cast were claiming they were not allowed to strip, clothes were being flung off all over the auditorium. And in at least one performance the injunction to ‘free the theatre’ swamped the stage with naked spectators and the play was brought to an abrupt end by a public discussion on the political relevance of the Living Theatre itself” (Innes, 1993, p. 189).

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Walter Kerr, then the senior theatre critic at the New York Times, wrote of Paradise Now, “The majority of the performers do not seem to be actors at all. They are converts” (as quoted in McDermott, 1969, p. 80). That, of course, was intentional. Beck explained in 1969, “When we think about actors for the company the criterion is totally a personality one. Nobody auditions for the Living. They used to. … What we are looking for is a certain kind person; that kind of person can do this [kind of performing]” (Malina et al., 1969, p. 36). As Patrick McDermott, then an actor with The Performance Group, wrote after seeing Paradise Now, “With few exceptions, critics do not miss the resemblance of the Living Theatre to that Old Time Religion. When you ‘get it’ you stand up and shout and roll about. Such enthusiasm without apparent reason … can seem funny to you, if you watch it. But if you try it you risk conversion, because it’s fun” (McDermott, p. 80). The connection between the Living and the audiences that flocked to see/experience their performances was explained by Malina at the time this way, “We’ve been able to travel from country to country and, as it were, bring news, bring an atmosphere with us, bring with us what we learned into our work and formed a kind of connecting link of groups of young people from whom we learned things and to who we give things, on who we have an influence and who influence us” (Brooklyn Academy of Music, 2013). What strengthened this link was the fact that the Living Theatre was not a group of professionally trained theatre actors; it was what many in their audiences aspired to, an itinerant commune of hippy-artists traveling the world, performing their ritual-like performances. When in 1968 they arrived for their U.S. tour, the Living Theatre numbered, “nearly 60 and grows as children are born” (McDermott, 1969, pp. 74, 75). “We have about 2,000 people who want to join the Living Theatre, of whom, I would guess, about two or three hundred would be terrific,” reported Malina at the time. “We can’t take them, so we say no all the time.” Added Beck, “About two years ago we started saying, ‘Don’t travel with us. If the Living Theatre had 500 people in it, it would not be able to function. Better form you own group.’ The extraordinary thing is that there are now about 11 itinerant groups in Europe that are creating plays collectively, that live as communities in Italy, Belgium, France, Switzerland” (Malina et al., 1969, p. 36). While it was clearly the cultural and political turmoil of the Sixties which moved the Living Theatre and its sister theatres toward ritual,

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they often sought theoretical justification for this move in the writings of Antonin Artaud, a French actor and director whose book of essays The Theatre and its Double, translated into English in the 1958, became something of a bible for avant-garde theatre artists of the Sixties. By the standards of his time (1896–1948) and culture (and ours) Artaud was insane, although in another time and culture he may have been perceived as a seer or prophet. He suffered his first nervous breakdown at the age of 19 and spent much of his last decade in mental hospitals (enduring numerous electroshock “treatments”). He came out of yet another avant-garde movement, which I haven’t discussed here because it didn’t particularly contribute to the unmooring of performance from the theatre—Surrealism. Surrealism held that all great art originated in the subconscious mind; the artist’s job was to find ways of tapping into that creative source. At the risk of oversimplifying, in Artaud’s writings he called for theatre as a ceremonial experience, beyond the limitations of language and the trivia of everyday life, intensely involving the audience emotionally and in the spectacle itself, that would, through its power of performance, liberate the collective subconscious of the human race, purging us of the superficialities of our civilization and bring us face to face with the cold cruelty of the universe (Artaud, 1958). Indeed, he called the theatre he imagined the Theatre of Cruelty, “Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel,” he wrote. “… not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other’s bodies, carving up our personal anatomies … but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things [the universe] can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been created to teach us that first of all” (Artaud, p. 79). In his passion to achieve a communion between performers and spectators, he anticipated (on paper) Environmental Theatre, calling for the replacement of stage and auditorium, “by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind” so that, “the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it” (Artaud, p. 96). It was Artaud’s passion for radically transforming theatre into something resembling a mass ritual—along with his madness which they respected/glorified in the face of the conforming “sanity” of corporate capitalism—that drew so many Sixties theatre artists to his writings. There they found in the rambling and often contradictory essays what they were looking for. For example, Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, imagined at a point in history when fascism was taking over Europe, became for Julian Beck

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in the Sixties, something quite different. “Artaud believed that if we could only be made to feel really feel anything,” he wrote, “then we might find all this suffering intolerable, the pain too great to bear, we might put an end to it, and then being able to feel we might truly feel the joy, the joy of everything else, of loving, of creating, of being at peace, and being ourselves” (Beck, 1970, p. 81). Another influence on the ritualization of the theatre in the Sixties is the work of Jerzy Grotowski and his disciples. Grotowski, a Polish-born director who first began working professionally in the 1950s, initially drew attention for his innovative environmental productions (which pre-dated the Performance Group), such as Akropolis, adapted from the script by Stanislaw Wyspianski, during which the actors built the structure of a crematorium around the audience while they acted out stories from the Bible and Greek mythology. The performance took place some 60 miles from Auschwitz and the production catapulted him to international attention. However, his enduring interest was not in putting on plays, but in developing acting training, which to him was not as much an aesthetic quest as a spiritual one. “We [human beings] suffer most from a lack of totality, throwing ourselves away, squandering ourselves. Theatre— through the actors’ technique, his art in which the living organism strives for higher motives provides an opportunity for what could be called integration, the discarding of masks, the revealing of the real substance: a totality of physical and mental reactions” (Grotowski, n.d.). As this quote indicates, Grotowski saw in acting more/other than the craft and art of enacting plays; he envisioned in the actor a power to re-establish the “totality” of the human species. In the 1970s, Grotowski and his colleagues traveled the world, in particular India, Mexico, and Haiti, seeking out traditional theatre and ritual performances in an attempt to discover/identify the universal building blocks of performance and unleash its spiritual powers. In 1983 he sought and was granted political asylum in the United States, and settled a few years later in Pontedera, Italy. He long ago had stopped putting on plays. His focus from the 1970s until his death in 1999 was almost entirely on the actor’s spiritual development. Innes opined, “They [the audience] were now subjected to an extended session of psychotherapy based on the acting exercises developed by … [Grotowski’s] Theatre Laboratory” (Innes, 1993, p. 164). He created

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shamans without a permanent community upon which to work their magic. The exercises developed by Grotowski were enthusiastically embraced by Schechner, Malina, and Beck, and many other experimental theatre artists around the world, who found them exciting and helpful in training their actors and exploring the border between theatre and ritual. While experimentation in ritualized theatre continued well into the 1970s and the creation of new rituals, based on local tradition is being put to good use, as we shall see, by some performance activists today, ritualized theatre as a mass phenonium reached its apex with Paradise Now. In 1970, at the conclusion of its U.S. tour, the Living Theatre agreed to split into three groups, two returned to Europe and the core group, led by Malina and Beck, traveled to Brazil which was then in the grip of a right-wing military dictatorship. Within a few months, 18 members of the theatre were arrested, charged with the possession of marijuana. “The Living Theatre came to Brazil because it was asked by Brazilian artists to help in the struggle for liberation in a land in which they described the situation as ‘desperate.’ We agreed because we believe it is time for artists to begin to give the knowledge and power of their craft to the wretched of the earth,” wrote Beck and Malina soon after they were arrested and imprisoned in Brazil. “We appeal to our friends, our allies, for whatever help they can muster, so that we can continue to develop and practice our art in the service of those who are the prisoners of poverty” (text of the letter included in Ryan et al., 1971, pp. 28, 29). In so doing, they were taking seriously their own exhortation at the end of Paradise Now: “The theatre is in the street. The street belongs to the people. Free the theatre. Free the street. Begin” (quoted in Martin, 2004, p. 49). They were also joining hundreds of small, mostly amateur, mostly short-lived, street theatres that were emerging from the social movements of the time. The Living’s shift to the streets was a move, as well, toward the Agit-Prop premise of theatre as a means of propagating progressive views and agitating for political action among the oppressed. Yet the performances that the Living created in Brazil before their arrest—and in U.S. cities after they were deported back to the United States—remained essentially ritualistic. Steven Ben Israel and Andrew Nadelson describe a performance on the streets of Ouro Preto in the state of Minas Gerais: “When we got to the square there were perhaps 2,000 people waiting and we took up positions at six different points, enacting plays with different subjects, such as the State, Property,

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War, Love, Money and Death. These were plays without words, done in an Artaudian style, ritualistically and repetitiously. In the end, there was a transformation with all the actors tied up in ropes and chains. … Eventually, the people watching the play unchained us and we all joined in a musical Chord of Liberation” (Ryan et al., 1971, p. 24). While under arrest, Latin American members of the company were singled out for the most violent treatment. Silviano Araujo, for example, received electroshock to his fingers and penis. Beck himself was thrown down a flight of stairs and then beaten by a group of policemen. An international campaign that included many arts celebrities got the American members of the Living Theatre released within a few months; back home they continued to work to get the non-Americans of jail (Tytell, 1995, pp. 298–303). Over the next few years in the U.S., their ritualized street theatre continued. It included “Money Tower,” the most Agit-Prop of their works. The “Money Tower” was a literal five-story, forty-foot high tower built with scaffolding. It was topped by a large green neon dollar sign. The capitalists stood at the top and the workers at the bottom creating the world’s wealth. The performance climaxed when the workers rose up and got rid of the capitalists. The Living erected their tower and performed their skit outside every steel mill in Pittsburg. (This was when Pittsburg was still producing one fifth of the nation’s steel.) They also performed many other, more ritualized, “plays” during this period, some 150 short plays/rites that together constituted The Legacy of Cain—from pricking their fingers and encouraging passer-byes to join them in smearing blood on a flagpole while chanting “This is the blood of us all,” to creating a participatory ritual for planting neighborhood gardens4 (Ryan et al., 1971, p. 22; Tytell, 1995, pp. 317–323). The Mellon Foundation— funded by the Mellon family, whose wealth included a major interest in the United State Steel Corporation—which had awarded the Living a grant for its residency in Pittsburg, did not renew its funding. With its mass audience evaporating along with the social movement that had generated it, and with no government or foundation funding forth-coming, the Living Theatre had no way to support itself in the United States, and returned to Europe, where government arts funding was more generous and the counter culture hung on longer, for the next 4 For a detailed description of some of the Living Theatre’s rituals at this time, see Beck et al. (1975).

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seven years. The ritualistic element of their work, and that of other sister theatres of the time, had been dependent on a community that shared its worldview and values. Paradise Now had ridden the crest of the wave which now had receded. With the ending of the draft and the war in Vietnam, the reabsorption of many of Sixties political activists into the Democratic Party, and the successful repression by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (the U.S. political police) of the most radical elements of the Left—from Martin Luther King to the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement—the community which believed/dreamed that they could create “Paradise Now,” no longer existed on a mass scale. Over the subsequent decades, the Living Theatre turned “audience participation” into something of a dogma. However, without the shared worldview and assumptions of a community, ritual can’t work. Increasingly, audience members experienced the Living Theatre’s ritualized audience participation as simply a gimmick and felt coerced by the actors. As early as 1970, Grotowski himself recognized the problematic of ritual without community. “After so many explorations, experiences, and reflections,” he told a conference that year, “I still doubt the possibility of direct participation in today’s theatre in an age when neither a communal faith exists, nor any liturgy rooted in the collective psyche as an axis for ritual” (Innes, 1993, p. 163). Schechner, reflecting on the ritualistic/participatory direction of the Performance Group, put it more succinctly, “…it could not last because American society in 1969 was not actually communal” (Schechner, 1973, p. 43). Judith Malina passed in 2015, but the Living Theatre survives, based again in New York City, making it the longest surviving avant-garde or political theatre in the history of the United States.

Street and Guerilla Theatre While the avant-garde was generating ritualistic theatre, the social movements swirling around the United States were generating hundreds of amateur, mostly short lived, theatre troupes that performed at demonstrations, rallies, and political meetings. John Weisman, who worked to pull together documents from as many of these theatres as he could find, wrote, in 1971, that while three years earlier there were no more than 50

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such theatres, “Now there are closer to ten times that” (Weisman, 1973, p. 5). In their mobility and passion for teaching politics through performance, these small political theatres were the descendants of the AgitProp movement, although few were aware of that history. They involved non-professionally trained performers associated with a social/political movement, and were devised with explicit politically didactic aims in mind. The political and class dynamic had changed considerably over thirty years. Instead of being created by militant workers, the new troupes were, for the most part, being organized by militant students and young people, mostly on campuses. Virtually every chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the hegemonic radical youth group of the Sixties in the US, had what was called a Radical Arts Troupe (RAT) which created skits in conjunction with demonstrations and meetings. One of the first RAT troupes, at the University of California-Berkley, put out a small pamphlet that started with the call, “Start a guerrilla theater troupe! It’s a good way to get the politics of SDS across in an entertaining, non-rhetorical fashion to masses of people (Besides, it’s fun.)” (Berkeley Radical Arts Troupe, 1972, p. 313). The other difference from Agit-Prop was that the new radical theatre groups lacked the discipline (involving repeated rehearsals) and the distinctive choral style of the AgitProp troupes. This was mostly due to their transient nature. Often, they were pulled together for a single event and campus-based theatres seldom kept the same performers for more than a semester as students graduated or moved on to the next adventure. There also sprung up a number of professional or semi-professional street theatres, which by the late Sixties, toured extensively and in so doing both provided inspiration to their amateur siblings and would go on to influence some currents of performance activism. The four most influential street theatres of the time were: Bread and Puppet Theatre (which has already been introduced); the San Francisco Mime Troupe; El Teatro Campesino; and the New York City Street Theatre Caravan. I’m using the term “street theatre” to designate theatre troupes that deliberately chose to perform in public spaces (parks, streets, etc.), which had not been done in the United States since the decline of Agit-Prop in the early-1930s. Like the amateur troupes, they were formed in response to the social movements of the time, and were politically motivated; they went to the streets and parks because they wanted to reach folks who did not go to the theatre.

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The San Francisco Mime Troupe was founded in 1959 by R.G. Davis and remains active today. Davis, originally from New York, had studied mime there at American Mime Studio with Paul Curtis. In 1957 he received a Fulbright Foundation grant to study with Etienne Decroux, teacher of the world-famous Marcel Marceau, at the Ecole de Mime in Paris. Two years later, Davis moved to San Francisco with a job as a director at the San Francisco Actors Workshop, then the city’s leading professional theatre.5 The Actors Workshop, founded seven years earlier by Herbert Blau and Jules Irving, by this point, had a national reputation for producing, among others, Europe’s newest playwrights, including, in 1957, bringing a production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot to San Quentin State Prison, an event that inspired prisoners there to form the San Quentin Drama Workshop, which is still thriving some sixty years later—and was a pioneering foreshadowing of much performance activist work being done in prisons around the globe (San Francisco, n.d.; Tranter, 2015). Under the auspices of the Actors Workshop, Davis quickly formed the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe, training others in mime and producing conventional mime shows. Inspired by mime’s long tradition in Europe of performing on the streets, he began experimenting with doing shows in San Francisco’s parks. In the early Sixties, the San Francisco Bay Area was crackling with progressive artistic and political sparks, Davis was quickly moving leftward and seeking ways to more energetically engage his would-be outdoor audiences. He found it in reviving the Commedia dell’arte, the improvisational comedic theatre popular in the Renaissance Europe (see pp. 35– 36). While it used language, Commedia, like mime, focused on physical performance; it was first and foremost visual. The stock characters had specific walks and poses and wore half-masks that could be identified at a distance. The performance was centered around a scenario (not a written script) so that it allowed for constant improvisation and the inclusion of local allusions and late-breaking news. “Reviving this comedic form was a stroke of genius on Davis’s part,” notes cultural historian Michael Williams Doyle. “It furnished the Mime Troupe with an earthy, subversive art form that was tailored for itinerant players who found their audiences in the streets and marketplaces … [Commedia troupes] supported themselves by passing the hat and therefore were not beholden to wealthy

5 This and other biographical information based on Online Archive of California (n.d.).

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benefactors, and were able to quickly disperse and slip out of town when the magistrates took offense and came looking” (Doyle, 2002, p. 73). Changing the name of the theatre to the San Francisco Mime Troupe, in May 1962, Davis staged the group’s first commedia, The Dowry. In so doing, Doyle emphasizes, “The signal importance of this initiative is that it took … theater out of the playhouses and resituated it out of doors, where it might again attract a diversely popular following … new audiences who might not otherwise go to see theater” (Doyle, 2002, p. 73). This was years before the proliferation of the amateur street troupes mentioned above and before the Living Theatre would proclaim, “The theatre is in the street. The street belongs to the people. Free the theatre. Free the street. Begin” (Living Theatre, 1971). Along with the Bread and Puppet Theatre in New York, who were bringing their puppet shows into the streets at about the same time, the Mime Troupe by reclaiming public space as a performance venue was initiating an “environmental” shift at least as impactful as the work The Performance Group would soon be doing inside the Performance Garage. Unlike much of the avantgarde/experimental theatre of the time, whose audiences were made up primarily of fellow artists, students, and hipsters, the Mime Troupe immediately began reaching people who didn’t go to the theatre in places where formal performance was not expected—and it was performing plays that raised political and cultural issues ignored on television and in commercial film. Also, as Doyle points out, with this move, the Mime Troupe, “…prepared a site for countercultural entertainment and festivity that would soon be thronging with outdoor rock concerts and be-ins” (Doyle, 2002, p. 73). Two years later, in 1964, Davis recalled the shift to the parks this way, “We went to the parks where the people congregated and had no trouble attracting an audience; to hold that audience for an hour and a half was another problem. We did it by demonstrating that live people can move, act, have fun and make an audience laugh outside of TV and the movie screen. With little money for costumes and props, and no money for publicity, we performed for some 4,000 people in [the first] three months, playing only on weekends … We did it by accepting donations after the performance, borrowing trucks to get stuff to and from the performing area, and by giving a percentage of the take to the performers themselves” ( Davis, 1964, p. 30). Given its often bawdy humor and radical politics, the Mime Troupe’s move to the parks was met with some resistance from the San Francisco

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Park and Recreation Commission. At first, the Commission insisted that performing in public parks was totally prohibited, but soon relented and agreed to grant permits to perform, show by show. The permits could be revoked if the Commission deemed the performance “inappropriate for children, or found [it] offensive or inappropriate” (Barshak, n.d.). Davis and his actors got through the first few two years with no major incidents, but in August of 1965, the Parks Commission found the troupe’s show, Il Candelaio (The Candlemaker), which at one point used a candle as a phallic symbol and whose two main characters were gay, to be “a vulgar travesty offensive to adults and incompatible with the minds of youth and children” (Barshak, n.d.). The Mime Troupe proceeded, of course, with its plans to perform. The company’s business manager at the time, Billy Graham, who went on to become rich and famous as a rock promoter, organized some one thousand people to turn out in support of the theatre’s right to perform. When the police moved in to arrest Davis, he put on his Commedia mask and proclaiming, “Ladieeeees and Gentlemen, Il Troupo di Mimo di San Francisco presents for your enjoyment this afternoon … AN ARREST!!!” and flung himself off the partially completed stage into the obliging upraised arms of the waiting police officers (Doyle, 2002, p. 72). The Mime Troupe, with the help of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and lively demonstrations at the hearings, won in court and went on, over the next five years, to become the most popular and influential theatre of the then swelling American Left, performing for large crowds—outdoors and in—on colleges campuses and parks around the country for much of the next decade. In 1966, the year after Davis’ theatrically staged arrest, he wrote an essay published in The Drama Review (TDR) called “Guerrilla Theatre” in which he used the term (the first time ever in print, as far as I have been able to ascertain) to describe the work of the Mime Troupe as an ongoing cultural guerrilla war against the establishment. He warned other politically progressive theatre artists, that they could “…be closed because of ‘fire violations,’ or even parking on the grass. What do you do then? You roll with the punches, play all the fields, learn the law, join the ACLU, become equipped to pack up and move quickly when you’re outnumbered. Never engage the enemy head on. Choose your fighting ground, don’t be forced into battle over the wrong issues. Guerrilla theatre travels light and makes friends with the populace” (Davis, 1966, p. 132).

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The label “guerrilla theatre” and the mobile tactics described by Davis were adopted by the hundreds of radical student theatre troupes that sprung up in the years that followed. Their work was far shorter and more mobile than the Mime Troupe. Moving on from Commedia to adapting American Minstrel Shows, nineteenth century Melodrama and other popular entertainment forms of the past, the Mime Troupe continued to produce full-length plays. By the end of the decade, what came to be called guerrilla theatre consisted of short performatory interventions, primarily uninvited and unanticipated, in public areas—college cafeterias, on the sidewalks outside corporate headquarters, and even on subway cars. Sometimes, the “guerrilla” performance was disguised as when, for example, two people on a crowded subway car pretended to get into an argument about the War in Vietnam (I, as a college student, actually did this) in order to engage the bystanders in a conversation. Boal, while in Peru, came to the same tactic. He called it “invisible theatre” and that label has stuck. Often, guerrilla theatre performances were organized on short notice in response to recent events. When the United States began to bomb Cambodia in May 1970—and subsequently American students protesting the bombings were shot dead by National Guard soldiers at Kent State in Ohio and Jackson State in Mississippi—dozens of hastily formed guerrilla theatres made up of students from New York University and elsewhere staged bloody massacres of students by soldiers on street corners throughout New York City. Schechner, who actively helped organize his students into guerrilla theatre troupes at the time, wrote in 1970, “The guerrilla theatre we are now involved in relates back to Davis’ ideas—but also, and more strongly to the things … Abbie Hoffman and … Jerry Rubin did. Like dropping dollar bills on the floor of the Stock Exchange; dumping a truck of soot and garbage on the brass of Con Ed [New York City’s privately-owned electrical power company]; showing up at HUAC [congressional House Unamerican Activities Committee] dressed as a revolutionary war patriot. … Guerrilla theatre is symbolic action. It is called ‘guerrilla’ because some of its structures have been adapted from guerrilla warfare—simplicity of tactics, mobility, small bands, pressure at the points of greatest weakness, surprise. … To make a swift action or image that gets to the heart of an issue or a feeling—to make people realize where they are living, and under what situation” (Schechner, 1970, p. 163).

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While the label has faded, guerrilla theatre has never gone away. Its linage can be traced in Flash Mobs and groups like Improv Everywhere in the United States, and its tactics have since been put to good use by performance activists throughout the Global South. Since it’s a performance tactic well suited to urban environments and relatively easy for amateur performers to create, it’s likely that what we now (thanks to Davis) call “guerrilla theatre” would have emerged in the Sixties with or without the Mime Troupe. However, its inspirational impact—both aesthetically and politically—should not be underestimated. The Mime Troupe directly inspired another very influential theatre of the Sixties, El Teatro Campesino (The Farm Workers Theatre). Luis Valdez, the son of migrant farm workers, who as a child had worked in the fields himself, was an early member of the Mime Troupe, joining soon after he graduated from San Jose State University. In 1965, he left the Mime Troupe to return to Delano, the town of his birth, where the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, a new union under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, was leading a strike against the owners of the massive corporate grape farms of California. The industrial unionizing drives of the 1930s and ’40s had failed in their attempts to organize agricultural workers and they (along with domestic workers) were left out the basic protections of the National Labor Relations Act of 1935 which codified workers’ rights, including the right to organize unions and strike. As a result, migrant farm workers, despite the economic boom of the post-World War II years, continued to work for starvation wages, with no benefits and unhealthy conditions, and the children of most farm workers had to join their parents in the fields to earn enough to feed the family. The United Farm Workers Organizing Committee was attempting to change that. When Valdez arrived in Delano, he set up meetings with groups of striking farm workers and asked them to talk about the conditions in the fields, the strike, the scabs, etc. He quickly moved from talk to improvisation, asking the workers to act out their trials and tribulations as farm workers and the challenges of organizing the union and striking. From this work emerged the first “actos” short, usually comic, plays that were performed by the worker-actors on a flatbed truck for strikers on the picket lines and at strike meetings. Borrowing from the Commedia, the actors made and wore half-masks, performed stock characters, and worked

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off scenarios.6 Twenty years later, Valdez recalled, “I was working with farmers, some of whom could not read scripts, so we used improvisation, which made presentations very lively … In the old days we rehearsed on the run and performed on the picket line. This was the middle of a great strike” (Heyward, 1985). In moving performance from the parks of San Francisco to the vineyards of California’s Central Valley, Valdez was, in effect, extending the environmental revolution that the Mime Troupe had started. As the artist Carl Heyward observed, “El Teatro created site-specific installation in the truest sense of the format, transforming the fields into sociopolitical arenas” (Heyward, 1985). Indeed, the line between performance and political action in El Teatro’s early days was very thin, both echoing the goals of the Agit-Prop movement earlier in the century and prefiguring the unity of performance and political action aspired to by many contemporary performance activists. “The first actos weren’t really actos at all, they were political acts,” Valdez recalled some two decades later. “For example, we were on the picket line just after I moved to Delano and the growers had put some signs right along the vineyard saying, ‘Red Commie Agitators Get Out!’ I remember Cesar [Chavez] asked me if there was anything we could do about that situation, meaning the Teatro. So, what we did is got our signs out [and went to confront the bosses and thugs] and everything they said, we said. If they said, ‘Get out,’ we said, ‘Get out.’ If they said, ‘Shut up,’ we said, ‘Shut up.’ If they said, ‘We’re going to call a cop,’ we said ‘We’re going to call a cop.’ Eventually they got so P.O.ed that they retreated into the vineyard and left us alone. That has really been the basis of anything we’ve ever done at the Teatro—don’t talk about it; do it” (El Teatro Campesino, 1985). Soon El Teatro Campesino was not only performing on the picket line but, as a national grape boycott in support of the strike took hold among liberals and progressives, at fund raisers for the strike all across the nation. El Teatro officially separated from the union (although continuing to support its organizing efforts) in 1967, which resulted in the Teatro being able to take on a wider range of political and cultural issues. In 1969 they were invited to perform at a theatre festival in France and their international reputation took off. During the Seventies, they did numerous tours of the United States and Mexico, along with six European tours. 6 For a sampling of the early actos, see Valdez (1971). For an overview of El Teatro Compesino’s first 20 years, El Teatro Campesino (1985).

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El Teatro Campesino almost immediately inspired the formation of other Chicano theatres with progressive political perspectives throughout California and the Southwest. Among the earliest were Teatro Urbano in San Jose, California; Teatro Chicano in Los Angeles; and Teatro de los Pobres (The Theatre of the Poor) in El Paso, Texas. In 1969 El Teatro Campesino took the lead in organizing El Teatro National de Aztlan Federation (Aztlan being a reference to the lands once part of the Aztec cultural continuum), to bring together the burgeoning Chicano theatre movement. The federation’s first Chicano Theatre Festival in 1970 drew 15 theatres, the third annual festival in 1973 was attended by 64 Chicano theatre troupes. While most of those theatres didn’t out live the decade, the Chicano theatre movement played a vital role in the rise of the Chicano ethnic pride and the Chicano political movement nationally.7 It was one of the most impactful cultural movements of the Sixties. Although the goal of unionizing America’s agricultural workers has yet to be achieved, El Teatro Campesino, now more focused on Chicano history and cultural roots, is still producing plays and training actors. The fourth significant street theatre to emerge in the Sixties was the New York Street Theatre Caravan (NYSTC or Caravan). As the name makes clear, it was based in New York City and its modus operandi was touring—although its caravan usually only consisted of a flatbed truck and a van or two carrying the actors. The Caravan was founded in 1967 by two actors from the mainstream theatre, Marketa Kimbrell and Richard Levy, who met as members of the short-lived ensemble at Lincoln Center. The theatre’s first performances took place at Resurrection City, the encampment of some 3,000 tents and shanties set up along the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC by the Poor People’s Campaign in the spring of 1968. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King had launched the campaign before his assassination as an attempt to bring the poor people together across racial and ethnic divides to demand the elimination of poverty in the United States. The campaign tried to solider on after King’s death, but without his leadership it couldn’t gain traction and lasted only a few months. By the end of June, the National Parks Service refused to renew its permit for the encampment and the police moved in with tear gas and clubs to end the occupation (National Park Service, n.d.).

7 This timeline owes much to Huerta (2015).

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Doing their first performance at Resurrection City for the Poor People’s Campaign embodied the mission and politic which the Street Caravan would pursue for the next three decades. NYSTC sought to perform specifically for poor working-class audiences and to do so in conjunction with progressive community and political organizations. This was different than either Bread and Puppet or the Mime Troupe who performed for whomever they encountered in the street or park and certainly different than the avant-garde theatres of the Sixties such as The Performance Group and the Living Theatre, who performed primarily for students and those in the counterculture. The exception, in this regard, was the brief period in the early ’70s when the Living Theatre performed in the favelas of Brazil and outside the steel mills of Pittsburg. When they did so, the Living attempted to put on their work unmediated, that is, directly to those on the street, without being connected to those organizing on the ground in the communities they were performing for. That was, also the case, and, indeed, the mission, of most guerrilla theatre. El Teatro Campesino, in its early years, was the theatre of the United Farm Workers, which is how they had access to, and the immediate support of, the striking workers. The New York Street Caravan was not a guerrilla theatre, nor was it a part of, or associated with, a particular organization. Its mobility was, at least in part, a response to wanting to be where it could be helpful. In addition to “hippie communes” of the time, the Sixties also gave birth to the Black Panthers, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, La Raza, the Progressive Labor Party, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Revolutionary Communist Party, to name but few of the most influential at the time. In this sense, the NYSTC was more a theatre of the Left than it was of the counterculture, although, admittedly, in the late 1960s and early ‘70s the line between the two was very porous. The Caravan members never did dope while on tour (it was considered to be an easy excuse for the police to bust you, as they would do to the Living Theatre in Brazil), and Caravan actors always referred to what they did as “political theatre.” The overview of the theatre’s archives at the New York Public Library begins by describing it as a, “…socialist theater collective that performed for underprivileged and geographically isolated communities in the United States and internationally” (New York Public Library, n.d.). In actuality, it was never a collective; Kimbrell ran it as a traditional artistic director. Nor were there political criteria for being a part of the Caravan, although it is safe to say that most of the actors, at least in the

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early days, did consider themselves, as Kimbrell herself did, to be socialists or communists of one sort or another. Under Kimbrell’s leadership, the Caravan was always looking to connect to radical organizing going on in poor communities and saw its theatre work as an extension of that organizing work. Here I must once again slip into the first person because I was an actor with the Caravan in 1969–1970 and my experience with it was seminal in my development as a political theatre artist. When I was a 19year old college student, studying at Bensalem, an experimental college of Fordham University in the Bronx, I caught the “D” Train and rode it to the end of the line in Coney Island, Brooklyn to audition for the NYSTC. I was responding to an ad in the National Guardian, a progressive weekly that was read at the time by virtually everyone on the U.S. Left. All of the other members of the diverse troupe (Black, Latino, and white) were also in their late teens or early twenties. They came, for the most part, from working-class families. The training in acting and devising plays that we received from Kimbrell and Levy was the first professional theatre training any of us had. Although I left the Caravan after less than two years, I stayed in touch with Kimbrell, off and on, until her death in 2011. Unless otherwise cited, what follows about Kimbrell and the New York Street Theatre Caravan is drawn from my experience/memory. Marketa Kimbrell was the creative and political force that drove the caravan. She was born Marketa Nitschová in 1928 in Czechoslovakia and began her acting career as a teenager with the Chamber Theater in Prague (Hevesi, 2011). As a young person, she was involved, in small ways, with the Czech resistance for which she was arrested right before the end of the war. Released from prison, she found herself in a displaced-persons camp in Germany where she met and married George Kimbrell a United States Army Major from Oklahoma. She was 18 years old at the time. George Kimbrell was a career military officer and Marketa returned with him to live with his conservative family in Oklahoma. They quickly had three sons. In 1952, while “playing” war games, George was killed when his jeep hit a live landmine. In a bizarre and incredibly sad coincidence, one of her sons, Alan, a journalist, was killed while riding in a vehicle that hit a landmine in Kuwait while he was reporting on the First Gulf War. When her husband was killed, Kimbrell packed up her three small children and moved to Hollywood to make it as a movie actress. She had a fairly successful run playing in television drama series such as “Playhouse 90” and the “Armstrong Circle Theatre.” Her most notable movie role is

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Tessie, the mistress of the character Sol Nazerman played by Rod Steiner in The Pawnbroker, which was released in 1964. By the following year, she had moved to New York, was acting at Lincoln Center and, with Levy, launched the Caravan. When I began with the Caravan two years after its founding, we were rehearsing in an abandoned building that had been an animal menagerie on Surf Avenue in Coney Island, which the city leased to the NYSTC for $1 a year. Coney Island, once a very popular amusement park and beach destination for working-class New Yorkers, was, at that point, run down and full of empty storefronts and abandoned buildings. The Bread and Puppet Theatre at that time had a similar deal with the city and were building and rehearsing their puppets a few blocks away. We visited each other once in a while. The NYSTC turned to folklore and folk music, which the American Left, at least since the 1930s, had approached as the foundation upon which to build a new, progressive “people’s culture.”8 The play we devised and performed during my tenure with the Caravan was based on the Central European folktale, “The Bremen Town Musicians,” in which a group of farm animals, each dispossessed from their farms for various reasons, meet up on the road. When they come upon a mansion that has been taken over by thieves who are celebrating by eating a feast, the animals decide to form a musical group and sing for their supper at the window of the mansion. The “music” they make is so cacophonous that it frightens the thieves, who run away, leaving the animals to take over the mansion and enjoy the meal. In our version, each animal represented a different oppressed group in the United States and the mansion occupied by thieves was the White House. For reasons I never did quite get, the play’s original title was taken from a song, “Come On in my Kitchen, It’s Gonna be Raining Outdoors,” by 1930s Mississippi blues singer Robert Johnson. It remained in the Caravan’s repertory for years, with the less poetic, more direct title, Hard Time Blues. Later Caravan plays—all devised by the cast and shaped into a script by Kimbrell— were based on American labor and political history, including its two best-known productions, Molly McGuire about a radical union on Irish immigrant coal miners active in Pennsylvania in the 1860s and ‘70s, and Sacco & Vanzetti, about two anarchist Italian immigrants in the Boston 8 For overviews of this cultural/political phenomenon, see Denisoff (1971) and Reuss (2000).

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area, who were framed on robbery and murder charges, and electrocuted by the state of Massachusetts in 1927. While in NYC, the Caravan performed on the back of a large International Harvester flatbed truck and took it to the streets of Brooklyn. (This is the kind of truck where the fence-like sides can be removed, leaving a flat stage-like area.) In advance, the theatre would arrange with various block associations and community groups to have the block closed to traffic for the evening. We’d then load up the back of the truck with all the costumes, props, and lighting equipment needed, drive the truck and a van full of actors to the block, take off the sides of the truck, put on our costumes, set the stage, and set up the lights. For power, we’d hook the lights up to a friendly store front or rig them up to a street light. (I’m not sure how we learned to do that, but we did.) We would then perform the play for scores, sometimes hundreds of neighborhood people of all ages who stood on the street and sidewalk, sat on stoops, or watched from their fire escapes. The NYSTC did its first national tour in the summer of 1969. On this tour, we performed not only in poor neighborhoods in Detroit, Jackson (Michigan), Chicago, Milwaukee, Portland, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC, but also on the Cheyenne, Navajo, and Hopi reservations, for farm workers in Delano and Salinas, California, oil rig workers in small-town Oklahoma and coal miners in West Virginia. Everywhere the Caravan performed, it was sponsored by a radical political organization or trade union that was organizing in the area. Shows on that tour were set up for us by, among others, the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, the American Indian Movement, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, and a radical rank-and-file caucus within the United Mine Workers of America. That connection to ongoing grassroots organizing all over the country remained a characteristic of the Caravan. As the 1970s proceeded and radical pollical groups were destroyed or faded away, and as the trade union movement moved rightward and lost its vitality, the NYSTC turned to performing in prisons as a way of reaching oppressed people. It also went aboard, performing in Cuba and Mexico and in Nicaragua for, among others, the Sandinista Popular Army during the civil war with the U.S.-funded Contras there. From the 1980s onward, the company was invited to theatre festivals in Europe. One unusual characteristic of the Caravan was that despite the radical views of its artists and the content of

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its plays, it continued to get funding from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council for the Arts and various corporate foundations, even as other politically progressive and community-based arts organizations were steadily cut off from such funding. This may be, in part—and here I am only speculating—that Kimbrell’sconnections in mainstream theatre and film, and the fact that from 1979 on, she taught at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, helped her access such funds. The street theatres of the 1960s, both the larger and longer-lasting professional ones discussed here, and the many hundreds of short lived, mostly amateur troupes that came and went more or less quickly, were an important part of both the theatre and the politics of the time. They all, to one extent or another, both expanded the physical environment of theatre and who got to experience it. The street theatres also revived in the U.S.—as Theatre of the Oppressed was doing in Latin America—the Agit-Prop perspective of using performance as a form of political education and organization. This perspective continues to inform an important stream in the performance activist movement today. That said, political street theatre, per se, is not performance activism. It is all about telling a story with a political message, which is a different activity than engaging participants in performatory development activity. Street theatre, even in its guerrilla variant, and however radical the content of its performances, retains the definitional distinction between the performer and the audience member. However, taken together, the ritualized theatre of the avant-garde and the “take it to the streets” activity of the street theatres were both reflecting and accelerating the performatoriness of Sixties’ culture and politics. And while “performatoriness” may not yet be a word recognized in English dictionaries, it is what I can come up with to try and capture the fluid and liminal border between “life” and “theatre” that was wide spread at the time and which found its most developed embodiment in the activities of the San Francisco Diggers.

Pranksters, Hog Farmers, and Diggers The Sixties was a time when millions of (mostly) young people were, donning costumes that (in the United States at least) were a combination of Native American and nineteenth Century white settler dress, growing their hair long, choosing new names, in short, trying out new versions of themselves. It wasn’t called performance at the time. It was called

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“rebellion” or “non-conformity” or “weird” or “disgusting,” depending on your politics. Whatever else it was, it was an attempt—political in its implications as well as cultural—to find a way of living that was different than the corporate-dominated, alienated culture they had grown up in. From early on, there were attempts to bring these new cultural experiments (performances) out to others. In the summer of 1964, the author Ken Kesey (best known for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ) with a colorfully painted bus accompanied by some twenty friends who were living collectively on his farm in Oregon set out to drive across the country. Dubbing themselves the Merry Pranksters, wherever they stopped they organized parties (with an early incarnation of the Grateful Dead providing the music) and gave out LSD. “The purpose of the bus trip,” according to historian Dominick Cavallo, “was to see what might happen when spontaneous behavior inspired by hallucinogenic drugs confronted what Kesey saw as the dreary conformity and dismal rationality of American society”9 (Cavallo, 1999, p. 111). A more performatory, and more inclusive, approach to this traveling proselytization, emerged with the Hog Farm, a rural commune outside of Los Angeles—literally a hog farm—led by former actor and stand-up comedian Hugh Romney, who by this time, had taken on the name (and clown persona) Wavy Gravy. The Hog Farm’s performances began when they were still settled at the farm with what they called “Hog Sunday” celebrations. Friends would visit the farm for the day and participate in activities with themes like “dress like kids” or “roll in the mud” or participate in events like the hog rodeo. “The group eventually piled into buses and trucks and went on the road for extended periods of time” (Callaghan, 2000, p. 91). What they did on the road is recalled by former Hog Farmer David Lebrun: Wavy Gravy discovered in work with autistic children that he could get children who wouldn’t talk to or touch each other to talk and make contact using improvisational methods. Operating on the assumption that by the late sixties the whole world was very autistic, very polarized, out of touch but actually wanting to make contact, we used these techniques and went right into middle America. The Hog Farm happenings were aimed at an entire community—church, police, students—people who usually didn’t 9 For a narrative account of the trip see Wolf (1968).

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talk to each other … Camp would be like a circus … [T]he police would always stop us, but we learned to switch roles, so, rather than them just being police and us being hippies, we would change all the parts around. We would start taking movies of them, asking them to take pictures of us playing ‘Home on the Range’ to them on kazoos, or getting out all kinds of toys, and the police would be disarmed. … It was very powerful. (quoted in Taylor, 1987, pp. 107, 108)

The Hog Farm caravan obviously had something in common with the New York Street Theatre Caravan, except they weren’t putting on plays; they were working to engage the whole town or neighborhood in a performance together. In that regard, the Hog Farm anticipated much contemporary performance activism (as distinct from political theatre). Nor were their performances prearranged and coordinated with local political organizations. They appeared unannounced; their performance events functioned more as provocations than as support for local organizing efforts. The NYSTC functioned as part of the political left; the Hog Farm functioned as part of the counter culture. The question of the line between art and life runs like a bright thread through the history of avant-garde theatre, from Dada to Performance Art and through the ritualized theatre of the Sixties. For the most part, the concern has come from the artists and the impulse has been to make art more like life, i.e., to bring non-artists onto the stage. In the Sixties, the interest in the line between theatre and life began to bubble-up on a mass scale from activists as well as artists, and, as these two examples help illustrate, the impulse was reversed—with much energy being directed toward making life more like the theatre. Cultural historian Michael William Doyle puts it this way, “The forms of political activism and the content of the avant-garde theatre in the United States converged in the mid-1960s. Artists, particularly those who worked in the theatre, used the stage to bring au courant controversies and sweeping social commentaries to the fore of public awareness. Political protestors, meanwhile, began increasingly to adopt dramatic form as a mean of expressing their collective dissent from a society they saw as morally bankrupt, racist, and culturally stultifying. Together the two developments contributed a distinctive sensibility to Sixties cultural politics; the interaction of New Left politics and avant-garde performance fused to produce the nation’s first counter culture to be called by that name” (Doyle, 2002, p. 72).

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That fusion gave birth to the first deliberate attempts to approach performance not simply as a tool to be applied to the struggle for social change (as in a play that taught a political lesson or a performance event like those of the Hog Farm meant to spread a new cultural attitude) but performance, brought into daily life, as itself the social change. Put in methodological language that I learned many years later from Fred Newman, instead of performance as a tool for a result, performance as simultaneously a tool and a result, that is, the means of social change and the change (Newman & Holzman, 1993). Given the presence of the Mime Troupe and the influx of tens of thousands of counterculture youth (hippies), it’s not surprising that the most articulate and developed expression of this emerged in San Francisco. In the fall of 1966 a group of about twenty Mime Troupe actors left the theatre and founded an anarchist collective called the Diggers (Chepesiuk, 1995, p. 128). They took their name from the sixteenth century Diggers, a group of proto-anarcho-communists, mostly peasants and artisans, who emerged near the end of the English Civil War (1649, to be exact) and began taking over unused land owned by big landowners and “digging,” that is, plowing and planting it collectively. The English Civil War (1642–1651) was essentially a revolution led by England’s rising merchant class and lower gentry (smaller land owners) against the political rule and feudal privileges of the old aristocracy. Politically, it was framed as a battle between Parliament and the King. Although it eventually resulted in compromise with the nobles, re-establishing their House of Lords and the monarchy, actual power remained in the hands of the merchants in the House of Commons. In order to defeat the aristocracy, the merchants had to enlist the support of the peasants and urban artisans to fight in their “New Model Army.” In the midst of the Civil War a strong movement called Levelers developed among the poor (and within the New Model Army) which called for “leveling” all wealth so that everyone had not only the same political rights but also the same amount of land and money. The Diggers were the most radical wing of this movement, maintaining that instead of dividing up private property equally, which they argued would soon become unequal again, the solution lay in doing away with private property all together, collectively working the land and sharing the fruits of their labor. One of their leaders, Gerrard Winstanley, wrote, “And let the common people, that say the earth is ours, not mine, let them labor together and eat bread together upon the commons, mountains and hills” (quoted in Berens, 2015, pp. 68, 69).

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The Diggers took direct non-violent action to do just that—to live the vision they had for a communal life of equality—by taking over land and digging it. They were soon violently repressed by the revolutionary government and disposed from the land they had occupied. “The Diggers of San Francisco seem not to have made a detailed study of their English forbears,” writes Doyle, “probably because they were less interested in them as a model than as an inspiration. What appealed to them about the earlier group was that it was a movement that had emerged spontaneously from within the ranks of the oppressed. What the two groups shared was a vision of the total transformation of social and economic relations, a dedication to bringing about the New Jerusalem by peaceable means … and, perhaps most importantly, a belief that exemplary actions were the key to realizing their ambitious goals. … Both groups managed to exert a measure of influence that was disproportionate to their small number; both proved ultimately to be short-lived” (Doyle, 2002, p. 79). Peter Coyote, one of the actors who left the Mime Troupe to start the Diggers, later explained the move this way, “[the theatre] appeared more and more circumscribed by the dominant culture’s values. If [political] theatre had been co-opted and turned into another product in their cultural supermarket, weren’t all efforts inside the market fruitless? All your skill and ability were just more packaging, and you wound up as just another product, this one labeled ‘radical.’ If we wanted to create a culture predicated on different premises, a counter-culture, we needed to escape the aquarium” (Coyote, 1998, p. 64). One way of understanding what the San Francisco Diggers did is that they took guerrilla theatre in a different direction, away from theatre toward what we now call performance activism. “Not Street = theatre; the street is theatre,” read an anonymous article by the Diggers printed in the Haight-Ashbury Tribune in 1968. “A crowd is an audience for an event. Release of crowd spirit can accomplish social facts. Riots are a reaction to police theatre. Thrown bottles and overturned cars are responses to a dull, heavy, mechanical and deathly show. People fill the street to express special public feelings and hold human communion” (Taylor, 1972, pp. 311, 312). The Diggers engaged in street performances/events which usually involved people on the streets as performers. “From the Diggers standpoint, anyone was welcome to join their events,” writes Doyle, “but mere spectators were actively discouraged” (Doyle, 2002, p. 83). As the Diggers themselves put it, their guerrilla theatre,

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“…seeks audiences that are created by the issues. It creates a cast of free beings. It will become an issue itself” (Taylor, p. 310). For example, in October 1966, in response to the growing stream of tourists who came to gawk from tour buses at the hippies in Haight-Ashbury, the Diggers organized people to cross Haight Street in as many variations of polygons as possible; within an hour some 600 pedestrians were zig-zagging every which way and vehicular traffic came to a halt. Not surprisingly, this performance/demonstration/event resulted in the arrest of five Diggers and another member of the crowd (Taylor). However, the most well-known activities of the Diggers, what garnered them national and international attention, were the free goods and services they organized. They started with serving hot food in Golden Gate Park at 4:00 p.m. every day. From there, they went on to open free stores, stocked with donated and found stuff, at which anyone could take whatever they wanted; free restaurants; free legal services; a free medical clinic; free housing in the form of communal “crash pads,” occasional free outdoor film screenings and free concerts with bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead. For a while, they organized a small fleet of vans, trucks, and buses that shuttled people (for free, of course) around the Bay Area. By 1967 all of this was being called the Free City Network (Coyote, 1998, pp. 70, 71, 89, 90; Doyle, 2002, pp. 81, 82). As they wrote at the time, “The diggers are hip to property … Everything is free … Human beings are the means of exchange … So a store of goods or clinic or restaurant that is free becomes a social art form” (Taylor, 1972, p. 310). The key to understanding the San Francisco Diggers’ contribution to the eventual emergence of performance activism is their insistence that their activities—be they street actions or free stores—were performances happening in life-as-it-is-being-lived, distinct from art as found in museums or theatres. It was a “social art form,” that is, both art and living in a new way—in this case outside the assumptions of the money system and consumerism—indeed, living in a new way is the art. “Not only were the goods in the Free Store free but so were the roles,” recalls Coyote. “Customers might ask to see the manager and were informed that they were the manager. Some people then froze, unsure how to respond. Some would leave, but some ‘got it’ and accepted the invitation to redo the store according to their own plan, which was the point” (Coyote, 1998, pp. 89, 90).

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The first of the Diggers’ free food distribution centers was called the Free Frame of Reference, because when people arrived for the free food, the Diggers asked them to walk through a tall yellow picture frame. “The frame represented what was possible when people changed their conceptual paradigm for apprehending reality,” writes Doyle (Doyle, 2002, p. 80). At all the Diggers street events and free stores, clinics, etc., people were given a miniature frame on a chain to wear around their necks, not as idle decoration or as a charm but as an ongoing reminder that they could reframe their perception of reality, of what was possible, at any time and choose, therefore, to perform differently. “The point,” writes historian Dominick Cavallo, “…was to create moments of theater in which people were compelled to put aside their ‘normal frame of reference’ and cultural scripts concerning hierarchy, property and authority. … Once they became conscious that their roles could be changed simply by altering the script, anything was possible” (Cavallo, 1999, p. 121). In this, sociologist/journalist Todd Gitlin, himself a former president of Student for a Democratic Society, postulates that the Diggers were influenced/inspired by the example of the Civil Rights Movement which performed “as-if.” That is, in the lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides, etc., activists were performing “as-if” they were already living in a desegregated society, although they knew full well they weren’t. Yet the performance was itself a means of transforming the reality they had been born into. All of this led, rather quickly, to the Diggers’ concept/activity of the Life Actor. The phrase was coined by Peter Berg, who had been, after Davis, the Mime Troupe’s preeminent writer-director, to describe someone who, in Coyote’s words, “… consciously creates the role he or she plays in everyday life, a person who marshals skill, imagination and improvisation to break free from imposed roles and reactions and, by example, demonstrates a path that will free others” (Coyote, 1998, p. 33). The Diggers sought to be Life Actors as a means of engaging and transforming themselves and the larger world at the same time. As theatre historian David Callaghan writes, “Each life-actor would construct a persona that embodied this ideal [of a collective, cooperative, ‘free’ society] and then perform it in his or her daily existence” (Callaghan, 2000, p. 87). The Life Actor didn’t perform only for his or own entertainment, gratification or self-improvement (although all of those might be generated), but as a method of political activism. “The Diggers believed”

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Coyote said, “that if we created enough examples of ‘free-life’ by actually acting them out … without the safety-net of the stage, then people would have alternatives to society’s skimpy menu of life choices” (quoted in Grogan, 1990, p. v). As we have seen in the course of this investigation, the notion of performance as an activity that can happen off stage has been exerting itself, in various ways (Dada, Happenings, Performance Art), throughout the twentieth century. Approaching performance as a way of being political is also not new to the Diggers (Agit-Prop, Epic Theatre, Guerrilla Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed). The Digger’s breakthrough, which happened, not coincidently, in the midst of a mass cultural movement which was expressing itself through new social performances, was to approach performance in everyday life as a means of social transformation. “Theatre is Territory,” the Diggers declared. “A space for existing outside padded walls. Setting down a stage declares a universal pardon for imagination. But what happens next must mean more than sanctuary or preserve. How would real wardens react to life actors on liberated ground? How can the intrinsic freedom of theatre illuminate walls and show the weak spots where a breakout could occur?” (Taylor, 1972, p. 310). David Callaghan, in a talk given at the Southeastern Theatre Conference in 1999, pointed out that the Diggers, “…adapted an aesthetic and social paradigm that perceived day-to-day life as a performance of sorts. In doing so they helped to redefine and stretch the boundaries of what could be construed as acting and theatre and seized on the possibilities of art and performance as a means of creating a new social order in America” (Callaghan, 2000, p. 87). Like their English predecessors some 300 years earlier, the San Francisco Diggers didn’t last long. By the turn of the decade they were gone, not repressed violently like the original Diggers, but weakened by the counter culture’s often destructive use of drugs and, led by the counter culture’s dominant politic of focusing on living by example, they gave up on their creative attempts to engage authority. They left the city, dispersing to form a web of loosely connected rural communal farms that became known as the Free Family (Callaghan, 2000, p. 90). The most immediate heir of the Diggers was the Youth International Party (Yippies), which played an active role in the peace movement and the counter-culture well into the mid-1970s. Its founders and leaders, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, came to San Francisco to learn from

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the Diggers and always acknowledged their debt. However, unlike the Diggers who made a principal of anonymity and did not forefront specific leaders, Hoffman and Rubin consciously projected themselves as counter cultural and political leaders. More to the point, the Yippies, unlike the Diggers, didn’t engage in on-the-ground organizing or establishing free “social art forms.” Instead they focused on creative guerrilla theatre events that Hoffman came to call “media-freaking.” As he explained it, “The trick to manipulating the media is to get them to promote an event before it happens … In other words … get them to make an advertisement for … revolution—the same way you would advertise soap” (quoted in Howard & Forbade, 1972, p. 69). Although Jerry Rubin in his book, We Are Everywhere, wrote that America would be better off if we could “change our personalities” create “abrupt new beginnings” and “start our lives all over again,” (Rubin, 1971, p. 76), the Yippies never embraced the Life Actor as an approach to either life or politics. (Indeed, in the 1980s, Rubin “started all over again” by giving up the counterculture and activism altogether and becoming a successful businessman.)

References Aronson, A. (2005). American avant-garde theatre: A history. Routledge. Aronson, A. (2018). The history and theory of environmental scenography (2nd ed.). Methuen Drama. Artaud, A. (1958). The theatre and its double (M. Richard, Trans.). Grove Press. Barshak, J. (n.d.). San Francisco mime troupe arrested. Shaping San Francisco, Digital Archive. http://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=San_Franci sco_Mime_Troupe_Arrested Beck, J. (1970). We, the living theatre (A. Rostagno, Ed.). Ballantine Walden Books. Beck, J., Malina, J., The Living Theatre Collective & House, L., Massengale B., Mary, M., Mary, W. T., & Silva, E., Schultz, J., Badyk, P., & Reznikov, H., Fanette, Altomare, C., Torch, C., Beck, I. M., & Westernik, C. (1975). Turning the earth: A ceremony for spring planting in five ritual acts: Collective creation of The Living Theatre. The Drama Review: TDR, 19(3), 94–105. https://doi.org/10.2307/1145000 Becks surrender and begin terms; Living Theatre owners start sentence in tax case. (1964, December 16). New York Times. www.nytimes.com Berens, L.H. (2015). The digger movement in the days of the commonwealth, as revealed in the writings of Gerrard Winstanley, the digger, mystic, and rationalist, communist and social reformer. Andesite Press.

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Bread and Puppet Theater. (n.d.). Welcome. https://breadandpuppet.org Brooklyn Academy of Music. [BAM.org]. (2013, March 5). The Living Theatre in Amerika: Paradise now [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=3oycJjTSgMA Buck, S. (2017, February 26). The plan to levitate the Pentagon was the perfectly absurdly inspiring protest for the time: How many hippies does it take to make magic happen? Timeline. https://timeline.com Callaghan, D. (2000). The perpetual present: Life as art during the 1960s. Theatre Symposium: A Publication of the Southeastern Theatre Conference, 8, 86–94. Cavallo, D. (1999). A fiction of the past: The sixties in American history. Martin’s Press. Chepesiuk, R. (1995). Peter Berg: From digger to environmental activist. In Sixties radicals, then and now: Candid conversations with those who shaped an era, 118–132. McFarland & Co. Coyote, P. (1998). Sleeping where I fall: A chronicle. Counterpoint. Davis, R. G. (1964). Radical, independent, chaotic, anarchic theatre vs. institutional, university, little, commercial, ford and stock theatres. Studies on the Left, 4(2), 130–113. Davis, R. G. (1966). Guerilla theatre. Tulane Drama Review, 10(2), 30–136. https://doi.org/10.2307/1125214. Denisoff, R. S. (1971). Great day coming: Folk music and the American left. University of Illinois Press. Doyle, M. W. (2002). Staging the revolution: Guerrilla theater as countercultural practice, 1965–1968. In P. Braunstein & M. W. Doyle (Eds.), Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s & ’70s (pp. 71–98). Routledge. El Teatro Campesino. (1985, November 1). El Teatro Campesino: The first twenty years [Video]. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/cusb_000229 Grogan, E. (1990). Ringolevio: A life played for keeps. Citadel. Grotowski, J. (n.d.). Source material on Jerzy Grotowski: Statement of principles. Owen Daly. http://owendaly.com/jeff/grotows2.htm Halprin, A. (1995). Moving toward life. University Press of New England. Hevesi, D. (2011, July 19). Marketta Kimbrell, 82, actress and producer. New York Times, p. A16. Heyward, C. (1985). El teatro campesino: An interview with Luis Valdez. High Performance #32, 8(4), https://web.archive.org/web/20051202092756/ http://www.communityarts.net/readingroom/archivefiles/2002/09/el_tea tro_campe.php..H Howard, M., & Forcade, T. K. (Eds.) (1972). (Eds.). The underground reader. New American Library.

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Huerta, J. (2015, December 5). The legacy of Luis Valdez and El Teatro Campesino. Howlround Theatre Commons. https://howlround.com/legacyluis-valdez-and-el-teatro-campesino Innes, C. D. (1993). Avant garde theatre, 1892–1992. Routledge. Kott, J., & Czerwinski, E. J. (1969). The icon and the absurd. The Drama Review: TDR, 14(1), 17–24. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144502 Lahr, J. (1970). Up against the fourth wall: Essays on modern theatre. Gove Press. The Living Theatre. (1969). “Paradise Now”: Notes. The Drama Review: TDR, 13(3), 90–107. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144460 The Living Theatre. (1971). Paradise now: Collective creation of the Living Theatre. Random House. Malina, J., Beck, J., & Schechner, R. (1969). Containment is the enemy. The Drama Review: TDR, 13(13), 24–44. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144455 Martin, B. D. (2004). The theatre is in the street: Politics and public performance. University of Massachusetts Press. McDermott, P. (1969). Portrait of an actor, watching. Antiphonal feedback to the Living Theatre. The Drama Review: TDR, 13(3), 74–85. https://doi. org/10.2307/1144458 National Park Service. (n.d.). Resurrection city. https://www.nps.gov/articles/ resurrection-city.htm Nelson, S. (1989). Redecorating the fourth wall: Environmental theatre today. The Drama Review: TDR, 33(3), 72–94. https://doi.org/10.2307/1145988 The New York Public Library. (n.d.). New York street theater caravan records. The New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts. http://archives.nypl. org/the/22678 Online Archive of California. (n.d.). Inventory of the Ronald G. Davis Papers. https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tflp3002f2/entire_text/ Pearson, M. (2010). Site-specific performance. Palgrave Macmillan. Performance Group. (1970). Dionysus in 69 (R. Schechner, Ed.). Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Reuss, R. A. (2000). American folk music and left-wing politics, 1927–1957 . Scarecrow Press. Rockwell, J. (1992, August 27). Theater; Behind the masks of a moralist. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com Rubin, J. (1971). We are everywhere. Harper and Row. Ryan, P., Beck, J., & Malina, J. (1971). The living theatre in Brazil. The Drama Review: TDR, 15(3), 21–29. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144678 The San Francisco actor’s workshop. (n.d.). Herb Blau and Jules Irving. http:// www.sanfranciscoactorsworkshop.com/History.html Schechner, R. (1968). 6 axioms for environmental theatre”. The Drama Review: TDR, 12(3), 41–64. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144353

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Schechner, R. (1970). Guerrilla theatre: May 1970. The Drama Review: TDR, 14(3), 163–168. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144567 Schechner, R. (1973). Environmental theater. Hawthorn Books. Schechner, R. (2003). Performance theory. Routledge. Schumann, P. (1970). Bread and Puppets. The Drama Review: TDR, 14(3), 35–35. https://doi.org/10.2307/1144551 Taylor, D. (1987). It was twenty years ago today. Bantam Press. Taylor, K. M. (1972). People’s theatre in Amerika. Drama Book Specialists. Tranter, R. (2015, May 15). San Quentin and Samuel Beckett: An interview with Rick Cluchey. Rhys Tranter. https://rhystranter.com/2015/05/15/rick-clu chey-san-quentin-drama-workshop-beckett-interview/ Tytell, J. (1995). The living theatre: Art, exile, and outrage. Grove Press. Valdez, L. (1971). Actos El Teatro Campesino. Cucaracha Press. Van Gennep, A. (1960). The rites of passage (M. B. Vizedom & G. L. Caffee, Trans.). The University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1908). Weisman, J. (1973). Guerrilla theatre: Scenarios for revolution. Anchor Press. Wolf, T. (1968). The electric kool-aid acid test. Bantam.

PART II

(Some of) What Performance Activism Does

We have now looked at the last one hundred years of cultural and political activity that has contributed to loosening the ties that bind performance to the institution of the theatre. This loosening has proceeded in fits and starts and zig-zagged in a number of different directions. All of it has, in various ways and to a lesser or greater extent, challenged notions of what art, in general, and theatre, in particular, is. Some of this activity has resulted in cultural dead ends, and some has looped back into reforms of the theatre. Other trends have expanded the boundaries of psychology, education, and political activism by introducing performance into their practice and foreshadowed some of today’s performance activism. In the course of this brief historical investigation we have gotten a glimpse of how some of today’s performance activist tendencies—Playback Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, Social Therapeutics—began to emerge. In part, the emergence of performance activism over the last few decades can be understood as a reaction to the old ways of doing politics, social work, education, psychology, and, of course, theatre, which are no longer working, or no longer working as their practitioners had imagined/hoped. It can also be seen as a positive reassertion of the human instinct/need to perform, a need that the segregation of performance into the institution of the theatre (and its progeny, film, and television) denies most of us. David Diamond, the founder and artistic director of Theatre for Living, who we will be hearing more from later, writes, “Theatre, like all other forms of cultural expression, used to be ordinary people singing, dancing, telling stories. This was the way a living community recorded

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and celebrated its victories, defeats, joys, fears. … Like many other things we can think of, cultural activity became commodified. It transformed from something that people did naturally ‘in community,’ into a manufactured consumer product. Today a vast majority of people buy theatre, buy dance, buy paintings, buy books, buy movies; the list goes on and on. We now pay strangers to tell us stories about strangers. But when do we use the symbolic language of theatre, dance, etc. to tell our own stories about our collective selves?” (Diamond, 2008, pp. 19–20). As Diamond postulates, and as the history summarized previously suggests, the common thread of performance activism might be summed up as the impulse to give the creative possibilities of performance away to “ordinary people,” to generate activities and environments that empower us to become active creators of culture. In so doing, performance activism also, as Diamond implies, generates connection and community. Even if that community is a temporary ensemble, performance is, by its nature, social. It brings people together to imagine, to play, to create together. The impulse to democratize performance is indivisibly interwoven with the creation of community. Those two activities, as I think will become clear in the following pages, wind together through all of performance activism no matter what else it has set out to do. As always when looking at emergent phenomena, attention must be paid to labels and definitions. As I have made clear from the beginning, what I mean by performance activism is the conscious activity of approaching performance as a means of engaging social issues and conflicts in order to reconstruct/transform social reality. Much of what I call here “performance activism” still calls itself “theatre” with a number of different descriptives: Applied Theatre, Social Theatre, Theatre for Social Change, Political Theatre, Popular Theatre. Since “Applied Theatre” is now the dominant label in the Anglophile world, I will use it here. Applied Theatre and its various subdivisions/offshoots—Theatre in Education, Theatre for Development, Playback Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, Theatre for Living, etc.—all use the word “theatre” in their names. These self-described “theatre” forms make up much of the mix of performance activism in the early twenty-first century. This reflects both the origins of many performance activists and, more generally, the framework for viewing/thinking about/participating in performance that has dominated most of our cultures (East and West, North and South) for centuries.

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Indeed, some of this performance activism is theatre in the orthodox sense of a passive audience viewing a play performed by actors. It is activism to the extent that it’s meant to educate or motivate the audience toward action. I would never, for example, deny Fritz Hoffman and the other members of the Prolet-Bühne in New York City in the early 1930s their identity as activists (see p. 20). However, at this point in history, most variants of Applied Theatre have long since embraced the teachings of Paolo Freire and left monologic didacticism behind in favor of a dialogic approach. As we have seen and shall see, they listen to community stories and transform them into skits (Playback Theatre); they stop the play and invite audience members on stage to change the action (Theatre of the Oppressed and Theatre for Living); they engage in “Participatory Community Assessments” to learn what the community is interested in (Theatre for Development). All of this reflects the general democratic thrust of Performance Activism; these variants of Applied Theatre activate the audience in specific ways and open up the creative (and reflective) activity of performance to more people and in so doing they generate community. While the theatre vestiges (stage, actors, narrative) are obvious, these forms have, nonetheless, moved beyond theatre in the orthodox sense. With all this in mind, I will now take a closer look at some of what emerging performance activism does. In Part I, l focused on the precursors of performance activism. Here we will sample the diverse work of contemporary pioneers of the emerging movement. What follows are vignettes and portraits of varying lengths and depths, intended to provide a mosaic-like overview of performance activism today. I have clustered the vignettes according to what, to my thinking, they are specifically doing, that is, the ways in which they are interacting with and impacting upon the individuals, communities, and societies in which they are functioning. The section, is therefore organized into the following chapters: Educating; Politicizing; Building Bridges; Creating Community Conversations; Healing Trauma; Reigniting Creativity, and; Building Community. In ordering the diverse work in such a way, I am aware that this very order might imply that any one of the categories of activity is exclusive. On the contrary, I believe that the impact of participating in performance is not measurable or reducible to a single (or even distinct) outcome. Performance opens so many doors of possibility that to reduce its function to one or another impact is to distort its nature. At the same time, I hope to demonstrate that despite the diversity of these projects,

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all extend performance to ever widening circles of people and generate community. The examples that I provide here are but a small sampling of the performance activism in the world today. I am writing mostly about the work of people I know, a sampling of the people I have met over the last two decades, many of them initially through Performing the World, the bi-annual gathering of performance activists that I have helped to organize since 2001. There are hundreds, no doubt thousands, of other projects of equal interest and value that could have been included. Reference Diamond, D. (2008). Theatre for living: The art and science of community-based dialogue. Trafford Publishing.

CHAPTER 10

Educating

Theatre in Education The use of play and performance in education can be traced back at least to Viola Spolin’s mentor Neva Boyd who introduced them to Chicago’s Hull House and other after-school venues in the early decades of the last century. It was, as she pointed out, “…in the early settlements [settlement houses], not in the schools, that cultural activities such as the arts, drama, music, etc., were experimentally prompted” (Boyd, n.d.). Most theatre historians, however, date Theatre in Education (TIE) as a distinct type of theatre to the United Kingdom in 1965 when Gordon Vallins of the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, funded by local the Educational Authority and Arts Council, formed a troupe of actors to work with teachers in local schools to create and perform plays that re-enforced the school’s curriculum (Vallins, 1980). Less than a decade later, in 1974, there were TIE companies in 35 different cities in England and 5 in Scotland (Redington, 1979, pp. 328–329). Christine Redington, one of the movement’s first historians, describes a Theatre in Education troupe as, “…a group of actor-teachers who usually have experience in both professions. They devise, or write, ‘programmes’ for very specific age groups and take these out to schools. The use of the word ‘programme’ avoids the limiting descriptions of the work as a play or a lesson; in fact, it is both,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_10

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using a complex of theatrical forms and techniques” (Redington, 1983, p. 1). While TIE as a movement didn’t gain traction outside of the U.K., it did inspire the emergence of “teaching artists” who play much the same function in some U.S. public school systems today. A difference is that in the United States. they are “free-lancers,” hired to go into public schools on a case-by-case basis. That TIE is one of the historic roots of what is now called Applied Theatre can be seen in the influential career of Chris Vine, who started out with the Greenwich Young Peoples Theatre, a TIE group in Greenwich, England and who co-founded, and who, as of this writing, is the Academic Director of the Applied Theatre MFA program at the City University of New York (Redington, p. 299).

The Mantle of the Expert In the midst of the Theatre in Education movement in the U.K there emerged a distinct new approach to using performance to educate. It is called the Mantle of the Expert (MoE), sometimes more generically referred to as “process drama.”1 Instead of dramatizing the curriculum for the students, the Mantle of the Expert approach turns the classroom into a long performance workshop (usually six weeks) in which students and teachers perform various roles within an imaginary situation. They pretend to be members of a company or organization tasked with a particular goal. In striving to meet that goal, all sorts of social, intellectual, and emotional challenges arise, challenges which require researching and utilizing information across the curriculum. The Mantle of the Expert was invented by Dorothy Heathcote. Born in the West Yorkshire village of Steeton, she started out working in the woolen mills at the age of fourteen. At nineteen she auditioned and was accepted at the Esme Church’s Theatre School in Bradford and subsequently also studied in that city’s Northern Theatre School. In 1950, at the age of 24, after five years of studying theatre, a teacher told her that while she was very talented she didn’t have the looks to become an actress and suggested she become a teacher instead. Heathcote applied for a job as a staff tutor at Durham University and was hired by Professor Brian Stanley. “He appointed me on my potential,” she later recalled. “He liked people with stamina and energy” (Heathcote as quoted in St. Clair,

1 For more on process drama, see Bowell and Heap (2013), O’Neil (1995a).

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1991, p. 74). When Stanley moved to the newly established University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Heathcote followed and four years later, at the age of 28, she was a Senior Lecturer of Drama in Education, without a degree in education—or anything else. It remained her professional home for the next 37 years as she developed her performatory approach to children’s education in schools throughout the U.K., Canada, the United States, and New Zealand.2 Instead of credentials, what Heathcote brought to the classroom was a conviction that performance was a creative human ability that could be put to use outside the theatre. Heathcote wrote, “Drama is about man’s ability to identify. It doesn’t matter whether you are in the theatre or in your own sitting room. What you’re doing if you are dramatizing is putting yourself in somebody else’s shoes. Man’s gift, with which we seem to be born, of just putting ourselves instantly into somebody’s else’s shoes … We have as yet not done very much about harnessing this to the education of our children” (Quoted in Heston, 1971, pp. 9–10). Heathcote set out to discover just how to do that: harness “dramatizing” to “the education of our children.” She said that she didn’t invent the Mantle of the Expert so much as “find herself doing it” (Mantle of the Expert, n.d.). MoE is different from most other educational approaches, including much of Theatre in Education, in that it doesn’t “teach” a particular subject. Indeed, it could be argued that it doesn’t teach anything at all. Instead, it creates an environment in which the students can pro-actively learn by playing (performing) with each other and the teacher/facilitator. The teacher in MoE is closer to a workshop facilitator than to a traditional teacher. Sandra Heston, observing a MoE session for her 1971 dissertation, wrote, “The function of the teacher was not to present information but to create and change contexts (often by assuming different roles in the session), by encouraging the child to share power and reflect upon the dramatized world” (Heston, 1971, p. 51). Meanwhile, the students are encouraged to stay aware that they are both who-they-are and who-theyare not. “The participant in the Mantle of the Expert is always aware of both the ‘as if’ and the ‘as is’ worlds operating together,” writes Viv Aitkin, a MoE practitioner and researcher in New Zealand. “The teacher can, at any time, signal a step out of the fictional company back into the real-life

2 For a full biography of Heathcote, see Bolton (2003).

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classroom to discuss and evaluate what is being learned ‘over there’—in the fictional context. … The dual realities of Mantle of Expert encourage reflection not only of what is being learned but how it is being learned” (Aitkin, 2013, p. 53). From the pedogeological perspective, Aitkin maintains, the big shift is that, “In Mantle of the Expert, curriculum is encountered in the same way as real life: not as a set of separated ‘subjects’ or ‘learning areas’ but as landing points with an ongoing experience” (Aitkin, 2013, p. 37). For Heathcote, “The conventional image of curriculum work is more akin to a highway, or railway links where one ‘solution’ follows another in linear format,” while for the MoE the image is “… a flowing system – as of a river, tributaries feeding in, and an estuary where all the different aspects of the work achieved come to a conclusion of wide and inter-related understanding of the many strands of enquiry and skill” (Heathcote, n.d.). This fluidity is possible because lessons are not being taught; an improvised game is being played. As Boyd wrote, “…to play is to transport oneself psychologically into an imaginatively set-up situation and to act consistently within it, simply for the intrinsic satisfaction one has in playing” (Boyd, n.d.). Improv, of course, depends on the performers choosing, in Spolin’s words, “self-discipline by accepting the rules of the game (‘it’s more fun that way’) and enter[ing] into the group decisions with enthusiasm and trust” (Spolin, 1999, p. 6). Educational theorist Cecily O’Neil writes of the importance of the “rules of the game” in MoE: “The students are empowered not by giving them spurious ‘freedom,’ but by encouraging them to accept constraints within which they will work to encounter challenges and take decisions from a position of an increasing authority and knowledge. From the foundation provided by the teacher, the students gradually begin to take control of the imagined context, a control earned in a context they have helped to create” (O’Neil, 1995b, p. ix). The fictional context within which the game is played can vary tremendously depending on the needs of the curriculum and the interests of the students. It could be an arbitration organization attempting to settle an ambulance strike, a committee at a museum tasked with gathering Chinese art and crafts, a group of medieval monks

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who need to create a book of monastery rules, a medical team working to cure cancer.3 MoE is, methodologically, about building a performance ensemble, a performance ensemble for learning. Unlike the prevailing educational and psychological view (as dominate today as when Heathcote was working), that sees learning as an individual matter, the working assumption of the Mantle of the Expert is that learning does not have its origins nor does it happen primarily in one’s brain. It is, instead, a social activity of the group, its origins and its activity are between us. In this, Heathcote shares much with Cultural Historic Activity Theory (CHAT) rooted in the work of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which I discussed briefly (see pp. 56–57). “Her method,” writes Heston, “…is based on the constructed interaction of the whole group, with an emphasis on a social event studied from an anthropological viewpoint” (Heston, 1971, p. 14). Heathcote was aware that she was challenging the dominant view on child development—which, in addition to its individualist basis, maintained child development was limited to biologically predetermined stages—and acknowledged her debt to Vygotsky’s social understanding of human development. “A ‘readiness’ theory of learning (derived from Piaget and others) sets a false limit on a student’s capacity,” she said. “It ignores the Vygotskian observation on socially determined learning contexts: that in the presence of an empowering adult, child can reach beyond his/her own capacity in carrying out a task” (Quoted in Heston, p. 51). The job of the MoE teacher/facilitator is, therefore, to create a social unit, what Vygotsky called a Zone of Proximal Development, that empowers the student to perform, in, Vygotsky’s words, “a head taller” then they are (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 192). In Freirean language, the performance becomes the means of an ongoing dialogic pedagogy. There are in the U.K, as of this writing, a handful of schools that function totally through the Mantle of the Expert.4 Although still usually related to in educational research and writing as part of the Theatre in Education movement, viewed through the frame of Performance

3 All of these examples and many more can be found in Heathcote and Bolton (1995). 4 For example: Lindow Community Primary School, Wilmslow, Cheshire (Lindow

Community Primary School, n.d.); Sparhawk Infant and Nursery, Sprowstan, Norwich (Sparhwak Infant and Nursery, n.d.); Bowsland Green Primary School, Bradley Stoke, South Gloucestershire (Bowsland Green Primary School, n.d.).

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Activism, the Mantle of the Expert clearly marked a qualitative shift from Theatre in Education to performance as education.

The Kerala Forum for Science and Literature In the early 1960s, educational activity using performance, but not, apparently, influenced by the Theatre in Education experiments happening in the U.K., emerged in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala. Initiated in 1962 by progressive lecturers at Kalikut University, the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishag (KSSP) (the Kerala Forum for Science and Literature) started as an attempt to popularize science education in the local language, Malayalam, during a time when virtually all education was still conducted in English. KSSP started by publishing inexpensive popular science booklets and organizing elementary and high school teachers to make use of them. The effort was never simply educational, it was also political. “Our idea was that science should become a tool for everyone to use to better themselves,” recalled Krishna Kumar, one of the founders, “and not just a means for a few rich and powerful people to become even richer and more powerful” (Quoted in Van Erven, 1992, p. 127). They soon became a self-supporting membership organization, with chapters in towns and city neighborhoods throughout the state. By the early 1970s KSSP, now influenced by Paolo Freire’s pedological writings, began supplementing its distribution of publications with free, informal night classes in rural villages. “These grassroots education workshops,” writes Eugene Van Erven, artistic director of the International Community Arts Festival and professor at Utrecht University, “often resulted in the formation of local popular science clubs composed of young people and school teachers, which in turn soon developed into action groups that moved from discussing local issue to tackling agricultural or ecological problems themselves” (Van Erven, 1992, p. 127). Building on India’s tradition of political street theatre that stretches back to the 1940s, KSSP, embraced performance as an educational (and political) activity in 1980, the year they began organizing Cultural Caravans (jatha) to tour the countryside during the height of the dry season in October. Reaching out to street theatre practitioners and theatre graduates from the Kalikut University School of Drama, they organized month-long training courses for KSSP members. Living and training together under the guidance of a professional theatre director, these

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teachers and adult students created songs and skits. In October, they set out in vans in different directions, each group staging four shows per day. The publicity for the event was generated by the local KSSP members in a particular village or neighborhood. “Typically, the group enters a community beating the traditional Kerala Jenda drum,” reports Van Erven. “Local KSSP members join them in the parade. The performers play with bare torsos, no facial makeup, and only an occasional mask” (Van Erven, 1992, p. 127). The skits, performed outdoors in the town square, have dealt not only with ecological/science issues such as industrial logging and the chemical disaster at Bhopal, but also wider social concerns, including Muslin-Hindu riots, dowry murders, and religious fanaticism. Not only has the KSSP expanded the range of who was encouraged to perform, its performances help to generate a community of learners who are also politically engaged activists. While its model has not been taken up in other parts of India (or abroad), KSSP has grown into a major non-party educational/political force in Kerala; the sociologists Olle Turnquist and P.K. Michael Tharakan call it “a supportive voluntary organization,” and performance remains in its educational and political tool box (Turnquist & Tharakan, 1996, p. 1995). KSSP currently writes of itself, “Over the past five decades it has grown into a massive people’s science movement, with a membership of about 50,000 drawn from all walks of life and distributed in about 2,000 units within the state of Kerala. Over these years, it has also expanded its fields of interests and activities to almost all fields of human endeavor. The KSSP is involved, broadly in three types of activities: educative, agitative and constructive, in areas like environment, health, education, energy, literacy, micro planning and development in general” [https://kssp.in/ about-us/. Accessed August 14, 2020]. As Turnquist and Tharakan postulate in their article “The Next Left?” the KSSP perhaps provides a new prototype for doing politics, one that focuses on grassroots education, performance, empowerment, and mobilization rather than running for office or organizing for violent revolution (Turnquist & Tharakan).

Theatre for Development In sub-Saharan Africa, where formal public education is far from universal, Theatre in Education morphed into Theatre for Development (TfD). In 1960, rural villagers made up 85% of the African population. Today, while its cities have swelled, the majority of sub-Sharan Africa, 60%, still live

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in rural areas. (World Bank, n.d.). According to the Borgen Project, a foundation dedicated to fighting extreme poverty around the world, as of 2012, only 28% of Africans are able to attend secondary school and half of that 28% drop out due to various reasons linked to poverty. Thirtythree million primary-aged children in Africa currently have never seen, and probably never will, the inside of a classroom (Borgen Project, 2017). Given its weak educational infrastructure, along with the fact that many people don’t have access to film or television, it is lawful that educators and artists in Africa would turn to theatre as an educational tool. The intention of Theatre for Development (TfD) has, from the start, clearly been didactic. Unlike Theatre in Education, the education its troupes provide has not been to teach reading, writing, arithmetic, or science. It has been primarily directed toward social behavior. Theatre for Development in Africa has its roots toward the end of the colonial period. Ross Kidd, who has worked doing TfD throughout Africa, describes its origins this way: In the ‘50s a number of ‘theatre-for-development’ experiments were carried out by the colonial governments in the transitional period as pressure built up for Independence. In Ghana and Uganda, for example, mobile teams were formed to tour the rural areas with plays on cash crop production, immunization, the importance of self-help, literacy, sanitation, and local government tax. The actors were development workers and often combined their performances with practical demonstrations (for example, of agricultural techniques), question-and-answer sessions, and other forms of practical activity (e.g., the distribution of insecticide sprayers, vaccination drives, literacy teacher recruitment, etc.). The tours were a form of ‘mass education’ to complement and reinforce a process of community development and extension work at the village level. (Kidd, 1984, p. 5)

In the Sixties this activity was taken up by Africans themselves, primarily in former English colonies. For the most part, it emerged from professors and students at universities (it still does) who formed theatre troupes and, usually working with government agencies, created plays specifically designed to educate the mostly illiterate rural population. At first, these theatre troupes were funded by the state and the universities involved, but the funding base shifted to include, indeed to be dominated by, agencies and NGOs based in the Global North (Desai, 1991, p. 8). Bashiru Akande Lasisi, a professor in the Department of Theatre Arts at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, is the leader of Creative Actors

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Initiative for Development (CRAID) which he founded in 2003 with a group of his theatre graduates. CRAID’s work reflects (as much as any single troupe in any particular country can) contemporary Theatre for Development. Lasisi himself is not comfortable with the Theatre for Development label. “Yes, we use theatre to engender development, but we do more than what TfD expects from its practitioners,” Lasisi says (B. A. Lasisi, personal communication, June 14, 2020). He prefers the term Edutainment, which he adopted from the Center for Communication Programs (CCP) located in the Department of Health and Behavior at John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, in Baltimore, U.S.A. (Lasisi, 2020, p. 9). CCP describes Edutainment as, “…designed to both entertain and educate, intentionally weaving important health and social issues into powerful storytelling that draw in viewers … [A]t CCP, we use Entertainment-Education as a catalyst for behavior change” (Johns Hopkins, n.d.). All labels are slippery, particularly when attempting to classify an evolving cultural practice. That said, the most common classification for this current of Applied Theatre, both among practitioners and researchers, has been and is Theatre for Development, so I will use it here. We will look at CRAID in some detail because its history, personnel, modes of creation and aesthetic practices, funding sources and the topics of its plays embody much of what Theatre for Development in Africa looks like in the early Twentieth First Century. “Our first task was to assist in dispelling myths and misconceptions about HIV/AIDS,” recalls Lasisi of CRAID’s early days. “We had several drama sketches [we] performed in schools, market places, motor parks, and health facilities. As soon as the agencies in charge of HIV/AIDS intervention in the state [Oyo] became aware of our activities, they expressed their willingness to work with us and started extending invitation[s] to the group for drama presentations in their trainings and outreach programmes” (Lasisi, 2020, p. 9). CRAID was soon getting funding from, in addition to the HIV/AIDS agencies in the state, from the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, the Ministry of Community Development and Social Welfare, the Ministry of Education, and the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (Lasisi, pp. 9–10). Within two years, the World Bank provided funding, through the Oyo State Agency for the Control of AIDS, for the creation and touring of a full-length play, Odun Ijesu, which Lasisi says, challenged the fact that the, “Majority of the people do not know how some of the cultural practices

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they do contribute to HIV infections.” Those cultural practices include, he writes, “…wife inheritance and patronizing the traditional herbalist and local barbers who use the same knife to circumcise many children … and also … for their clients’ shaving and scarification” (Lasisi, 2020, p. 10). The play tells the story of a popular local musician who gets sick right before the annual yam festival at which he is to perform. “The sickness is attributed to the handiwork of the witches. … but with the help of the health workers … who trace the origin of his sickness to his late brother’s wife [who] he inherited without knowing the cause of his brother’s death,” writes Lasisi. “It’s discovered that the musician’s brother died of AIDS and he has caught the disease from his inherited wife and he, in turn, has infected his other two wives.” Once the true origin of the disease is discovered, the health workers rally the community to support him and his wives to get appropriate treatment and at the end of the play he, “…treats his people with melodious music and make[s] the new yam festival a very glamorous and melodious one” (Lasisi, p. 10). CRAID begins most of its projects with a Participatory Community Assessment (PCA), a popular approach of NGOs (called “non-profit organizations” in the U.S.) that are tasked with identifying and alleviating specific community ills.5 As Lasisi describes it, his theatre artists “…work with the target audience/communities to identify the issues in the areas of cause, effect, and proposed solution. It is the findings emanating the PCA that serve as the raw materials for the scripting of the drama” (B. A. Lasisi, personal communication, June 14, 2020). Although Lasisi’s language is that of the International NGO world, the practice of talking with the villagers before creating the play can also be traced to a group of educators/theatre makers at the University of Botswana in the mid-1970s. In the Sixties, for the most part, plays were created on subjects deemed developmental by theatre academics and then brought to the villages. “The plays produced therefore were basically one way didactic creations,” writes Samu Dandaura, a professor in the Department of Theatre and Cultural Studies at Nasarawa State University in Keffi, Nigeria (Dandaura, 2011, p. 14). The University of Botswana theatre makers called their approach Laedza Batanani, which in Setswana (also spelled Tswana), the majority and national language of Botswana, means, “The sun is up, let’s go and work together” which

5 See Dummett et al. (2013), Mizoguchi et al. (2004).

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clearly indicates their collaborative intentions. “Instead of touring readymade plays on themes determined outside the villages,” writes Kidd, the Laedza Batanani model involved, “… development cadres and theatre workers (a) researched the villagers’ issues and concerns before making the drama, and (b) organized discussion at the end of the performance in order to facilitate a process of community education and mobilization” (Kidd, 1984, p. 5). Writing in 1978, at the height of Laedza Batanani activity in Botswana with five troupes touring the countryside simultaneously, Martin Byram and Ross Kidd described the performances: “In each village the campaign team puts on a one-and-a-half hour performance, including drama, puppetry, dancing and singing. After each performance the actors divide the audience into groups and organize discussion of the problems presented” (Byram & Kidd, 1978, p. 84). The Laedza Batanani approach to Theatre for Development spread rapidly from Botswana to other English-speaking African countries over the next five years. However, while its influence lingers, its explicitly activist bent petered out as funding increasingly came from the Global North (Kerr, 1991).6 Once CRAID completes its Participatory Community Assessment, its playwrights draft the script. Their scripts are in the local language of the people they’re performing for. When they have had occasion to produce a radio series or a video they usually perform in English in order to reach a broader audience. CRAID’s plays are almost always performed on the local school’s football field or the town’s market place in the late evenings when all the household chores are completed and its performances are usually attended by about 80% of the village. In addition to the local villagers, CRAID invites to the show authorities from the local council (county) level, as well as “government officials like security personnel and managers of health and other development programmes serving the people in those areas” (B. A. Lasisi, personal communication, June 14, 2020). Prior to their performance, CRAID organizes local musicians, singers, dancers, and acrobats to perform before the play, “to showcase their talents and [to] make the ambience a carnival-like event full of drama, singing and dancing” (Lasisi, 2020, p. 11). When organizing and rehearsing the pre-play show (“appetizers” as Lasisi describes them),

6 Also see: MacKenzie (1978), Kidd and Byram (1978).

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Lasisi reports, “We always encourage that it focuses on the educational theme but sometimes there are some [acts] that deviate and concentrate on mere entertainment. We are usually flexible whenever we realize that the pre-play performances are meeting the entertainment needs of the people.” The pre-shows run, in total, 15–20 minute, the play itself usually about an hour (B. A. Lasisi, personal communication, June 14, 2020). At the end of the play, the actors engage the audience in a conversation, asking “…questions about what they have learnt with regards [to] HIV/AIDS [or whatever the play’s topic] and what steps they would take to ensure that they protect themselves as well as others” (Lasisi, p. 11). Starting the day after the show, CRAID usually holds three days of workshops with selected locals, often people who are already performers of various sorts in the community. They are recruited, “in consultation with local authority and community leaders,” says Lasisi. “We train them on issues relating to health and development challenges peculiar to their communities as identified through the PAC process, content creation, troupe management and mobilizing resources locally to sustain their performances.” When CRAID has work that brings them back to the area, they, “… always renew contacts and find out how they are progressing,” reports Lasisi (B. A. Lasisi, personal communication, June 14, 2020). While I have focused here on Odun Ijesu, CRAID’s first major production, the troupe, using much the same process, has, over the last two decades, also created and produced plays about malaria prevention, unwanted pregnancy, abortion, drug abuse, peer pressure, and personal hygiene (Lasisi, 2020, p. 12). Although not all Theatre for Development troupes do so, to the extent that groups like CRAID hold conversations with the community and train local performers to continue producing socially engaged theatre when they leave, they are crossing the border from didactic theatre (in which actors perform for a passive audience) to performance activism (in which performance becomes of form of community organizing). There is no doubt that TfD has positively impacted the lives of many rural people, particularly relative to malaria reduction, AIDS prevention and other public health issues. At the same time, the nature of this social education has raised a knotty problem for some of its artists. As the name of the movement suggestions, TfD sees its work helping to bring “development,” to the “underdeveloped” countryside. Development—a word with a myriad of meanings—in this context has been, in effect, a code word for modernity, that is, modern (as in European), as distinct from

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traditional (as in African) approaches to sanitation, health, agricultural practice, sexual mores, etc. In looking at this, we can’t ignore TfD’s origins during colonial times in the 1950s and its ongoing dependence on various governments (often one-party or military dictatorships) and European-based funding sources. Some of its more politically progressive practitioners have wondered out loud about the role its education has played in re-enforcing Neo-Colonialism, a term coined by African liberation leader and Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah to describe the continued economic and cultural dominance of the former colonial powers in the politically independent states of the Global South. David Kerr is a professor of theatre in the Fine and Performing Arts at the University of Malawi, who has also taught in Zambia and Botswana. “What sometimes makes the stereotyping in Theatre for Development especially patronizing,” he writes, “is the way it tends to reflect a crude division between reactionary traditional characters and progressive modern characters. Since the catalysts are usually petti-bourgeois, professional extension officers, a group trained in the ideology of modernization, they often create traditional characters such as the illiterate peasant, the superstitious patient, the greedy herbalist, who are sunk in ignorance or apathy, from which they can only be rescued by the dynamism of the modernizers, doctors, extension workers, teachers and community officers” (Kerr, 1991, p. 63). TfD practitioners interested in exploring subjects beyond the “development” goals of the donor organizations and/or wanting to organize the villagers they were performing for to move beyond being passive audience members/students have thus faced a dilemma. In the tangle of this dilemma there emerged in the late 1970s, some experiments within TfD which pointed in the direction of more participatory and community generating forms of TfD. Laedza Bananadine, was, as we have seen, an attempt at a more dialogic relationship with the audience. While its preplay research allowed for more local specificity, it did not do away with the overall frame work of bringing “development” (Western modernity) to the villagers. Some theatre makers/educators/activists who wanted their work to engender community and social change, remained dissatisfied. Researching the conditions, retreating to the university to create the play, and then returning to the village for a single performance and discussion, struck them as very limited, even as an educational method, and surely as a social change tactic. As Kidd put it at the time, “If people are left out

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of the action and dialogue in the play, it’s difficult to turn them on like a tap when it’s all over” (Kidd, 1979, p. 7). “A new approach was needed if the work was to become participatory, critical and a catalyst for action,” writes Kidd. “A group at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria [in 1977] showed the way forward. They restructured the approach so that villagers were involved throughout the process. The former ‘objects’ of research and one-way communication were integrated into a process of research and learning as the ‘subjects’ of the exercise. Instead of retreating to the workshop center [at the university] after collecting data [to write or devise the play] the outside team remained in the village and developed the analysis and dramatization with the villagers. Instead of putting on plays for the peasants, they assisted the peasants to make the ‘plays’ themselves” (Kidd, 1979, pp. 6–7). This opened a qualitatively different, albeit brief, chapter in TfD, in which its practitioners called Transformational Drama. “The farmers became the actors and the theater became the medium through which they analyzed their situation,” the Ahmadu Bello University Theatre Collective reported in 1982. “In explaining the increasing appropriation of their land by outside agencies, the farmers ‘role-played’ various ways they could question and resist these practices. After each ‘rehearsal’ the farmers analyzed their action—its limitations and potential obstacles— and then redramatized their course of action” (Ahmadu Bello Collective, 1982, pp. 22–23). These ‘rehearsals’ were where the education, (dialogic not monologic), or perhaps more to the point here, the development and community building was taking place. As Kidd sees it, “Putting the means of artistic production and analysis within the hands of the peasant groups meant that the peasants were taking control of their own transformative process” (Kidd, 1984, p. 7). Although they sometimes resulted in a public performance, the play was not the thing. Transformational Drama was concerned with what we today call the workshop rather the product. The activity of performing was itself approached as the means of growth. There was no lesson to be taught; there were discoveries to be made together. Development was not something that happened to people by watching a play, it was something the peasants and the theatre students from the university created together. In this, the work of the Ahmadu Bello University Theatre Collective decisively moved beyond TfD, in which theatre is applied as an instrument for education (the passing on of

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knowledge) to performance as an activity through which people reimagine what’s possible and together create new meaning. Despite its similarities to Theatre of the Oppressed, the “transformational drama” of the Ahmadu Collective was not a formulistic application of Forum Theatre. Instead, it appears to have been an improvisational process done in the spirit of dialogic education. As Desai points out, “Rather than unquestioningly accepting the previously formulated discursive practices of development theater in Africa, the Nigerian theater workers chose to analyze the hidden agendas of these practices. … the Ahmadu Bello theatre practitioners … [asked] hitherto unasked questions such as ‘What is development?’ and ‘What is adult education?’” (Desai, 1990, p. 78). The work of the Ahmadu Bello Collective, rather than being an adaption of Theatre of the Oppressed, appears to be a parallel result of empowerment-minded artist/activists bumping up against the limits of older forms of didactic theatre and discovering new ways of using performance to engage social issues. The Ahmadu Bello University Theatre Collective, as its members graduated and sought employment elsewhere, disbanded by 1984.

References Ahmadu Bello Collective. (1982). Stage one: The Ahmadu Bello initiative. Theatre International, 6, 21–24. Aitkin, V. (2013). Dorothy Heathcote’s Mantle of Expert approach to teaching and learning: A brief introduction. In D. Fraser, V. Aitkin, & B. Whyte (Eds.), Connecting curriculum, linking learning (pp. 34–57). New Zealand Council for Educational Research Press. Bolton, G. (2003). Dorothy Heathcote’s story: The biography of a remarkable drama teacher. Trentham Books. The Borgen Project. (2017, July 21). 10 important facts about schools in Africa. https://borgenproject.org/about-schools-in-africa/. Bowell, P., & Heap, B. S. (2013). Planning process drama: Enriching teaching and learning. Routledge. Bowsland Green Primary School. (n.d.). https://www.bowsland.org.uk. Boyd, N. (n.d.). The theory of play. Viola Spolin. http://spolin.com/?page_id= 1068. Byram, M., & Kidd, R. (1978). The performing arts: Culture as a tool for development. Botswana Notes and Records, 10, 81–90. Dandaura, E. S. (2011). Evolution of development theories and theatre for development interventions. Abuja Journal of Theatre and Media

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Arts, 6. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258106998_Evolution_ of_Development_Theories_and_Theatre_for_Development_interventions. Desai, G. (1990). Theater as praxis: Discursive strategies in African popular theater. African Studies Review, 33(1), 65–92. https://doi.org/10.2307/ 524628. Desai, G. (1991). Introduction: Theatre for development in Africa. Research in African Literature, 22(3), 7–10. Dummett, C., Hagens, C., & Morel, D. (2013). Guidance on participatory assessments. Catholic Relief Services. Heathcote, D. (n.d.). Mantle of the Expert: Establishing procedures and implementing the style and possibilities for developing standards and progression. Mantle of the Expert. https://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/wp-content/upl oads/2018/01/DH-MoE-Establishing-Procedures.pdf. Heathcote, D., & Bolton, G. (1995). Drama for learning: Dorothy Healthcote’s mantle of the expert approach to education. Heinemann. Heston, S. (1971). Teaching through drama. Doctoral thesis, Manchester Metropolitan University. Heathcote Archive. File No. CD056. Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. (n.d.). What is entertainment education? http://ccp.jhu.edu/entertainment-education/. Kerr, D. (1991). Participatory popular theater: The highest stage of cultural under-development. Research in African Literature, 22(3), 55–75. Kidd, R. (1979). Liberation or domestication: Popular theatre and non-formal education in Africa. Educational Broadcasting International, 12(1), 3–9. Kidd, R. (1984). From people’s theatre for revolution to popular theatre for reconstruction: Diary of a Zimbabwean workshop. International Council for Adult Education. Kidd, R., & Byram, M. (1978). Organizing popular theatre: The Laedza Batanani experiment, 1974–1977 . University of Botswana. Lasisi, B. A. (2020). Applied drama: Reflection on the practice and the question. Journal of Art & Humanities, 9(1), 6–15. Lindow Community Primary School. (n.d.). Mantle of Expert. https://sites.goo gle.com/site/lindowschool/our-curriculum/mantle-of-the-expert. MacKenzie, R. J. (1978). The national popular theatre workshop. University of Botswana. Mantle of the Expert. (n.d.). Origins. https://www.mantleoftheexpert.com/ what-is-moe/origins-of-moe/. Mizoguchi, N., Luluquisen, M., Witt, S., & Maker, L. (2004). A handbook for participatory assessments: Experiences from Alameda County. Alameda County Health Department. O’Neil, C. (1995a). Drama worlds: A framework for process drama. Heinemann Drama.

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O’Neil, C. (1995b). Forward. In D. Heathcote & G. Bolton (Eds.), Drama for learning: Dorothy Heathcote’s mantle of the expert approach to education. Heinemann. Redington, C. A. (1979). Theatre in education: An historical and analytical study. Unpublished doctoral thesis. University of Glasgow. Redington, C. A. (1983). Can theatre teach? An historical and evaluative analysis of theatre in education. Pergamon Press. Sparhawk Infant and Nursery. (n.d.). Welcome to our website. http://www.sprows tonsparhawk.norfolk.sch.uk. Spolin, V. (1999). Improvisation for the theatre: A handbook of teaching and directing techniques (3rd ed.). Northwestern University Press. St. Clair, J. P. (1991). Dorothy Heathcote as philosopher, educator and dramatist. Unpublished master’s thesis. University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Turnquist, O., & Tharakan, P. K. M. (1996). The next left? Democratisation and attempts to renew the radical political development project: Case of Kerala. Economic and Political Weekly, 31(29), 1953–1973. Vallins, G. (1980). The beginnings of TIE. In T. Jackson (Ed.), Learning through theatre: Essays and casebooks on theatre in education (pp. 2–15). Manchester University Press. Van Erven, E. (1992). The playful revolution: Theatre and liberation in Asia. Indiana University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Harvard University Press. The World Bank. (n.d.). Rural population—Sub-Saharan Africa. https://data. worldbank.org/indicator/SP.RUR.TOTL.ZS?locations=ZG.

CHAPTER 11

Politicizing

So far, we have been looking at performance activism that understands its primary purpose to be education. This application of performance is one of the two seminal sparks of performance activism. Theatre for Social Change—also in the Global North called “Political Theatre” or “Social Theatre” and in the Global South, often “Popular Theatre”—is the other. It can be traced—historically and stylistically—back to Agit-Prop in the 1920s and ’30s. In Part I we looked at how Agit-Prop opened up performance to millions of “ordinary people,” that is, working-class non-actors and saw that it was initiated by and remained closely connected to the communist movement of the time. Those two elements survive at the core of Theatre for Social Change. It remains a theatre form practiced primarily, although not exclusively, by non-professionals and it remains connected to the political Left. While the influence of the Communist Parties of the twentieth century has come and gone, Theatre for Social Change, in all its variants, remains politically oppositional to the political and economic status quo and supportive of the political, economic, and cultural empowerment of poor and other oppressed people. This connection to the Left is not only a matter of sympathy or intention. For the most part, Theatre for Social Change around the world has emerged from, relates to, and is connected with larger, multi-faceted onthe-ground political and economic movements for progressive change. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_11

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The “activism” in performance activism stems from Theatre for Social Change. The most popular current within Theatre for Social Change, as I have noted, is Theatre of the Oppressed (TO). The spect-actor opens the door to possibilities beyond orthodox theatre and one-way didacticism. It is a performatory way of organizing community dialogue. While Boal was not the only, or even the first, to bring audience members on stage to perform—see, for example, the work of the Ahmadu Bello University Theatre Collective mentioned above (see pp. 158–159) or the Zimbabwean pungwe discussed below (pp. 165–167)—Boal was a professional director who systematized his discoveries and wrote books about them. As of this writing, his books have been translated into 35 languages. TO today is practiced in 70 countries, with Jana Sanskriti Center for Theatre of the Oppressed in West Bengal, being the largest TO network in the world with a membership of about 40,000 with thirty theatre teams (Ganguly, 2010). Because TO has been so well documented and discussed elsewhere, I won’t be examining it in any detail here. In Chapter 13, “Creating Community Conversations” we will look at performance activism that has used Boal’s methodology to go beyond the antagonism of “Oppressor” and “Oppressed” to create and deepen internal community dialogue. Earlier we sampled some of what Theatre for Social Change looked like in North America and Europe during the Sixties. But it has a rich history as well in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Books have been (and many more should be) written about this theatre. However, if I were to attempt to mine the vein of Political Theatre in the Global South, this book would run to several volumes, and it would take the focus away from the new forms of performance activism designed to politicalize that are emerging.1 Instead, this chapter will present examples where political activism has generated performance or politically motivated performance has transformed into political activism.

1 For an overview of Political Theatre in Asia see: Van Erven (1992). For Political Theatre in India see: Waltz (1977–1978), Richmond (1971), Sircar (1978). For Latin America see: Taylor (1991). For Political Theatre in Southern Africa, see Gunner (2001).

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The Pungwe During Zimbabwe’s 15-year armed struggle (1965–1980) to liberate itself from the racist settler state of Rhodesia, villagers and guerrilla fighters together evolved a new form of participatory political theatre out of an old and, at that point, fading, cultural activity—the pungwe, a gathering of the villagers at night to exchange stories and songs. Ross Kidd, who helped lead theatre workshops in Zimbabwe in the years immediately following the revolution, writes: “The cultural format of these pungwes arose out of the needs of the liberation struggle. The freedom fighters recognized in the early ’70s that guns were not enough—they also needed to win the commitment and active support of the peasants in order to be successful. This required meetings and political education sessions with the peasants, and early on they found the peasants’ own cultural gatherings were an ideal pretext or cover for these meetings and a powerful means of conveying the ideas and spirit of the revolution. Villagers got turned off by one-way over-didactic approaches. But when the speeches were shorted and combined with songs and dances or the same messages were conveyed through short sketches, the villagers responded with enthusiasm. When the villagers themselves became major actors and co-organizers of the event and not mere listeners, their interest and support grew even more. (Kidd, 1984, pp. 9–10)

Kidd’s description of the evolution of the pungwe bears a striking resemblance to Innes’ description of the evolution of Agit-Prop’s Living Newspaper form through the interface of communist organizers and Russian peasants during the Russian Revolution. Despite the obvious cultural and historical differences between Russia in the 1920s and Zimbabwe in the 1970s, in each case a similar discovery was made about the value of performance to propagate the ideas motivating a revolution and to organize community support for it. Dzingai Mutumbuka, Zimbabwe’s first Minister of Education and Culture, addressed a pan-African workshop that brought together progressive theatre artists from 19 African countries in August 15, 1983. He recalled the emergence of the pungwes this way, “The fighters and villagers organized all-night pungwes in which the combatants and their

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supporters put on skits, songs, poetry and dances as a way of strengthening morale and talking about the issues and problems of the war. The pungwes played an important role in revitalizing the traditional performing arts which had been undermined during the colonial era” (Quoted in Kidd, 1984, p. 9). In contrast to much of Theatre for Development, which often discourages, and sometimes denigrates, indigenous African traditions, the pungwe movement was built on and with traditional culture and created something new with it, something that, thanks to its link to the insurgent army, was a force “for social change.” Indeed, Joshua Mpofu, a guerrilla fighter, wrote at the end of the war of the pungwes as part of the process of establishing an alternative power base capable of challenging the Rhodesian state: “Behind the ostensibly quiescent normal peasant existence of the Tribal Trust Lands, there grew up activities and structures of a system of dual power challenging the settler state. This was metaphorically—and frequently also literally—a difference between night and day. When darkness fell and the curfew laws came into operation, entitling anyone leaving their homes to be shot by the security forces, villagers would sneak off to the agreed rendezvous for a meeting [pangwe] with guerilla units” (Cliffe et al., 1980, p. 51). The activism inherent in the pangwe performances is obvious. The activists (in this case the guerrilla fighters) co-created with the communities they were organizing a participatory performance that succeeded in both politically educating and motivating the community—and unleashing its creativity. Kidd writes: “Participation and dialogue, therefore, became the essence of the pungwe. This wasn’t one-way communication—guerrillas simply standing up and giving speeches. This was … a highly participatory activity involving everyone in the creation of culture. People joined in singing, contributed their own sketches, music, and dances, responded to the politicization talks with slogans and bursts of song, and participated in the discussions which punctuated the various cultural presentations. Villagers and the fighters acted out and danced their commitments and built up their strength and unity through collective music-making. “The medium was part of the message. Through the pungwe people’s own culture was being revived, recognized, and advanced as something of value in itself and also as an important tool for liberation.” (Kidd, 1984, pp. 9–10)

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The political pangwe flourished during the revolutionary war. After victory, the new government no longer made use of it, nor was it encouraged. However, it left a legacy of progressive political theatre that is still being built upon by contemporary performance activists in Zimbabwe.

From Play to Union In the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, in the 1970s, a group called the Association of the Rural Poor (ARP) began by holding dialogic adult education classes inspired by Freire in a Dalit /Harijan (Untouchable) community about a hundred kilometers from Madras. Felix Sugirtharaj, one of the organizers of the Association of the Rural Poor, who is the major source of this information, uses the term Harijan, coined by Gandhi, which translates as “Children of God.” The term has since been rejected by many Untouchables as patronizing. Their preferred term is now Dalit , which translates as “The Oppressed.”2 The conversations in the classes led to the acting out of stories from the participants’ lives. “We dramatized the tragic situations in the villages themselves,” recalls Sugirtharaj. “They played scenes about a Harijan being beaten up by a money lender because he was unable to pay his debt. Or how his daughter was raped by goons of the landlord” (Quoted in Van Erven, 1992, p. 133). They then began extending the scope of their performance to rehearsing how to confront the local landlord. These rehearsals included not only what they would say, they also “blocked” the encounter, deciding where the spokesperson should stand in relation to the landlord and where the “cast members” should position themselves. When the group felt ready they, “…marched to the landlord’s house,” Sugirtharaj continues. “There were 100 people and he was caught totally by surprise. … The Harijans did all the talking themselves. Of course, the landlord refused to raise the wages, claiming he was losing money already. So we went back and decided to go on strike. That evening and the next we went around to the neighboring villages to present short drama pieces on the potential positive and negative effects of a strike. The strike itself lasted one week. The police came and bargaining started. We succeeded in raising the wage from six to eight rupees per day” (Quoted in Van Erven, 1992, pp. 133–134). Having evolved from an adult education course to

2 Guha (2017).

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a performance group, in 1977, the Association of the Rural Poor made yet another transformation, becoming a union called the Rural Harijan Agricultural Laborers Association and which eventually spread to some five hundred villages (Sugirtharaj, 1990). Here we see not theatre for social change being directed at an audience, but performance by the Dalit villagers themselves which allowed for a deepening of their sense of community and power and transformed their performance into an ongoing organization for the exercise of power—the Rural Harijan Agricultural Laborers Association.

From Trial to Play … From Play to Trial When, during a strike in Johannesburg in 1980, fifty-five Zulu steelworkers were illegally arrested, the union’s lawyer Halton Cheadle, a long-time union organizer urged the workers to act out the events of the strike.3 With the help of the Junction Avenue Theatre Company, which still exists and which is known for its progressive plays about South African history, the workers devised a full-length play, Ilanga lizophumela abasebenzi (The Sun Will Rise for the Workers ), presenting the strikers’ version of events. It was performed as their defense in court. This is a case of not only of applying theatre to another aspect of life (the legal system), it is also a clear expression of performance as activism. The workers lost the trial, but later performed the play for co-workers at the Metal and Allied Workers Union Hall and other industrial sites around the country. It was also videotaped and circulated widely to workers throughout the country (Hutchinson, 2004, p. 362). During the Johannesburg strike the “real life” trial was transformed into a play and then an organizing tool. An interesting example of it working the other way around, that is, of a performance becoming, in effect, a “real life” trial took place in the Indian state of Kerala in 1979. The People’s Cultural Forum, an Agit-Prop troupe associated with the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist), “… performed a satire about corrupt doctors in front of a hospital notorious for its bribe-taking,” writes Eugéne Van Erven, a chronicler of Asian political theatre. “After the show, the actors ran into the building, dragged the doctors out, and put them on public trial for refusing to treat the poor. Afterwards, the 3 Halton Cheadle went on to help draft Bill of Rights in the post-Apartheid South African Constitution, as well as various labor statutes (BCHC, n.d.).

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thoroughly humiliated physicians were released with the warning that next time they would not get off the hook so easily. The actors were arrested, but the incident received so much publicity that subsequently corruption in Kerala’s state hospitals was drastically reduced” (Van Erven, 1992, pp. 132–133).

Michael Rohd and Hope Is Vital Michael Rohd started out like many young middle-class Americans interested in theatre in the late twentieth century. He earned a bachelor’s in Theatre from Northwestern University in Chicago in 1989 and set out to make it in the theatre. “I tried the traditional actor thing for about a year and I was struck by how empty that life was,” he recalled in a 2015 interview (M. Rohd, personal communication, March 23, 2015). “I didn’t really come into theater through activism,” he recalled. “I’m a theater artist, that’s my training and that’s was my interest, but I very soon sensed something absent from the field and I wasn’t able to put my finger on it. … There seemed to be very little relationship between the buildings where theater was made, the people who came to see it, and the neighborhoods and communities where those buildings actually sat. Mostly, it was people who lived 20 to 30 minutes away who could afford to buy tickets who paid to be entertained and then everybody went home. There wasn’t really much of a sense of community or connection outside of the moments that they were seeing the story on stage. … I was trying to reconnect with what happens when you’re part of a community. That was kind of it at that point for me. What if everybody in the audience and all the makers and everybody thinking about the story all knew each other? That was the best way I could find back to this impulse that I had initially been interested in as a theatre artist” (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 21, 2017). By 1992, Rohd was teaching theatre at the Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC. Another teacher at the school had begun doing workshops at a homeless shelter in downtown Washington. The fifth floor of the shelter was a confidential clinic for men and women on the streets living with HIV and/or AIDS. It was called Healthcare for the Homeless and it was one of the first confidential clinics in the city. She invited the 24-year-old Rohd to lead a theatre workshop there. “I had no idea what that meant or how I would work with that population whose life experience was so different from mine. … I started doing it because, being

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young, I didn’t worry about what I didn’t know. … Nobody came for six weeks. I would just sit there and wait; nobody came. Then the seventh week, one man, Russell Golatt came.” Russell, homeless and HIV positive himself, partnered with Rohd. He organized others to come and they gradually built an ensemble. The workshops consisted of improv games, storytelling, and conversation. Rohd says his major influences at this point were Viola Spolin and Robert Alexander’s Living Stage, with whom he was also working at the time. Living Stage (1966–2002) was one of the earliest performance groups to work consciously and exclusively with non-actors to create improvised plays as a basis for conversation and the engagement of social issues.4 “When we had a regular group of people doing the workshop, Russell said to me, ‘Let’s get some teenagers involved,’” recalls Rohd. “I got some young people from the school I was at to start working with us. Then Russell said to me, ‘Let’s take this on the road.’ And I said, ‘What is that, taking it on the road?’ He said the obvious—‘doing workshops around the city’” (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 21, 2017). And so, Hope is Vital (HIV) was born. It brought local teens and a group of HIV-positive men who were receiving services at Health Care for the Homeless, into collaboration. “For 18 months, we created and conducted performance workshops all over the metro D.C. area for hundreds of young people focused on HIV/AIDS prevention and sexuality education. We worked at schools, youth shelters, correctional facilities, hospital drop-in clinics, churches, and afterschool programs. … I found it very quickly the most exciting theater I had ever been a part of. Period” (M. Rohd, personal communication, March 23, 2015). At the end of those 18 months, Rohd and his group concluded that they had developed a model that could be useful in other places. “The group gave me a mission,” said Rohd, “take our product, which was, in fact, a process, and try, at the age of 25, to head out into the world and spread the word. … I tried the lazy way—submitting grants—for six months. But there was no way that foundations were going to give money to a 25-year-old with no institutional history” (M. Rohd, personal communication, March 18, 2015). His girlfriend was living in Eugene, Oregon, so he loaded up his car and started driving across the country, 4 See website for overview of the Living Stage’s history and techniques (Aya arts and media, 2015; George Mason University Library, n.d.).

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stopping in virtually every town, seeking meetings with school principals and local arts councils, trying to interest them in sponsoring Hope Is Vital workshops. In New Mexico after a meeting with a principal who was polite, but not very interested, as Rohd was walking through the school parking lot, returning to his car, a teacher rushed out to stop him. The teacher, whose name was Brian Fant, had seen the material that Rohd had left on the principal’s desk. Fant told Rohd that he’d be interested in helping him bring his workshop into the school and offered to put him up in his house. They did a two-week workshop. “From that I learned that the gatekeepers are not just the people at the top,” he recalls (M. Rohd, personal communication, March 23, 2015). For the next nine years, he traveled the country doing Hope Is Vital workshops, eventually expanding their topics beyond HIV prevention to a wide variety of issues. Between 1993 and 1998, Rohd was on the road 75% of the time. “It was literally just driving, showing up at schools, showing up at arts councils, driving to colleges, looking for health departments and just trying to convince people that this was an interesting thing and that it would be cheap and a way that they would engage young people in their community” (M. Rohd, personal communication, March 23, 2015). Near the end of the ’90s, Rohd went to graduate school at Virginia Tech and got a Master of Fine Arts in directing and public dialogue. In 1998 he wrote and published Theatre for Community Conflict and Dialogue: The Hope Is Vital Training Manual, one of the first theatre manuals in the United States to focus on creating theatre with people without formal training that also tied performance to pressing social issues. It became very popular, riding, and helping to generate, the beginnings of interest in the United States in what we are now calling performance activism. Rohd reports that he still gets emails every day from people using his book, thanking him and asking for advice. Theatre for Community Conflict and Dialogue came with some financial remuneration and recognition in the academy, which brought with it invitations to lead workshops on campuses and conferences. Rohd was able to stop his nearly constant travel and settle down in Portland, Oregon. There he began the work of finding a way to deepen the performatory conversations he’d been generating and project them on to a larger stage (so to speak). In 1999, he founded the Sojourn Theatre. “Sojourn started as company of nine of us who met when I was in grad school at Virginia Tech,” reports Rohd (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 21, 2017). Building on the spirit and methodology

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of Hope Is Vital, Sojourn creates large-scale devised performance-based workshops designed to spark conversations on political, economic, and civic issues. While based in Portland for its first 10 years, Sojourn, as its name implies, was always a touring troupe, and currently its 17 members live in 8 different cities across the United States working together in constantly shifting combinations. Sojourn’s initial show was called, Look Away. Created soon after Columbine, the first U.S. mass school shooting to attract national and international attention, it was about young people and violence. Rohd describes it as, “a pretty complex, highly choreographed show that had post show workshops and experiences [with the audience]” (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 23, 2017). It was eventually seen by 40,000 young people in Illinois, Nebraska, Oregon, and Washington State. Sojourn’s next production, Cities on a Hill, was an investigation into what Rohd calls, “the utopian impulse in American history.” They created it collectively as they drove across the country from Virginia to Oregon interviewing people at gas stations and rest areas about the American Dream. Sojourn’s most produced work, first created in 2013 and still being performed around the country seven years later, is How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes (With 199 People You Don’t Know). It was devised in the course of a year of research and dialogues with community organizations. Each performance starts with $1,000 in cash, derived from the box office, placed in a glass bowl. The bowl is set on stage at the beginning of each show. It is then raised over the heads of the performers and pumped full of air so that the money spins around throughout the performance. The audience is assigned the task of deciding which local anti-poverty organization to donate the $1,000 to. The decision is made by a vote at the end of the show. As of this writing, the show has resulted in $86,000 being repurposed from the arts economy into poverty reduction efforts. How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes doesn’t have a plot; its arch is the journey of strangers, the audience, making a decision about how to best engage with a seemingly intractable public issue. During the first half of the event, the performers help the audience build relationships with the strangers around them. By the time they get to conversations about alleviating poverty, they’re talking with people they’ve begun to connect with. “We want that audience to be a mixture of ideological and generational experiences from around whatever community we’re in so that people are

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arguing,” says Rohd. “That’s what the show is, it’s 90 minutes of arguing about values and approaches to this very complex issue with performance as the instigator and holder of the space” (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 21, 2017). The audience design is worked on for six months before the performance with the organization producing the show in the city, town, or campus. Sojourn insists that 25% of the tickets be set aside for people who can’t afford to buy a ticket. They also insist that not only liberal and progressive groups get invited. They want part of the audience to be the local Republican committee, young Republicans on campus, the Chamber of Commerce, even far right activists. “There are basically two different philosophical approaches in America to dealing with poverty—one blames the poor for their poverty, the other blames the rich or the economic system. The idea is to get those strangers in the room where they have to see each other as people and then talk about it. It’s Sojourn’s job to host that” (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 21, 2017). As of this writing, Sojourn has created and toured 25 pieces, all of which might best be described as some combination of a play, an interactive workshop, and a facilitated conversation. Despite its demonstrable artistic and political/civic success, funding remained an ongoing challenge for Sojourn. During the first 10 years, Sojourn was only able to pay Rohd, its artistic director, a salary for two years. In 2007 his alma mater, Northwestern University, invited him to join its theatre faculty. One of the consequences of Rohd accepting an academic appointment is that Sojourn, has, in his words, “spread out … We have a model of nimble, project-focused work. We’ve kept our mission and work, but not a physical theater or an infrastructure” (M. Rohd, personal communication, March 23, 2015). The other consequence is that, with a job that provided him with some financial stability, he was able to build out the Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP), which started as the brainchild of Rohd and two other Sojourn artists, Shannon Scrofano and Soneela Nankani. It has proven to be a significant step in further scaling up and institutionalizing the work Rohd has been doing since he started—finding ways of activating performance to deal with civic and political problems. CPCP sets up collaborations between artists and arts groups with community organizations and local governments all over the United States. “We don’t make art at the Center, we support other people making art in conjunction with local advocacy and civic organizations. … It grew out of so many folks coming to us and asking for help in building their own capacity as arts institutions, or

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community groups or local governments coming to us looking for ways to bring performance and other arts to the civic issues they were concerned with. We call it arts-based, community-lead transformations” (M. Rohd, personal communication, September 21, 2017). In 2016, Rohd, accepted a position as professor at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute for Design and Art, bringing the CPCP with him; he continues to work with CPCP and Sojourn Theatre as well.

References Aya arts and media. (2015, March 10). Living Stage Theatre Company promo [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdpeSW1zfYo. BCHC. (n.d.). Halton Cheadle. https://www.bchc.co.za/staff-member/haltoncheadle/. Cliffe, L., Mpofu, J., & Munslow, B. (1980). Nationalist politics in Zimbabwe: The 1980 elections and beyond. Review of African Political Economy, 7 (18), 44–67. Ganguly, S. (2010). Forum theatre and democracy in India. Routledge. George Mason University Library. (n.d.). Guide to the Living Stage records 1965–2001. https://scrc.gmu.edu/finding_aids/livingstage.html#IDUGEZ PTL5HC4KPGNIUHWA4IWB5CJPHZVGFT0KENHYYSPQ0PFMP4FH. Guha, R. (2017, June 10). Naming the reality: The rise and fall of the term ‘Harijan.’ The Telegraph India. https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/ naming-the-reality/cid/1459876. Gunner, L. (Ed.). (2001). Politics and performance: Theatre, poetry and song in southern Africa. Witwaterstrand University Press. Hutchinson, Y. (2004). South African theatre. In M. Banham (Ed.), A history of theatre in Africa (pp. 312–379). Cambridge University Press. Kidd, R. (1984). From people’s theatre for revolution to popular theatre for reconstruction: Diary of a Zimbabwean workshop. International Council for Adult Education. Richmond, F. (1971). The political role of theatre in India. Educational Theatre Journal, 25(3), 318–334. Sircar, B. (1978). The third theatre. Naba Grantha Kutir. Sugirtharaj, F. (1990). Organizing agricultural labourers in southern India: Association of the rural poor. Grassroots Approaches to Combating Poverty Through Adult Education, 34, 169–195. Taylor, D. (1991). Theatre of crisis: Drama and politics in Latin America. University of Kentucky Press.

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Van Erven, E. (1992). The playful revolution: Theatre and liberation in Asia. Indiana University Press. Waltz, M. L. (1977–1978). The Indian people’s theatre association: Its development and influences. Journal of South Asian Literature, 13(1–4), 31–37.

CHAPTER 12

Building Bridges

As we have seen, theatre (even monologic, didactic theatre) can, indeed, educate and agitate/politicize. However, the transformative power of performance becomes clearer when people other than the actors have the opportunity to participate in it. The performance activism we have looked at so far, among other things, has opened up significant opportunities for spreading performance to more people (students and teachers, peasants and steelworkers, Dalits and the homeless) and, in so doing, to provide them with the experience (and power) to generate community. At the same time, performance activism, particularly in the last two decades, has been doing more than education and political agitation. One of the activist uses it’s been put to forefronts the power of performance to generate conncection and respect between those performing together— even when social and historical contexts mitiage against connection and respect.

Arabs and Jews Sharing a Stage A young Muslim Arab woman and a Jewish mother from a religious rightwing settler background take the stage together, in front of a mixed Israeli audience. They’ve chosen to. Two years ago, neither would have been the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_12

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other’s first-choice partner, and both could face recriminations. But they’ve been sharing each other’s space, perspectives, culture and grievances for two years now, and both feel they understand ‘the other’ better, so decide to spread their learning through drama. (Oryszczuk, 2016)

The scene described here, from the U.K. weekly paper Jewish News, took place in 2016. It was one of several final-year projects, the culmination of a three-year program in Community and Educational Drama and Theatre at Western Galilee College in northern Israel where the student body is roughly half Jewish and half Arab. The program was initiated and is run by Peter Harris, who was born in Britain and has spent most of his adult life in Israel. The Community and Educational Drama and Theatre program provides students, some of them meeting the feared “other” for the first time in college, with performance and devising skills—and, through performance, with an ongoing cultural and political dialogue. Harris, before launching the program, had spent 15 years facilitating theatre workshops in prisons that brought inmates and university students together. Through that work, he began approaching performance as a way for people with very different histories, views, and attitudes—even Arabs and Jews who have been at various states of conflict for a hundred years—to see and hear each other in ways that would otherwise not be possible. At first, of course, they’re suspicious of one another. “A typical 19-yearold Arab girl has never really been outside her village,” points out Harris. “They’re fearful of Jews. They think Jews will harm them. Both see the other as a threat, but for our students, that’s only initially.” Through three years of class, “They’re working together, improvising, rubbing against each other, laughing together, bringing their own home narratives into the space” (Quoted in Oryszczuk, 2016). “In the dramatic space, we are on an equal footing because we’re all actors,” says Harris. “Regardless of what our biases are and the baggage we’ve brought into the space when we’re performing together, acting together, playing together, we can put that aside. We can create an artificial environment that is a process of creating a safe space on an equal footing. And then when people feel safe enough, they can start discussing the differences, the difficulties they have with one another, the concepts they brought with them from home and so forth. The performance space is a neutral zone. The neutral zone is where things can happen. Sometimes things can happen just from talking but they take much longer. The

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performativity also enables people to observe one another as performers and there is joy in that. Instead of looking at someone who you may have biased attitudes towards, you’re looking at someone who moves beautifully, who beautifully interacts with you in an improvisation” (P. Harris, personal communication, September 28, 2017). The process of putting differences and grievances and wounds on display is painful. Harris explains, “I devise exercises that bring up the difficult issues. At that point, obviously both groups are angry at me.” They blame him for antagonizing the situation, stripping away the polite co-existence that they’re trying to maintain at school. “‘Why are you’re doing this?’ they ask. ‘We’ll never be able to look at each other again after the stuff we’ve said.’ But it appears, every time, that they can because they’ve developed a rapport through performing together in this space, they’re acknowledging the warmth and the humanity in the other—then they can actually approach the difficult issues, which I think have to be approached. … The only way for us to exist in the Middle East is to have a dialogue to confront our differences because the other option is destruction” (P. Harris, personal communication, September 28, 2017).

Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids Lenora Fulani came to performance from political activism. Growing up poor and Black in Chester, Pennsylvania, she attended college on a scholarship and was on her way to a doctorate in developmental psychology when she met Fred Newman, a radical community organizer and the creator of social therapy, who would later become the artistic director of the Castillo Theatre. She cast her lot with, and quickly became a leader of, the nascent political and cultural movement he had initiated in New York City’s poor communities of color. I should point out here that while I know many of the performance activists interviewed for this book, Fulani and I have been friends and political colleagues for almost four decades. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s Fulani helped to organize lead a number of progressive independent parties that sought to break the monopoly the two major parties have long held on politics in the United States. In 1988, she ran for president of the United States as an independent, becoming the first woman and the first African American to be on the presidential ballot in all 50 states. Her electoral work was continuously accompanied by community organizing. This included leading countless demonstrations against police brutality, opening health clinics

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and social therapy centers in Harlem and the Bronx, and co-founding, with Newman, the All Stars Project, Inc. In 1991 rioting broke out in Crown Heights, Brooklyn between the Hassidic Jewish and the Afro-Caribbean and African American communities after a rabbi’s car accidentally veered on to the sidewalk killing a Black child and seriously inquiring another. While there were sporadic street battles between Black and Hassidic youth, tension was concentrated in the confrontation between Black youth, who massed in the streets, and the police, who were assigned to contain and disperse them. While most of the city’s African American leaders huddled with the mayor and the police brass, Fulani was in the streets, using what persuasion and authority she could muster to prevent one side from making any move that would force the other to respond violently. Though it was extremely tense, no serious violence broke out between the cops and kids during the threeday standoff. It was on the streets of Crown Heights during those three days that the seeds of Fulani’s performance activism were planted. In the years that followed, police officers who were on the scene during the Crown Heights disturbances would introduce themselves to Fulani when their paths crossed and thank her for the role she had played—many of them crediting her with saving lives during those potentially violent confrontations. Flash forward to 2006, when Sean Bell, a 23-year-old unarmed Black man was shot 50 times by undercover police officers on the night before his wedding. “I helped to organize protest rallies and demonstrations, bringing a multi-racial component to the demonstrations that were taking place in the city,” recalled Fulani in 2014. “At the same time, I realized that anger and reactive demonstrations had for many years failed to change the culture of fear and hate between poor youth of color and the NYPD [New York Police Department]. I had seen it many times: the community is hurt and outraged, they demonstrate angrily; the police, and their media defenders, get defensive. Eventually, the demonstrations die down and it happens all over again” (L. Fulani, personal communication, December 12, 2014). Fulani and Newman agreed that, “While legislative and regulatory action might be called for, legalistic changes imposed from the top-down will mean little, we were convinced, until the deeply entrenched attitudes of mutual mistrust between police officers and young people of color can be reorganized. What was needed, we concluded, was a change in the

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culture of police-community relations” (L. Fulani, personal communication, December 12, 2014). Thus was launched Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids. Within a month of Bell’s death, Fulani invited some young people she had worked with and some New York police officers she knew to sit down with her at the African American Benevolent Society in Springfield Gardens, Queens and have a conversation together. “That first meeting and the ones that soon followed with other cops and other kids at other locations were awkward and strained,” recalls Fulani, “I quickly learned that we couldn’t have the conversations without play and performance first” (L. Fulani, personal communication, December 12, 2014). Fulani restructured the first half of the encounter into a performance workshop. When the cops and the kids first arrive at the community centers where the workshops are usually held, there is pizza available and a circle of folding chairs in the middle of the room. “Almost always the cops sit on one side of the circle, the kids on the other,” reports Fulani. “I tell them to reseat themselves, cop/kid/cop/kid. With some hesitation, they do. … Everyone makes their introductions, formal, stiff, brief. … I tell them that they don’t know how to talk to each other and so they’re going to perform instead—perform new roles, new emotions, new interactions. I inform them that I’m not using performance as a metaphor; it’s actually what they’re going to do. Though they only have a vague sense of what they’re agreeing to, all of them are willing to try. Only a handful of cops or kids have ever backed out at this point.” “I get them on their feet in a circle and we begin a series of performance games—slow motion movement, pass the clap—activities familiar to actors and theatre students, but new and strange to the youth and the police. What happens in that fifteen minutes of play is that cops and kids, begin to smile at each other, to laugh, to joke around; they have shared the experience of being silly together. We then move on to improvising scenes. The young people and officers don’t play themselves and they don’t play the other; they improvise something new. If we were to have cops and kids play each other, they would simply replicate the predictable behavior of the other. We purposely give them silly improvisations. When they start playing characters other than themselves, it’s amazing how quickly everyone is smiling and laughing” (L. Fulani, personal communication, December 12, 2014). Only then, when they have been playing together for a while, do they sit down and talk. First Fulani asks the police officers and the young

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people to “get it off their chest” and say “what they really think of each other.” Someone, usually a young person, will eventually break the ice, often by saying he hates cops. That opens it up. In the course of the conversation, Fulani asks a few questions, including, “What is the hardest thing about being a young person of color growing up in New York today?” and “What’s the hardest thing about being a police officer?” Two or three times in the course of a workshop Fulani will call on a cop and a kid to bring their chairs to the center of the circle and face each other. She then asks, for example, the young person or the officer to share the worst thing that’s happened to him/her, and asks the one listening to respond to the other empathetically. Some observers of Operation Conversation workshops have criticized these exchanges as phony, arguing that the cops, in particular, really aren’t being empathic, that they’re pretending. “This response misses the whole point of the workshop,” says Fulani. “To my understanding, empathy is not a mental state; it’s an active social relationship. If people perform empathy together, they create/experience empathy or, for that matter, any other emotion” (L. Fulani, personal communication, December 12, 2014). Fulani never corrects a participant, be it a cop or a kid. “The facilitator is not a teacher,” Fulani is quick to point out. “She supports everyone to accept the offers being made by the other, no matter how offensive they may feel they are. It’s not about getting everyone to agree, it’s a messy, shared creative social experience” (L. Fulani, personal communication, December 12, 2014). “It’s hard for me to express to you the kind of things that happen in this environment because they are both extraordinary and ordinary,” says Fulani. “I remember a Dominican cop from Washington Heights [a neighborhood in upper Manhattan] and a Puerto Rican kid from Mott Haven [in the Bronx], immediately suspicious of each other, finding a way to talk about the fact that both of their fathers abandoned their families when they were little kids—and to actually share the pain and shame of that with each other and with the group. When I ask the cops and kids to talk about what’s the hardest thing in their lives, the young people are often surprised, and moved, when the cops say that it’s really difficult to not be with their families on holidays, for example, to have missed the last four Thanksgivings dinners because they had to work. One of the things they discover that they have in common is that they’re scared of the streets they share. The young men often talk about how every morning, on their way to the subway to go to school, they’re afraid of being shot by a local gang member or hassled by the police. And the police officers live with

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the knowledge that violence against them can flare at any moment. One young police officer talked about how he calls his mother every morning before he goes to work to tell her he loves her—in case he doesn’t come home alive that night. This prompted a young man from the community to share that he, for the same reason, never picks a fight with his mom when he leaves the house” (Fulani, 2012). For the first eight years of Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids, Fulani facilitated all the workshops, which then averaged two a month. In 2015, working closely with Diane Stiles, the managing director of the Castillo Theatre, Fulani began training facilitators to be able to scaleup the project. As of this writing, twelve facilitators have been trained. They work in teams of two, consisting of a one person with a social work background and the other a theatre background. As of this writing, the Cops & Kids partnership between the NYPD and the ASP has survived the tenure of two New York City mayors and three police commissioners, and, mediated by the All Stars Project, versions of it are taking initial steps in Newark, New Jersey and Dallas, Texas. “Let me tell you why it works,” concludes Fulani. “It works because we use performance and improvisation to break down the walls. We pretend that cops and kids can actually speak to one another, and through this pretense, they actually can. When you start playing new roles, characters other than yourself, it’s amazing how quickly everyone is smiling and laughing. I’ve found that even the most sullen kids and the most reserved police officers become hams in two minutes” (Fulani, 2012).

References Fulani, L. B. (2012, May 7). Speech presented at the 13th Annual National Gala of the All Stars Project, New York City. Oryszczuk, S. (2016, October 31). Making a drama out of a crisis. Jewish News. https://jewishnews.timesofisrael.com/making-a-drama-out-of-a-crisis/.

CHAPTER 13

Creating Community Conversations

Closely related to building bridges between antagonistic communities is finding ways for communities to speak internally. Virtually all communities, (families, villages, towns, cities, nation states) are full of conflicting interests, oppressions, and as David Diamond puts it below, “patterns of behavior” that generate misunderstanding and violence. The ability to help communities play with these conflicts in a context where participants feel safe to imagine alternatives and take risks is another thing that performance activism is doing. Here we look at three performance activists from different parts of the world who have found ways to use performance to promote conversation within communities.

Savana Trust Daniel Maposa, the founder and director of the Savanah Trust in Zimbabwe, started doing politically engaged political theatre during the last years of the Mugabe dictatorship which, sadly, established its misrule through the war of liberation mentioned earlier in our discussion of the pungwe. “When we started Savanah Trust we were doing agit-prop,” recalls Maposa. “We were in a harsh environment where we could be arrested if we were found by the police. So, we devised a way of doing short pieces, doing a discussion and moving on.” Looking back a decade © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_13

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later, Maposa feels his guerrilla theatre was what was needed and possible at the time. However, he has come to believe that, “Our hit and run theatre was for the people, not with the people” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). That began to change in 2008 as the long-ruling Zimbabwean African National Union (ZANU) agreed to a government of national unity with the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), the main opposition party. The two parties worked up a new, more democratic (at least on paper) constitution, which was approved by referendum some five years later. (“Zimbabwe”, 2013). “The issues we were dealing with changed,” recalls Maposa. “Our first job was educating people on the need for a new constitution.” In doing that educational work, Maposa says, “We realized that people know what they want.” Savanna Trust began re-tooling its work from producing plays to generating activities and environments in which “ordinary people,” in this case rural peasants and workers, could through performance begin to engage the various strata of authority (tribal, governmental and cultural) in the village in open dialogue. While Savanna Trust still does some theatre work in Harare, its attention has shifted primarily to rural villages, and from educating and agitating audiences to, in Maposa’s words, “simulating” people to use performance to become “active citizens in their society” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). He describes the evolution of Savanna Trust’s work this way: We asked ourselves, why do we have oppression and violations in our communities. It could be gender based violence, it could be political violence, it could be child abuse. Why do we have such violence? Then we realized there are two participants in the oppression. The first one is the oppressor, the violator. Sometimes the violator is not just the highest person in office or highest rank in the military. The military is, after all, the youth who are being used by the powerful people. So, we said, ‘Those oppressors must also be liberated.’ They don’t just wake up and say, ‘I want to be an oppressor’ or ‘I want to violate someone’s rights.’ It is the whole system, the acculturation, the whole set of values that they learn from the elders, that they learn from the political parties and the like. So, we said, ‘They also must be active participants in terms of freeing themselves.’ It is something close to Boal, but very, very different. In the same process whilst liberating the oppressor we also need to empower the citizens, the participants themselves. Often, they, as a community, are passive, they look sideways while such violations happen. We realized there is a need for

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dialogue between these two forces. So, we departed from our confrontational theatre … to create a hybrid process that would allow people to think and reflect and, at the same time, at the center of it, to dialogue in a peaceable manner. (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020)

Savanna Trust began reaching out to villages around the country and organizing residents to create their own interactive plays about issues of importance to them. “We go through community groups,” says Maposa, “through traditional leaders, through councilors, and also make sure that we are known to those who are called the district development coordinators, those who are in charge of the district. So, the community people do the mobilization for us” (D. Maposa, personal communication, March 11, 2020). The first step in Savanna Trust’s organizing process is to recruit some of the villagers to form a performance group. “When we come to a community we find that there are always people who have an interest in theatre, and they never have had the opportunity to do it,” Maposa reports. “Some are poets, some are school drop-outs. … We stimulate them to form their own theatre club.” Savanna Trust artistactivists then train the new troupe both in performance. “We teach them acting. We try to make sure that they are good with their craft.” However, the process is not one-sided; the villagers also teach the Savanna Trust cadre local performance skills and these are incorporated into the play, “We also borrow from community performance,” relates Maposa. “You know in Africa, we use a lot of music, a lot of dance. That’s how you sustain people’s interest. We use their local dances, their local songs to sustain interest and also to communicate” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). As part of the devising process, they “initiate dialogue around the things that people think are pertinent” and begin to create a play around those issues and concerns (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). Savanna Trust focuses, as well, on the political engagement and understandings of the newly minted actors. “Their role is not just to produce a play,” says Maposa. “Their role is to transmit, not only the message, but the values of whatever we are undertaking. For example, if we’re dealing with the issue of political violence, the members of the theatre group must first understand what political violence is, why is it bad, how do you identify political violence. In that way, they also must be transformed as

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members of the community. That is our first point of all: You must be transformed and lead an exemplarily life” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). While the play is being rehearsed, the troupe often holds, “… previews before the actual performance so that different stakeholders in the community can have input into the production”. Those stake holders, “… might be political parties, it might be bureaucrats. We want them to understand the project that we are carrying out in their community so that they also become active members or partners” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). The entire village and people from the surrounding area are invited to the performance, which is free. The plays themselves are usually about 25 minutes and interactive. “We leave certain issues open ended and begin to talk to the audience, asking them questions and then get back into the play again,” relates Maposa. “They become part of the performance. … We have open discussions where the citizens share their concerns, ask questions and the leaders respond” (D. Maposa, personal communication, March 11, 2020). From Savanna Trust’s cultural/political organizing perspective, it’s important that the village performance group continue beyond its initial show. “When we develop the local community theatre groups our desire is for them to be able to engage the stakeholders in their community even after we’ve left” says Maposa (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). Ten theatre groups have continued after the Savanna Trust cadre left. As of this writing, five continue to function (D. Maposa, personal communication, September 4, 2020).

Interactive Resource Center Like Maposa, Mohammed Waseem started out doing political street theatre. In 1987 he helped to found Lok Rehas, (Punjab People’s Theatre) in Lahore, Pakistan during the military dictatorship of General Zia-ul-Haq which ended in the late nineties. “When there is a dictatorship, the enemy is very clear,” says Waseem. “But when faced with a more complex situation, [I realized] it [our theatre work] was only [addressing] one layer.” Inspired by Boal, “All of a sudden, the idea came that we could improvise the scripts and we could help communities tell their own stories” (M. Waseem, personal communication, March 16, 2020)

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In 2000, Waseem founded the Interactive Resource Center and began traveling the country transferring, “to the people,” to use Boal’s words, “the means of production in the theatre so that the people themselves may utilize them” (Boal, 2008, p. 98). Waseem went from village to village, for the most part by himself, organizing local people, mostly peasants, into what were initially Theatre of the Oppressed troupes—250 of them over the next ten years. “I start with non-actors, they are never trained actors,” says Waseem. “That was my whole approach. You can go to the community, you can engage 10 or 12 people [who want to make theatre]. Never did I audition anyone. … I believe that If you are human, you can perform. All the exercises we do with them in the workshop, we’re trying to discover [what the performers can do]. If they can sing, it’s a musical. If they dance, it’s a dance play. Whatever the forms, the knowledge and the skills the community has, we work with that” (M. Waseem, personal conversation, March 16, 2020). Early on, Waseem noticed that it was the poorest and most marginalized in each community who were drawn to his performance workshops. “Being in Pakistan, an Islamic country, there is a lot of taboo against the theatre. Theatre is not a respectable thing to do,” notes Waseem. “So, normally the most oppressed people from the lowest castes are the ones willing to do the theatre. … That is a very interesting part [of the work]. They have nobody. Nobody wants to talk to them and when they do theatre, the whole village can come and they can talk to anybody, they can comment on anything, they have that power. That is a transformation I have seen again and again” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). He also came up against millennium-long barriers to public activity by women and Dalits (Untouchables), barriers which have been deeply internalized. “Even in a small village of Untouchables, there are, different kinds of hierarchy,” he reports. “They cannot use each other’s utensils because they are Untouchables to each other. You must push them to come together and sit and try. Later they are all together performing their plays. That is the power of performance” (M. Waseem, personal communication, March 16, 2020). Waseem, illustrating the power unleashed by the permission to pretend, tells this story about a rehearsal: “There was a real situation [in this village]. One person took all the family’s savings and went to play in a gambling den. He was there and one person said, ‘Your wife is coming.’ And he said, ‘No, women can’t come here.’ In that kind of place, women don’t enter. But [onstage] she came. She caught her husband, got all the

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money and took it back. I asked them, ‘Is this possible?’ They said, ‘No, but let’s do it [anyway].’ When we did it in the performance over 250 people stood and clapped. I told them, ‘Now you can do that.’ So, you can break many myths, break many barriers through performance” (M. Waseem, personal communication, March 16, 2020). Given that Waseem and his colleagues have worked in 13 languages, it’s not surprising that when devising a play, he relies heavily on Boal’s technique of Image Theatre. “We start with images, then ask them to communicate in their own languages and someone translates for me. That’s how I’m not bound to one language. … When they have created those images, they have created the characters—there’s a mother, there’s a father, there’s a farmer, there’s a grandson, there’s a granddaughter— and also that image has a location. You have all those details within the image. Now you have the image, what do you want to say with this image? Now we extend it into a two-minute scene, a three-minute scene, a four-minute scene. And then you ask them to make it more entertaining. We say use your music, use your dance, whatever. You must enjoy” (M. Waseem, personal conversation, March 16, 2020). Given that the performances take place outdoors without lights, sound amplification, or props, Waseem forefronts the visual: “They can move, they can run, they can form geometrical forms, circles, triangles, pentagons, different kinds of lines. …. They can play trees, they can be human props. It creates a kind of aesthetic. … That’s why I feel sometimes that Theatre of the Oppressed can be boring, because it is very realistic” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 5, 2020). Having adapted Boal’s techniques to the aesthetics of the cultures he is working in, Waseem increasingly found that Boal’s dichotomy between the Oppressor and the Oppressed was not helping the communities he was organizing in to look at and engage their ingrained patterns of behavior. What was helpful, he found, was not a performance of antagonistic confrontation, not one that singled out the “oppressor” as a villain but a performance that generated conversation between the “oppressor” and the “oppressed,” who, in the immediate sense were almost always members of the same community, even the same family. He gives this example. If the performance feels safe for them, if they don’t feel threatened, they come forward. For example, I’m making a story of a child marriage. We are showing the fear of the mother. She is not the enemy. Maybe she

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thinks she’ll not get a suitable groom [for her daughter] afterwards. Due to poverty she is thinking maybe if one child is left maybe the other child will get better food. Maybe she’s afraid of sexual abuse [at home]. There is the temptation of money as well. Sometimes there is an old age man who wants to give money to the family to get the child. … Maybe the husband got in an accident. His leg is broken. The mother is in a panic. The family’s only bread winner, and now she agrees to the marriage. There could be many other reasons you could list and normally we do list them. We generate a long list of the reasons the mother is accepting this child marriage. On the other hand, we now come to the perspective of the child. She will not be treated as a child after the marriage to the family. She could die during pregnancy. She cannot handle the children [of her husband’s family]. People come with different propositions. For example, ‘Child marriage is against the law.’ ‘Okay what should we do about that? Should we call the police? Anyone want to come on stage and as the police?’ So, some people come up and play the police and we do a whole scene, and the mother is arrested. Then, someone says, ‘My sister did that and her daughter died. Do you want your daughter to die?’ The real examples are coming from the community. Another person says, ‘Don’t worry. He’ll only be on his back for two to six weeks and we’ll provide for you the food from the community and everything will be alright.’ That kind of community support is discussed. So many examples, all kinds of situations are discussed. Now certain people are pushing the mother into that kind of marriage. You ask the audience, ‘Do you agree?’ They say no. We say, ‘Come on the stage, take the position of the spect-actor and try to change it on the stage’. He tries to change the situation and the cast becomes the fears that the mother has in her head, that she is struggling with. You are not doing propaganda, you are not telling them what to do. Rather, you are presenting a situation and asking them [what to do]. You are presenting a solution that is normally acceptable in the community. In the name of religion, you are supposed to support this child marriage. But the person who came from the audience to oppose it, by the end he is the hero of the arena. Most of the audience are clapping. Now the community is against it. They are providing the safety net. That is the reason after 20,000 performances there has not been a single act of violence. Because this theatre is not propaganda theatre; it is not telling you what to do or what not to do. Rather, you are putting the question to the audience: In this situation, what could be the right answer? … A solution is worked out by the community, so the actors aren’t [related to as] a threat. (M. Waseem, personal communication, March 16, 2020)

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From the beginning, Waseem was interested in creating a network of local performance activists who could continue working long after he moved on. “I want to organize theatre troupes in different villages, but I don’t want to own them. I don’t want them to be my group. I want them to have their own identity. … The whole purpose is that these groups should be independent. They should have the support of the community and [if they do] they survive and continue” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal conversation, August 6, 2020). Some of these troupes take the participatory play they created with Waseem and tour the area. Others use the tools they’ve learned and create new performances for their villages. Waseem reported in 2020 that of the 250 troupes created, 40 are still active and creating new work (M. Waseem, personal communication, March 16, 2020).

Theatre for Living Vancouver-based David Diamond had been a professional theatre artist for 16 years and practitioner of Theatre of the Oppressed with an international reputation for 6 years when his interaction with Canada’s Indigenous Peoples caused him to rethink what he was doing. “They were dealing with issues of family violence and addiction as a result of colonization and they didn’t want the characters in those plays on abuse issues portrayed as criminals. They wanted those characters to be portrayed as needing healing. Not that we would condone terrible acts, but that we would have compassion for all characters. It was a big challenge for me, but they were right and that … led me down the path of really questioning the binary model that Boal was working in” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 6, 2020). To meet the challenge being raised by the Indigenous communities, Diamond started evolving his week-long “Power Play” workshops and longer three-week creation/rehearsal processes during which he worked in depth with a cross section of community members—both victims and perpetuators of violence and other abuse. The Power Play process (one intense week that went to performance), he found, gave communities a chance to use performance for “…creating alternative role models” (Diamond, 1994, p. 36). This work among Canada’s Indigenous peoples led him to, “… letting go of the oppressor/oppressed model entirely. Not that I think oppression doesn’t exist in the world. Of course, it does. But even the iconic

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oppressors don’t drop in from outer space. We grow them. I got tired of ringing the alarm bell and saying, ‘There’s a lot of violence in the world and we should stop the violence.’ I realized that the question was, ‘Why are we growing so much violence?’ So, the work changed. Eventually I couldn’t call it Theatre of the Oppressed anymore. I started calling it Theatre for Living” (D. Diamond, personal communication, October 12, 2018). Diamond went on to do 30 more years of creating Theatre for Living—some 600 community-specific projects—around the world. The actors in these plays are always members of the community he’s working in, and, as he writes, the characters they create and perform, “…are no longer specifically oppressors or oppressed. Characters are community members engaged in various struggles with each other and dysfunction. … The invitation in Theatre for Living is to engage in the struggles of the characters—not to break the oppression (getting rid of something we don’t want), but to create healthy community, or safety, or respect (getting what we do want)” (Diamond, 2008, p. 43). His extensive international work and his book Theatre for Living have made Diamond into a global leader of, and spokesperson for, performance as means of civic engagement. He sums up his understanding of the political value of this kind of performance activism: “Paulo Freire wrote very eloquently about how communities sometimes fight revolutions and sometimes they win only to become the very oppressors they were fighting against. Why does that happen? It happens over and over again in history. I believe that nature teaches us one of the reasons it happens, it’s because it’s patterns of behavior that create structure, not the other way around. So yes, we need structural change, yes, but if all we do is focus on changing the structures, which is what revolutions tend to do, and we neglect the patterns of behavior that create and sustain the structures we’re doomed just to recreate the same structures all over again. I know a lot of people doing really good work on structural change. I don’t think theatre is the greatest tool to look at structure. I think it’s a beautiful tool to look at human behavior” (D. Diamond, D. Maposa, and M. Waseem, personal communication, August 6, 2020).

References Boal, A. (2008). Theatre of the oppressed (A. Charles, M. L. McBride, & E. Fryer, Trans.). Pluto Press.

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Diamond, D. (1994). Out of the silence: Headlines theatre and power plays. In M. Schutzman & Jan Cohen-Cruz (Eds.), Playing Boal: Theatre, therapy, activism (pp. 35–52). Routledge. Diamond, D. (2008). Theatre for living: The art and science of community-based dialogue. Trafford Publishing. Zimbabwe approves new constitution. (2013, March 19). BBC News. https:// www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-21845444.

CHAPTER 14

Healing Trauma

In a good deal of the performance activity we’ve looked at so far healing is implicit. Bringing Arabs and Jews together in Israel or police officers and young people of color in New York involves healing (or at least finding ways to move beyond) wounds inflicted by warring groups. Much of the work of creating community conversation involves healing, in the sense of finding ways to negotiate beyond a community’s internal wounds. In the case of atrocities and intense violence, the transformative power of performance is explicit, allowing the victims of trauma to re-experience their pain in ways that allow them to re-enter life in new ways. We will now take a look at the performance healing being done by two performance activist pioneers—Sanjay Kumar in India and Hector Aristizábal in Columbia.

Sanjay Kumar and the Pandees in Nithari Sanjay Kumar is an associate professor of theatre at Hans Raj College of Delphi University in New Delphi, India. In 1987 he, along with some of his students, founded pandies theatre, which, as of this writing, has 150 members and brings performance and play-making to some of the most oppressed, brutalized, and marginalized populations in India. In Kumar’s words, pandies uses, “a workshop-based mode of performance to allow © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_14

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the participants to grapple with their traumatic experiences and create performances that not only re-create harrowing moments from their past but also help them to articulate their visions and critiques of mainstream culture” (Kumar, 2013, p. 95). Pandies started out doing conventional (albeit it, politically progressive) theatre. “We pride ourselves as being one of the few activist theatre groups in the country. But the origins of pandies are really very humble. We started as a college club theatre” (S. Kumar, personal communication, November 16, 2017). In India, being a college club theatre means participating in the annual university theatre competitions, putting on 35– 40-minute plays, in English, primarily of light entertainment. From the start, pandies did more serious, socially engaged (and, for the most part, longer) plays. For its first six years, the group produced progressive third world writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o (Kenya) and Vincente Leñero (Mexico), along with progressive European playwrights such as Garcia Lorca, Jean Genet, and Bertolt Brecht. “We were doing avant-garde plays of the Left—Marxist, feminist—extremely conducive to the kind of environment that we lived in,” recalls Kumar. “Then we had fingers pointed at us. ‘Look at this abomination.’ ‘Look at the sexual content.’ ‘How graphic!’ ‘How ridiculous!’ Bla, bla, bla, and, of course, we were banned from working at the college” (Kumar, 2018). Forced off the campus in 1993, pandies began raising money to independently produce its plays, still doing what Kumar calls “proscenium theatre.” Pandies’ first off-campus production was Macbeth. Within two years, pandies were devising their own plays—with scripts being finalized by Kumar along with Dr. Anand Prakash and Anuradha Marwah, two other pandies—on subjects including HIV and other issues facing sex workers; rape; LGBT rights; and the rights of the incarcerated. By the turn of the century, pandies was moving from performing political plays on traditional stages to primarily doing a form of what we’re calling performance activism—and that Kumar calls “workshop theatre”— with marginalized youth. What precipitated this shift was, among other things, the pogrom in 2002 in Gujarat state during which at least 2,000 Muslims were massacred by their Hindu neighbors. “What really roused us,” said Kumar, “was the fact that the same [right-wing state] government that had been seen as responsible for this pogrom came back to power with an overwhelming majority, fueling its campaigns with the ‘glory’ of this violence” (Kumar, 2012, p. 171). (The party that ruled in Gujarat, the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP] now controls the national

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government and its chief minister, Narendra Modi, is now India’s prime minister.) Responding to the pogrom, pandies made a decision, Kumar, writes, “to use the workshop mode of theatre with children of varying regions, classes and religions to mitigate religious bigotry. A special focus was on marginalized children of slums and bastis who are targets of such bigotry” (Kumar, 2012, p. 172). Kumar Sanjay and the pandies arrived in the New Delhi slum of Nithari soon after the news of the atrocities broke in the press. In December of 2006, after two years of children disappearing from Nithari and constant appeals to the local police, the cops finally moved in and discovered the limbs and rotting body parts of fifty-three children in the drains of the wealthy homes bordering the slum. “[It is] one of the most horrifying cases of cannibalism, and I mean cannibalism, of children that has ever taken place,” says Kumar. “It was literally a case of the rich eating the poor, not metaphorically the way it is all over the world” (Kumar, 2018). Eventually, a rich resident of the area surrounding Nithari, and his servant, were convicted of luring the children with goodies, raping and killing them and then chopping their bodies up and eating them. They were convicted in February, 2009 and were both sentenced to death. Appeals have been filed against the sentences and the case continues in court (Kumar, 2012, p. 172). Over the next five years the pandies worked with the siblings and friends of the children who were killed. They were as young as five and as old as seventeen. They began with daily workshops. “When we went to meet with them,” recalls Kumar, “we were met with the most unusual silence. … They had been struck dumb by the horrible findings and the media stories that followed.” So, the pandies worked on having the children perform silently. “Expressing [themselves] without words worked …” continues Kumar. “… through silent machines, the groups re-enacted what they thought had happened in the house where the children—their siblings and neighbours—were killed” (Kumar, 2012, p. 179). Slowly, some of the participants began to open up, telling stories of how they had escaped abduction. From there, the young people began devising scripts, which included monologs and dialogues about their perceptions of the event and its causes. “Is trauma cured, or at least lessened by … going back to it and seeing it without the initial fear and shock?” asks Kumar. “In this case, the answer could only be a partial affirmation. Emerging out of a stunned silence was only the beginning of facing the trauma. The participants and

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the facilitators, together with teachers and parents decided that a public performance was essential. It would restore confidence and self-worth that had been lost in this episode” (Kumar, 2012, p. 179). In April 2007, less than half a year after the workshops had begun, a two-hour performance, which included the children and their pandies facilitators, was presented at the Habitat Center in downtown Delhi. It was a montage that included the skits created by the children, a monolog by a girl who had escaped abduction, and reenactments of the games and exercises that had gone on in the workshops. The audience consisted almost exclusively of upper middle class and affluent theatre goers, precisely the audience the children and their families wanted to address. “A performance before the oppressive rich was required,” claims Kumar. “required to present their point of view from the margins before the class responsible, in the larger sense, for the trauma” (Kumar, 2012, p. 179). Over the next three years the children of Nithari, working with the pandies, would devise and perform a total of seven public performances, each one growing out workshops and each one different. All were performed before well-to-do audiences, including, in a number of cases, politicians, and government bureaucrats. The pandies have been involved in Nithari, as of this writing, for over a decade. They no longer lead workshops or help device plays. Instead, they check in twice a year, both because they’ve become friends and also to see the work that the (now) young adults of Nithari are creating and producing on their own—including devising and producing their own plays—a development of which Kumar is particularly proud. “I’ve seen these kids grow from waifs to young adults,” he reflects. “They’ve gone from the intense hatred, the intense anger, the intense trauma, to saying, ‘I don’t want to talk about that anymore. That is not all of who I am. Is that all you want to talk to us about? You think I can’t talk gender? You think I can’t talk politics? Why the very hell do you pick up your clothes and come here to talk to me about what happened in 2008?’ … The point is that the community is defining its own problems and seeking its own methodology to work out solutions, if there are any solutions possible. That kind of backing off [by the pandies] is very important. … The little school that we started there, all the teachers are volunteers. No one is making a penny, no one is charged a penny. And they’re all from the community. Some teach theatre and that’s something that’s gone on non-stop. Now they are the facilitators. Now they are the mentors.” And he adds, “I’ve seen some fabulous plays they’ve created. Plays that

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posit questions that I did not even know existed” (S. Kumar, personal communication, November 16, 2017).

Hector Aristizábal, Opening the Chamber of Torture Hector Aristizábal grew up poor, his father a textile mill worker, in Medellin, Colombia when it was the most violent city in the world. The fifty-year-long civil war that pitted various communist guerrilla groups, on the one side, against the conservative government’s military and its right-wing militias on the other, was raging furiously. At the same time, Medellin’s violent cocaine cartels were becoming the major power in the city. In high school, Aristizábal began his interest in both theatre and psychology, a synthesis he continued to pursue at Universidad de Antioquia, where he eventually earned a master’s degree in psychology. Aristizábal recalls the political atmosphere of his college years: “We were living under the Estatuto de Seguridad [Statute of Security], a repressive law that looked at any opposition to the government as Communist-inspired. It was dangerous to talk politics. Sometimes even more dangerous to create art. Friends of mine from the university had been seized and disappeared only to reappear as cadavers found in a ditch, bodies covered with cuts and burns, toes and fingers broken, tongues missing, eyes gorged out. It could happen to me. With my theater company, I performed plays that encouraged dissent by poking merciless fun at the military and the rich, at presidents and priests. I’d participated in protests and human right demonstrations and had organized cultural events where we sang the protest songs of Victor Jara and Mercedes Sosa and showed our revolutionary sympathies by watching Cuban films” (Aristizábal & Lefer, 2010, p. 9). In 1982, when he was 22 and still an undergraduate student, the military burst into his family’s house at 4:30 in the morning and arrested him. They had also arrested his younger brother Juan Fernando, and his friends, while they were on a camping trip. He and the other young men rounded up were tortured for a week. “Soldiers attached electrodes to my testicles and sent jolts of electricity tearing through every nerve. They twisted my arms up behind my back and left me hanging [from the ceiling] until the pain and helplessness became so great, I was blown right out of my body and mind. Soldiers drove me around in a small jeep. One

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forced the barrel of his rifle into my mouth. ‘You’re going to die now,’ he said. ‘Just like your brother’” (Aristizábal & Lefer, 2010, p. 13). Neither he nor his brother were killed. “I was very fortunate. … They tortured me during the week of presidential elections and there were international delegates witnessing the election. Because of that, they didn’t kill me as they did many of my friends before they took me and many of my friends after they took me” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). Aristizábal earned a Master’s Degree in psychology, became a psychotherapist and remained active in the theatre. He was a member of El Pequeno Teatro de Medellin and a street theatre called La Mojiganga. They explored how to collectively create new plays and were heavily inspired by the work of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba. Of the street theatre, Aristizábal recalls, “We used broad physical humor and all our clowning skills. … We’d explore the economic despair that led to violence and would follow every performance with a discussion that let the audience speak up about their lives or come up on stage to portray their own [situations]” (Aristizábal & Lefer, 2010, pp. 134–135). After seven years, at the age of 29, the unceasing violence and death became too much. “In 1989, I got tired of burying friends, intellectuals, activists, not only people with leftist ideas, but anyone who dared to think. They killed a mentor of mine, Hector Abad Gomez, who was a medical doctor, founder of the Colombian National School of Public Health. He developed public health programs for the poor in Medellin. After his murder, I made the decision to leave the country. I went to the United States, went back to school and did a MFT, [Masters in Family Therapy] at Pacific Oaks College, which was complimentary to my psychology training in Colombia, and I also found ways to remain involved with theater and activism” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). In 1995, his brother Hernan Dario died of AIDS, and in 1998, ten years after he had fled Colombia, Aristizábal’s other brother, Juan Fernando, was “disappeared” by the paramilitaries, his mutilated body found by a truck driver in a ditch by the side of the road. Aristizábal learned that after their arrest in 1982 Juan Fernando had become active with the Ejército de Liberation National (ELN), National Liberation Army, one of the guerrilla groups opposing the government. Aristizábal married and settled in Pasadena, California. As a therapist,

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he worked primarily with the marginalized and traumatized—with immigrants, pregnant teens, gay and transgendered youth, torture victims, gang members, prisoners, and with the dying. Aristizábal’s transition from being a therapist who also did political theatre into what we are calling a performance activist, happened in 2004. “After seeing the photographs that American soldiers took of themselves while torturing their prisoners in Abu Ghraib, Iraq, I did an improvisation about my own experience with torture and the killing of my brother at a program for torture victims in Los Angeles. I told people that this was not a few bad apples as the government and the media claimed, that this was a consistent policy of the U.S. Army, and that the U.S. government supports many countries in the world that use torture. The reaction [of the audience] was so strong that I decided to do a play with a few friends and then, as I opened the chamber of torture and what used to be my personal nightmare, my personal story, somehow the world came in” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). He created a performance piece, Nightwind, in which he reenacts his arrest and torture which then, using dynamic meditation and Image Theatre, flows into a participatory workshop in which he works with the audience— turned participants/performers—to engage the traumas in their lives and communities. He found himself being invited to universities, symposiums, and conferences against torture. “I started traveling so much that I let go of my practice as a therapist and ended up working in many different parts of the world.” As of this writing, he has performed Nightwind in 54 countries and more than 150 cities. “Many times after my performances and workshops, people would approach me saying that they wanted to invite me to their cities or countries. Some might put it together with local universities, or with people interested in the multiple uses of Theatre of the Oppressed. One thing led to another and I began to travel the world as workshop facilitator” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). From Nightwind, Aristizábal has evolved numerous variants created in response to the specifics of the communities he’s working with. As he puts it, “I go to communities and develop plays about issues that the community are interested in and every community, every single human being, is an expert in their lives. I use that expertise and the fact that we all know how to play, that we all know how to improvise because we—every single human being that I have ever met—does it all day long.

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Using that expertise and that universal ability to play and improvise, I help people develop short plays that ask questions about the issues that their community is interested in. Then we perform those short plays for other members of the community. We invite them [members of the audience] to become spec-actors, performers themselves, to intervene in the questions that the play asks and try alternatives to find solutions or to find ways to move the conflict, hopefully, in ways that use imagination and not violence. The workshop becomes a place to ask questions and a laboratory for human behavior, an environment in which we can explore and reflect on how we react to conflict, how we react to difficult challenges and to complex social issues” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). When, in 2017, after 50 years of civil war, a peace treaty was signed between the Colombian government and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionari de Colombia (FARC), the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the country’s largest guerrilla army, Hector Aristizábal returned to live in his hometown of Medellin and began using his performance skills to try and heal his long-suffering country. One of the first of what he now calls his “psychosocial interventions” took place in the rural village of Trujillo Valle. It was the first place where, during the war, right-wing paramilitary groups began their practice of cutting in half the bodies of the people they killed. “They threw half of the body into the river [that flows pass the town] and half of the body into mass graves,” explains Aristizábal (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). The right-wing militias, working with the Cali drug cartel and with the complicity of the Colombian military and police, killed between 245 and 342 people in Trujillo who they accused of being sympathetic to the guerrillas. “You can’t even imagine the stories that were told during this process,” he recalls of his time with the survivors. “So many stories, so much pain, came out that [I realized that] a simple play was not going to be able to deal with all that came out. So, I invited the community to design rituals. We had named the names of so many people who had disappeared, most of who their bodies had never been found and also the river had been transformed from a place of life into a place of death. They called it the cemetery of water. We decided that we could do something to recuperate the river as a source of life and to honor the names of those that have left. We created little rafts with bamboo that could float and I asked them to bring the photographs of their loved ones and we photocopied them and

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then the children decorated the little rafts and the teenagers wrote poems to their fathers or their brothers or their mothers. Actually, there were seven people who died of grief, pena moral, and they were considered also as victims of what happened there. It was very interesting, it was mostly men, six men and one woman that they said died because of the pain, so they were also included.” “Then we did a ritual on the river where I asked each woman, each mother and their kids to put these rafts into the river. I asked two dancers to receive the raft and put it in the water because the river is very difficult in that place and I was scared, but the women started to enter the waters and I saw the men who were watching the whole thing and I called them. They immediately ran, threw their wallets on the floor and their cell phones, the ones who remembered, and their money and then they created like a wall down the river in case anyone fell down into the water. Everybody participated with some songs. I taught them a song from Burkina Faso that they sing to the dead. Then at the end, I invited a Chirimia musical group, [Chirimia is a folk music of the Colombian Pacific coast area] to bring us back into life. It was like what, they call the ‘second line’ in New Orleans, where after the funeral the band brings us back to life. We ended up dancing and remembering the beautiful people that were named during the process. So that’s another way of using performance, to create ritual. It was the first time the entire community came together to cry for the loved ones, not as families, not as individuals, but as community” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, October 19, 2017). As of this writing, Aristizábal is part of a team developing a project called Reconectando (Reconnection) which is working with the Truth Commission in Colombia established after the peace treaty of 2017. “We combine Deep Ecology inspired by Joanna Macy,1 social theatre inspired by the Theatre of the Oppressed, and Teya Sepinuck’s Theatre of Witness2 as well as the design of healing rituals” reports Aristizábal (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, November 25, 2020). The project takes groups of up to 20 people for a five-day intensive experience into the forest, which Aristizábal calls, “the womb of Mother Nature.” Excombatants from all sides, their victims, community and environmental

1 For an overview of Deep Ecology, see Macy (2003). 2 For an overview of Theatre of Witness, see Sepinuck (2013).

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leaders, artists, academics and business people are all invited into these laboratories to explore their deepest wounds created by the war and find collective healing. “Our work also considers nature as a victim of the war,” says Aristizábal. “Inspired by indigenous wisdom, we see Mother Earth as the most ancient teacher and healer. We are working to take our work beyond the anthropocentric paradigm to developing an eco-psychosocial approach” (H. Aristizábal, personal communication, November 25, 2020).

References Aristizábal, H., & Lefer, D. (2010). The blessing next to the wound: A story of art, activism, and transformation. Lantern Books. Kumar, S. (2012). Dramatising an evolving consciousness: Theatre with Nithari’s children. In J. Daniel Meyer-Dinkegräfe (Ed.), Consciousness, theatre, literature and the arts 2011 (pp. 170–197). Cambridge Scholars Press. Kumar, S. (2013). Performing on the platform: Creating theatre with India’s platform children. TDR: The Drama Review, 57 (4), 95–119. Kumar, S. (2018, April 13). Performance activism panel [Conference panel]. 2018 Play, Perform, Learn, Grow Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece. Macy, J. (2003). World as lover, World as self . Parallax Press. Sepinuck, T. (2013). Theatre of witness: Finding medicine in stories of suffering, transformation and peace. Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

CHAPTER 15

Reinitiating Creativity

As we have seen, performance activism can lead to very specific and practical ends such as helping children learn, organizing oppressed people to take political action, building bridges between antagonistic communities, generating community conversations, and healing trauma. However, as I said at the beginning of Part II, even when directed toward specific ends, performance simulates in many directions simultaneously. No matter its practical “application,” performance can reignite imagination and creativity even in those who have had it beaten, or bombed, or starved out of them. In this chapter, we’ll look at two performance activists whose work—on the streets, in prison and a mental hospital—rather than being directed toward particular ends, has helped spark creativity among people formerly denied the environment in which to grow it. As with all the stories included here, their work stands in for hundreds, probably thousands, of others doing similar work around the world.

Alexandra Sutherland and Luvuyo Yanta Go to Prison Alexandra Sutherland’s journey toward performance activism started as a theatre professor at Rhodes University in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown) in South Africa. Makhanda has, since 1974, been home to South © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_15

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Africa’s annual National Arts Festival, the largest performing arts festival in Africa. For two weeks it features theatre artists, dancers, and musicians, and draws arts appreciators from all over the country. With the city filling up with arts tourists the children living on Makanda’s streets have long taken to begging in mass. In 2002, Sutherland decided to see if she could work with street children to create their own performances for the festival. “I never named it as performance activism, but I always believed in the right of everyone to access their creativity, and to do that collectively, and to perform stories that they needed to tell,” Sutherland recalled in 2017. “We found ways of using theater games and then devising techniques to start to tell the stories that street children wanted to tell. Like with all marginalized groups, the first story … is the story of ‘How I became a street child.’ I think my job is to say, ‘Okay, there are other stories out there of who we are as human beings. What other stories do you want to tell?’ I guess part of my approach has always been, ‘If the only stories we can tell are the stories of you being marginalized or victims, then I don’t think that’s political’” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). Encouraged by Sutherland, the children began generating stories about love, politics, doing satire, and they were commissioned five times to perform at the National Arts Festival. “Through that performance process, I watched how young people who came onto the street during that National Arts Festival as beggars were transformed into citizens, people who had something to say and were being listened to by a fairly elite audience. For me, those performances were a kind of meeting place of people from different sectors of society, and different ways of witnessing each other” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). Based on this work, Sutherland, in 2010, was invited by the government’s Department of Correctional Services to bring theatre workshops into Makhanda’s all-male Grahamstown Prison. She and her co-facilitator, Luvuyo Yanta, a Xhosa-speaking male improviser and actor, welcomed the opportunity. Their weekly hour and a half workshops are open to any prisoner who wants to attend. Sutherland and Yanta have worked for 12 years with a continually evolving core group of 18–25 men. A typical session involves playing theatre games and learning, by doing, devising, and acting skills. All the sessions are bi-lingual, conducted in English and Xhosa. The gap between Sutherland as a white, middle class woman and the male Xhosa prisoners from very poor backgrounds, is mediated by

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Yanta. “We’re a team, and because he is such a brilliant improviser, he is so good at doing that gentle invitation of people to come and play. Often, when new members are a bit like, ‘Mm, I’m not quite sure what this is about,’ he is good at making them feel comfortable, by going up and improvising with them. They find themselves responding to him and understanding the space that you’re is non-judgmental that you can try almost anything.” Sutherland emphasizes, “I’m very clear and continue to be reflective about my position as a privileged, white, English speaking female with lots of education, and how that might play out in the space and what the power dynamics are. At the same time, I also believe that the way that play and performance works can radically democratize a space. If we’re all being foolish together and we’re all being vulnerable together, and I’m modeling that, it’s a way to create together. Even with all the shit of power and race and class that happens … I think there’s a way to transcend it and buy into another possibility through play and performance” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). As with the street children, the first story the prisoners want to tell is the story of their societal identity as prisoners. Yanta describes the process this way, “In improv scenes, at first, if someone was incarnated because they robbed someone, in the scene they’d [at first] play themselves but as the story started to move forward they would be mothers, they would be young people. … They became better aware of other things that were in their world. It was not as closed as it had been” (L. Yanta, personal communication, August 6, 2020). Sutherland and Yanta consider the freedom afforded by performance to transcend societal identity an important aspect of what’s growthful about performance in general and for the inmates of Grahamstown Prison in particular. In 2012, Sutherland and Yanta were asked by a psychologist Lauren Creese at the Fort England Hospital to do performance workshops with patients there. Fort England, a former fort built to defend English settlers from the indigenous Xhosa people, is now a state forensic psychiatric hospital. Its inmates have been labeled both mad and dangerous. They are sent to the hospital by a criminal court. “Working in a prison is child’s play compared to working in a so-called therapeutic environment,” says Sutherland. “It’s under the guise of therapy, which I find very, very insidious, because it’s under this pseudo benign gaze of, ‘We’re really helping you. You must understand that you’re sick, but if you really listen to me, you’ll get better.’ I’m not denying that people have really serious mental health issues. …. but the layers of oppression that I’ve observed in that

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space are very different from the prison. In Fort England, because they’ve committed a criminal offense and are also mentally ill they are forced to surrender to such an extent that they have to be cared for in every single way. There’s an infantilization which is extreme” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). The performance group is totally voluntary. “It’s one of the only groups where a patient is allowed to come when they want and allowed to leave when they want; and if they want to leave during a session, they can; and if they don’t want to come, they don’t have to” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). The performance workshop is not connected to any therapeutic program nor is it part of the institution’s behavior modification system by which rewards and punishments are meted out in an attempt to engender passive, cooperative behavior. “That took a long time for the nursing staff and the patients to get their heads around, because there’s minimal sense of agency or autonomy in anything else,” says Sutherland. “It was very important that we disrupted the gaze of therapy and illness, because these men were situated as ill all the time in all their navigations in the hospital. What I tell the participants is, ‘We’re not starting with your identity as an ill person. Of course, it’s in the space, but that’s not the reason we’re here. The reason we’re here is a meeting of creative people who want to explore creating together” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). From the start, Sutherland and Yanta insisted that psychologists and other staff who wanted to be involved in the project needed to do so as participants, not as observers. “We told them, ‘If you’re going to get involved, you’re going to have to do so as a player. You’re not sitting on the side watching.’ And they did; and they got involved wholeheartedly; and they found it quite liberating. The completely unexpected side effect was the radical shift that happened in those clinicians, in how they saw their work, how they understood therapy, and what they were seeing in patients who they never viewed before outside of the frame of illness” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). “Because of the shift that the theatre space does, sometimes I would forget that the mental health issue was there,” says Yanta. “Once you step into the space it sort-of feels like you can be anyone. It feels like the institution is taken away from them for those few hours, they can feel a sense of normality and that’s how they engaged with us. Once we stepped outside, I could see they remembered that they were patients; they began acting like patients. The power of hope when they stepped

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into that space, the sense of possibility, that for me was profound” (L. Yanta, personal communication, August 6, 2020). Most of Sutherland’s and Yanta’s work at Grahamstown Prison and at the Fort England Psychiatric Hospital take the form of workshops, in which the performance work is an end in itself, not necessarily prepared for a public performance with an audience. However, they also believe there is developmental value for the performers in a public performance. “I do think there are times when showing the work is very important, because I think those witnesses and that gaze back is incredibly affirming for the performer, and it also allows those witnessing to see people often in a very, very new way,” says Sutherland. “In the prison work, the most exciting moments are when they’re allowed to go and perform outside. I think it’s vital for them, because they’re performing something that is entertaining, is making people laugh, that is constructive. They’re performing a sense of themselves in the world that is away from the deviant criminal identity that they’re stuck with in the prison. The feeling of being able to contribute to the world in a way that is positive and relational is very, very important. Time after time, the feedback from the performers is, ‘It was so good to do something good for other people.’” “In the psychiatric hospital, it was quite difficult, because it’s such a closed environment, and the aesthetics of work were very, very different. There are people with physical disabilities and there are people in various states of psychosis. There’s always a lot of stuff going on in the room. … When we started, we thought public performance would be quite stressful and take away from the work. But when they said they wanted to share their work, we said, ‘Right, great, we’ll share the work.’ It was incredibly affirming. The sense of joy that came out of it for the performers, as well as people who are watching was palpable. There are some men who people thought were lost causes, really lost causes, could not even do therapy, they were so bad in terms of their impairments and their mental illness, some of who didn’t even speak outside the workshop, and here they were doing stuff that was so beyond what the expectations were” (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017). Sutherland and Yanta worked together in Grahamstown Prison for 12 years and Fort England for five. Sutherland moved to Cape Town in 2017, where she works as Creative Arts in Activism Coordinator at the Tshisimani Center for Activist Education. Yanta now leads the prison

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group alone. Sutherland reflects, “He has now taken over that group by himself, but the group has existed for so long, they’re also quite selfsustaining. If he took himself out, they’d still continue, which is what you want in the long-term isn’t it?” Lauren Creese, the psychologist who helped start the drama group at the hospital, now runs a version of it with another clinical staff member (A. Sutherland, personal communication, October 5, 2017).

CHAPTER 16

Building Community

Sutherland’s and Yanta’s work in sparking imagination and creativity (see previous chapter) leads us to an apparent constant in performance activism—the generation of community. When people perform together they bond—and within certain environments are able to find new ways of being together and moving forward. We’ll now look at examples of performance activism in which the creation and/or strengthening of community is the main point. One, led by Jon Oram, functions primarily within the context of existing geographically defined communities to deepen and refine their connection to their histories, and hence, toward each other. The other two, one led by Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Kenya, the other by Dan Baron Cohen in Brazil, explore performance as a way of creating an activist community where it did not before exist.

Community Plays When Jon Oram was a teenager he ran away and joined the circus, the Billy Smarts Circus in the U.K. Although he stayed with the circus for only one season, for most of his adult life, Jon has been traveling from town to town putting on shows. Not presenting acrobats, animal acts, and clowns, but organizing the town’s folk, often hundreds of them at a time, to create and perform a play about their history. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_16

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Since 1983, Oram has directed 40 of what he calls “Community Plays,” mostly in the U.K. but also in Canada, the U.S., and Europe. The process of creating the play usually takes about 18 months. Participation in these plays is open to anyone who wants to perform or help produce it. As a result, casts can number in the hundreds. Because of the size and scope of these projects the performances most often happen in non-theatre spaces—warehouses, barns, churches, tents, town squares, streets, shopping centers. The average community play organized by Oram involves 130 performers, with scores of others working as researchers, costume makers, set builders, musicians, and participating on various production committees. Oram’s Community Plays resonate with the medieval Mystery Plays, which were put on by communities and trade guilds in England and much of Western Europe in the late Middle Ages, and with contemporary mass historical reenactments, except that they are not telling prescribed Bible stories or enacting predetermined historical scenarios. Each play is new and specific, based on what the community wants to explore about its history and contemporary issues. Community Plays also have something in common with the Mass Spectacles in the Soviet Union and Germany during the early decades of the Twentieth Century, except that the content is not designed to arouse or reinforce support for a political viewpoint or movement. The content and politic of the play find themselves in the process of creating and performing the play. The contemporary Community Play came into being when Ann Jellicoe, a progressive playwright and director, in the mid-1970s left her job as the literary manager of the Royal Court Theatre in London to move to the small town of Lyme Regis in England’s southwest. Jellicoe’s initial aim in making the move was to raise her children. However, she soon got involved directing a play at her children’s school. “She could see that the stage was too small, so she decided to put the audience on the stage. And that wasn’t big enough for an audience either. So, she put performance stages around the outside and put the standing audience and the cast in the middle,” says Oram. “That was the promenade, which is something that we’ve hung on to because of the benefits of it. And she didn’t like the idea of children playing adults, so she started inviting the community to be involved. It was all serendipity. It was all a series of happy accidents, really. And it was only afterwards, in hindsight, that you could see what it was” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020).

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When she began recruiting theatre professionals—designers, choreographers, and playwrights—to help craft the productions, the essential elements of the contemporary Community Play were in place. In 1978, Jellicoe founded the Colway Theatre Trust and began creating a Community Play each year in different villages and towns in the West Country of England.1 In 1981, Oram went to see Jellicoe’s third community play, The Poor Man’s Friend by Howard Barker. “It blew me away,” he recalled nearly 40 years later. “There was one particular incident in the play, there was a boy who was about to be hung for burning down a flax field. … He was going to be hanged as an example to the community. The judge puts his little black hat on, which is a sign that the boy’s going to be condemned to death. And there was a little girl in a costume standing next to me with her mother. And she pulled on my trouser leg, and I looked down at her. She was seven or eight. And she said, ‘Why, why are they doing that? It’s not… Why are they doing that?’ And it demanded an answer. And I looked at the mother and she wasn’t helping me. I just cried. There was a girl of the twentieth century relating to a boy of the seventeenth century and bringing me into her world. It was the most powerful moment, theatrically, I’ve ever experienced” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020). Within a year, Oram was working with Jellicoe and when she retired in 1985, he became artistic director of the Colway Theatre Trust, which changed its name to the Claque Theatre in 2000. (Claque as in circle, crowd, community.) Before joining Jellicoe, Oram had been working with Dorothy Heathcote (see Chapter 10), as a “drama advisor… teaching teachers to use drama as an educational tool.” Oram cites Heathcote as the greatest influence on his work. In producing a Community Play, he explores real situations imaginatively through improvisation, usually inspired by earlier events or periods in the community’s history. In the case of a Community Play, the process of research and creative exploration can last up to two years, during which the participants research, discuss, debate, and perform and in the process become better acquainted and connected to the history and culture of their town or neighborhood. Oram usually starts by asking the community what local historical events and contemporary issues most interest them in order to inform

1 For an overview of this early work see, Jellicoe (1987).

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the subject and content of the play. “We do a whole series of buildups to find out whether the community wants the play, to find out what the resources are, to see if it’s feasible, basically. We normally do a twoor three-month preliminary investigation, which is followed by a public meeting, where we present the idea to the community. … I ask the community to vote. And if they vote no, which hardly ever happens, I go away. That ends there. And if they vote yes, I continue” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020). Once the process of finding the subject and sketching out the play is concluded, the casting sessions begin—never auditions—because everyone is guaranteed a part (A sign on the door reads “Congratulations, You’ve Got the Part”). The script is then reworked to accommodate the size of the cast. It’s then that a team of theatre professionals is brought in. “A professional team moves into the town. … Stage managers, designers, costume makers, prop makers, choreographers sometimes, depending on the makeup of the play.” They are paid, usually with funds from the Arts Council of England, local government agencies, and the community is always organized to take care of any short falls through fundraising, which, “increases its sense of ownership” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020). Around each of the theatre professionals a working team of local people gather to sew the costumes, build the sets and props, help with the choreography. As Jellicoe put it back in 1981, “The town is irrigated with a kind of creativity” (quoted in Southon, 2019). While a few of Claque’s recent plays have been entirely devised, most have been created through a collaboration between the devising of the community actors and the playwright—among them have been Howard Barker, David Edgar, Arnold Wesker, and David Cregan. Some Community Plays are done outdoors most in large, non-theatre spaces, but, as in Environmental Theatre, the audience and the actors (in costume) always share the same space and mingle. The girl who pulled on Oram’s pants leg during The Poor Man’s Friend was “in” the play. Oram calls those who circulate in the audience “Social Actors.” They are both characters in the play and simultaneously organizers of the audience. “Some of the scenes are happening on stages, and sometimes the scenes happen through the middle of the audience,” Oram explains. “We may have a parade of suffragettes coming through and the suffragettes would grab women from the audience and give them a banner or put a suffragette sash on them. … We might have them passing buckets to put out a fire. … Or we might encourage the audience to participate as a

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crowd of rebels or protestors at a public meeting. If you are a Social Actor … you’re next to members of the audience, and you’re watching them watching the play and you’re in a kind of quiet conversation with them, you play with them, you create a social connection. … The key role of the Social Actor is to implicate the audience in the drama, into the world of the play. The Social Actor’s character treats the audience as a member of their community, asking their opinions and participation, pushing them to take sides, to engage at a deeper level than the usual token audience participation” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020). Most Community Plays have been in and been about the history of a specific village, town, or neighborhood. There have been times, however, when Oram worked with what he calls a “community of interest” as distinct from a geographic community. Ten years after the failed national miner’s strike in Britain, Oram did a play, Fightback (1998) with former miners from Kent about the strike. On occasion, the creation of a Community Play spills over into protest and politics. In Tunbridge Wells, in response to a new shopping mall overshadowing the traditional shopping district of Camden Road, the play started with a lantern parade along Camden Road to draw attention to the fact that, unlike the mall, the city wasn’t lighting it at night. “They’re now doing their 12th or 13th annual lantern parade, it’s continued,” Oram reported in 2020. The creation of the play also inspired the formation of a group called C.R.E.A.T.E, Camden Road Education, Arts Theatre Events. “They have a 40 strong choir … that’s still going. They have reading groups, they have an improvisation group, they’re still flourishing” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020). After a Community Play that Oram directed in Eramosa, Ontario, Canada, The Spirit of Shiveree by Dale Hamilton, members of the cast stood against the incumbent council in protest of their development plan, were elected, and eventually drove the developer out of the township. For the most part, however, the impact of Community Plays is primarily located in deepening the ties of the community. “Dorothy Heathcote, I keep coming back to her, she has this thing she calls fellowship. Or do I call it fellowship? I can’t remember now, but it’s this idea that you make a connection,” says Oram. “Like that girl again, she made a connection. She found a fellowship between herself and this boy who was being sentenced to death. … We can find fellowship in the community sideways as it were, and we can find fellowship by going back

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and finding the humanity of the people that were involved in historical events, the people who helped shape the community” (J. Oram, personal communication, July 20, 2020).

Kamiriithu Education and Culture Center In the East African country of Kenya, in the 1970s, a singular cultural experiment—the Kamiriithu Education and Culture Center—was created through a collaboration between progressive artists and intellectuals and local peasants and workers. The way it was built dramatically (pun intended) reveals the potential of performance to catalyze community building. Kamiriithu’s experiment was violently suppressed by the Kenyan state after six years of activity, but continues to inspire progressive theatre artists and performance activists half a century later. When, in the mid-1970s, Ngugi wa Thiong’o returned to live in his home town of Kamiriithu about 30 km northwest of Nairobi, the nation’s capital, he was already a world-famous novelist and a professor at the University of Nairobi. Kamiriithu was in transition from the rural village he grew up into the small city of some 42,000 residents that it is in 2020. At the time, Kamiriithu’s population was about 11,000 roughly evenly divided between: industrial workers, most of whom worked for the British owned Bata Shoe Company; agricultural laborers who worked in the surrounding tea and coffee plantations, formerly owned by white settlers, but recently taken over either by international agribusiness or rich black Kenyan landowners; and the unemployed. The town was located in the formerly “White Highlands,” so-called because in the early twentieth Century white settlers from Britain and South Africa arrived in large numbers, seizing the land from the indigenous Kikuyu people, who were, were, for the most part, reduced to becoming hired help on their former lands. By mid-century, the area had a radical political legacy. It had been the scene of intense fighting during the war of liberation (1952–1960), which was the fifth, and, finally, successful, uprising against British rule since 1895. Ngugi’s older brother had been a fighter with the Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), known to the British as the Mau Mau, and his mother had been arrested and tortured by the colonial authorities during the war. In October, 1975 a local school teacher in Kamiriithu, NJeeri wa Aamon, held a meeting to organize an independent educational and

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cultural center for the city.2 This effort was different from most other development and educational projects in post-colonial Africa in that the people of Kamiriithu set out to organize and finance it themselves, independent of the government, religious organizations, or NGOs from the global north. They set up a steering committee and sub-committees for adult education, culture, and health. Adding to what would prove a fertile mix, at about this same time, two of Thiong’o’s university colleagues followed him to Kamiriithu: theatre director Kimani Gecau, and educator Ngugi wa Mirii, who had embraced the pedogeological approach of Paolo Freire. With 80% of the town illiterate, the center’s organizers decided to start with a literacy program. The educational sub-committee asked Mirii to head up the program; it was launched in July, 1976 with fiftyfive students. According to Ingrid Björkman, whose Mother Sing for Me: People’s Theatre in Kenya, is the first (of only two) book-length studies of the Kamiriithu Educational and Cultural Center, previous literacy programs, sponsored by church organizations and outside NGOs had not made much progress. The literacy program, now under Mirii’s leadership, decided that the material they would use to learn to read would be, “…based on the villagers’ lives and concentrated on their actual problems, such as lack of land, unemployment, insufficient food for the family; lack of hospital and health facilities” (Björkman, 1989, p. 52). This led to many political and historical conversations. Freire’s dialogic method was a spark. As Björkman observes, “The insights and experiences of the illiterate were put to use; those who had experienced the events with which the course was dealing became the experts and led the discussions. The teachers were the authorities only within the scope of their own subject— reading and writing. … Former students told me how the courses had built-up their self-confidence; they suddenly discovered that the joy of learning was taking them outside their routine existence and giving their lives new meaning” (Björkman, p. 52). After about a year, students decided that a way should be found to involve more people in learning about history and politics and they decided theatre would be a good way to do it. There were no plays written in Kikuyu, the language they spoke and had just learned to read and write, so they turned to the famous writer living among them, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and asked him to write a play about the issues and history 2 Unless otherwise cited, my description of the Kamiriithu Educational and Cultural Center is based on Björkman (1989).

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of the area, one that included their traditional songs and dances. While Thiong’o wrote, Björkman reports, “Peasants who never in their lives had set foot in a theatre first constructed a model complete with stage, changing rooms, prop rooms and an audience platform seating more than 2,000 people; and then built the real thing” (Björkman, 1989, p. 53). It was, at the time, the largest theatre in East Africa (Björkman, p. 60). Thiong’o completed the draft of Ngaahika Ndeenda (I Will Marry When I Want ), the first play in Kikuyu, in April of 1977. Writing almost a three decades later, Ciarunji Chesaina and Evan Mwangi, both professors at the University of Nairobi (Chesaina also served as the High Commissioner for Kenya in the Republic of South Africa) describes the content of I Will Marry When I Want as lamenting, “the exploitation and marginalization of the peasants who fought for Kenya’s liberation by a new group of leaders and financiers who have taken over the country” (Chesaina & Mwangi, 2004, p. 222). However, far more impactful than its content, and more significant from the vantage point of the emergence of performance activism, was the process through which it was created. Thiong’o and director Kirani Gecau decided on what they would come to call “open rehearsals.” They invited anyone and everyone who so desired to come to rehearsals and actively help shape the play. Since the times most people were off from work were Saturday and Sunday afternoons, that’s when they rehearsed, and as the rehearsals continued, more and more people showed up. According to Kidd, “Over 300 people pitched in every weekend over several months to help shape the drama and participate in the performance” (Kidd, 1984, p. 8). It was a rare collaboration between skilled artists and a large group of artistically untrained working people. In some ways the process resembled that of Oram’s Community Plays, although the political atmosphere was far more charged. “Ngugi would actually rewrite scenes in public,” says Dan Baron Cohen, who worked with Thiong’o during his exile in the United Kingdom in the mid-1980s, “The community stage was, for him, both a place for public discussion and collective collaboration. Ngugi definitely had a role as a poet, as a writer, as a charismatic pedagogue. At the same time, the community had a very powerful role [in creating the production]” (D. Baron Cohen, personal communication, August 3, 2020). One of the Kamiriithu villagers who participated in the process described it this way, “We cannot close the centre if the Ngugis [writer wa Thiong’o and company manager wa Mirii] are not here. If they stopped writing we would come together and write something. Group scripting is not something strange and we

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would do it. These two individuals are not the centre; the centre is the members. We appreciate an individual’s talents but attempt to curb any feeling of self-importance in the individual. If a member has a good voice and therefore leads a song, he understands that without the supportive voices of about 50 other people on stage he wouldn’t be able to do that song” (Unnamed Kamiriithu Centre member in Björkman, 1989, p. 56). In his prison memoir Detained: A Prison Writer’s Diary, Thiong’o recalled the creation of I Will Marry When I Want this way: “The six months between June and November 1977 [when the play opened] were the most exciting in my life and the true beginning of my education. I learnt my language anew. I rediscovered the creative nature and power of collective work. … Although the overall direction of the play was under Kimani Gecau, the whole project became a collective community effort with peasants and workers seizing more and more initiative in revising and adding to the script, in directing dance movements on the stage and in the general organization [of the production.] … Furthermore, the whole effort unleashed a torrent of talents hitherto unsuspected even by the owners. Thus, before the play was over, we had already received three plays in the Gikuyu [Kikuyu] language, two written by a worker, one by a primary school teacher. One unemployed youth who had tried to commit suicide four times because he thought his life was useless, now suddenly discovered that he had a tremendous voice which, when raised in a song, kept his audience on dramatic tender hooks. None of the actors had ever been on a stage before yet they kept the audience glued to their seats, even when it was raining” (Thiong’o, 1981, p. 76). The play opened on October 2, chosen because it was the 25th Anniversary of the beginning of the war of national liberation. After nine performances before packed and enthusiastic audiences, the government banned the production and arrested Thiong’o, holding him in prison, without charges, for a year. The Kamiriithu Educational and Cultural Center, meanwhile, thrived. In the wake of the production and its enforced closing, more literacy classes were organized. The orchestra formed for the play continued to perform, giving concerts in other towns and even making a record. A woman’s group was organized which helped its members find jobs and that pooled their incomes, raising the medium income of women in Kamiriithu in the process (Björkman, p. 54). The people of Kamiriithu made it clear, through their continued and intensified activities, that as important and organizing as the creation of the play had been, it was

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not an end in itself, but was a part of a larger interconnected grassroots community building activity. As Björkman put it, “The theatrical activities in Kamiriithu formed a part of the popular education programme to which the village was committed” (Björkman, 1989, p. 60). When Thiong’o was released and returned to Kamiriithu, the center decided to produce a new play that would become Maitu Njugira (Mother, Sing for Me), two hundred people signed up to be in the production. This time, Thiong’o, leveraging his international reputation and connection to the University of Nairobi, secured an agreement to bring the production to the Kenya National Theatre. The National Theatre was originally established by white colonialists in 1950 and was situated in a wealthy area in Nairobi. Until the arrival of the amateur actors from Kamiriithu, the National Theatre had produced primarily European plays in English performed by professional actors trained at its theatre conservatory (Chesaina & Mwangi, 2004, pp. 218–219). Mother Sing for Meis set, for the most part, in the 1920s and ’30s during the depths of the kipande system. Established by the Native Registration Amendment Ordinance of 1920, the kipande system made it compulsory for African males over the age of 15 to at all times wear a small tin around their necks which contained papers with personal details such as their weight and height, their fingerprints and employment record. The intent (and effect) was to restrict the movement of Africans in their own country, preventing them from leaving jobs they didn’t want, essentially reducing them to a form of serfdom (Mau Mau Revolution, n.d.). The parallels to the present of the 1980s were made obvious. Instead of returning the land to its original African owners, as the revolution had promised, Black Kenyans were told after independence that they had to buy the land back, and, of course, the vast majority couldn’t afford to do so. Near the end of the play, the cast asks the character of the “Governor” now running the “independent” country, to produce Kariuku, a long-missing honest revolutionary. He is finally brought out with his hands cut off and his eyes gouged out. The new rulers proclaim, “Now, if you ask about him anymore, you shall follow him” (Anonymous audience member, quoted in Björkman, 1989, p. 15). Björkman reports, “…the play was seen as a statement that the ultimate goal of the war of independence had not been achieved. The people had got rid of their white masters but only to be oppressed by black ones” (Björkman, p. 9).

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While most of Mother Sing for Mewas in Kikuyu/Gikuyu, Thiong’o and the play’s two directors—Kimani Gecau, who had directed I Will Marry When I Want , and Waigwa Wachira, also from the University of Nairobi’s Department of Literature and a graduate of the London School of Drama—worked to include songs, dances, and snippets of dialogue from all of Kenya’s major ethnic groups. Toward that end, they brought in people from around the country to teach their traditional songs and dances to the local actors. They wanted to create a truly national play; the Mother in Mother Sing for Me being Kenya. For two months the play was (openly) rehearsed at Kamiriithu. There were a number of developments relative to the rehearsals of I Will Marry When I Want . The cast and crew met four times a week (instead of twice a week), with an extra rehearsal called if deemed necessary. People now came from all over the country to the open rehearsals, often renting a bus or van in order to participate in large groups. Officials from other nations were invited to the open rehearsals as well. Representatives from the Zimbabwean Department of Education and Culture attended and invited the production to tour their country after its Kenyan run. The press was invited as well, resulting in some very positive articles that further raised Kamiriithu’s profile and excitement about the production around the country. A few days before the play was scheduled to open at the Kenya National Theatre, rehearsals in the theater’s space were supposed to start. When the cast and crew arrived that morning, they found the building padlocked and surrounded by police. Chesaina and Mwangi write, “The group, whose purpose was to reclaim the Kenya National Theatre as a space for drama in local languages by the local people, was denied a license to perform” (Chesaina & Mwangi, 2004, p. 223). They stood outside the theatre singing songs from the play. The university theatre, which was close by, was put at their disposal. However, they were not allowed to sell tickets and with 150,000 hard earned Kenyan shillings invested by the community to put on the play, they were faced with a serious financial loss. They pushed on, with open rehearsals at the university. With the press reporting on the situation, it became clear that the play would probably never be allowed to “open” and the rehearsals became, in effect, the show’s “run.” Thousands of people from all over the country began attending the rehearsals each day. “There were such crowds that the Uhuru Highway was blocked each afternoon,” reports Björkman. “Rehearsals began at

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6:30 p.m. but by 3 p.m. all the seats were already occupied; people sat on the stage, in the wings, on the stairs, and even in the light and sound rooms. The corridors and stairways were crowded and those who could not get inside sat on the grass outside and listened through open doors and windows” (Björkman, 1989, p. 59). One member of the cast, looking back a few years later, said, “What was our economic bankruptcy compared to the opportunity of performing to these thousands of spectators, most of who had never been to a theatre and could not afford a ticket even as cheap as 25 shillings? Now we got the right audience” (Quoted in Björkman, p. 59). At one rehearsal the lights went out because, as another member of the cast recalled, “…the lighting control room was invaded by people; they tripped over the wires and disconnected the lighting. But we said: ‘Well, let’s do the play anyhow. The light doesn’t work. But the play should be seen by as many people as want to see it’. … I remember [at one rehearsal/performance] the leading actress fainted before she got through the auditorium, because it was so crowded and hot. But it was also beautiful. Because it was a dance drama we needed to walk out dancing through the auditorium. People were packed like sardines. It was so crowded that we didn’t have room to act. People were sitting on the stage. We would let them sit there, but in one scene we needed to pass. They would see us coming, they would sit on one another and let us do the play. They were so disciplined. Public support was just amazing” (Quoted in Björkman, pp. 59–60). One spectator, identified only as Ndungu in Björkman’s book, recalls the experience of the play’s ending: The play closes with the song: Come, come, come, everybody come, Bring what you have, Bring your education, Bring your intelligence, Bring your generosity That will be able to pull those that are left behind, That will be able to awake those who are sleeping. And at that point something very interesting used to happen every time. The audience would break up and go to the front. We filled the stage, we joined with the actors. Everybody would walk up slowly, singing, ‘wake up, wake up, wake up.’ … When people came to the front they had already

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crossed something. They had made up their minds on which side they want to belong. You could hear them asking: ‘Where are the guns? Give us the guns.’ … And the play closed with people leaving the halls singing the same songs of liberation. There was continuous clapping, and they were moving forward with the clapping. (Quoted in Björkman, 1989, pp. 17–18)

It was a moment in which Theatre for Social Change loses its “for.” It is theatre and social change simultaneously; performance and activism. As described, performance was no longer a tool for a result; it was both the tool and the result. After ten open rehearsals, during which Mother Sing for Mewas seen/experienced by between 12 and 15 thousand people, the government forbid the company from using the university space. A few days later, on, March 10, Ngugi wa Thiong’o held a press conference denouncing the crack-down. The following day, the government forbade any future theatre to take place in the town of Kamiriithu. At the same time, “Landrovers full of police drove to the village and razed the theatre: stage, dressing rooms and seating galleries were leveled to the ground, only the bamboo fence remained” (Björkman, 1989, p. 60). The governor of the province of Limuru, where Kamiriithu is located, explained to the Daily Nation, “The people of Limuru wanted development and that theatre was taking people away from adult literacy classes. ‘The theatre experts can go elsewhere,’ he said. He said Government plans to develop Kamiriithu were being hindered by the Kamiriithu Community Education and Culture Centre which he accused of usurping Government functions” (Daily Nation, March 12, 1982, quoted in Björkman, p. 60). The government went on to build a vocational training school on the ruins of the center. Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Kimani Gecau and Ngugi wa Miri all fled the country. Gecau and Miri found refuge in Zimbabwe where they have been based ever since (Miri died in 2008). Thiong’o went first to the U.K. and later to the United States; he now lives in California. The destruction of the Kamiriithu Educational and Cultural Center, “profoundly affected theatre practice in the country” (Chesaina & Mwangi, 2004, p. 223). According to Wasambo Were, a professor of literature at Kenyatta University, after Kamiriithu, “dramatists developed cold feet and refrained from producing plays with similar themes” (Were, 1991, p. ix). Community-based theatre re-emerged in the 1990s, “Although,” as Chesaina and Mwangi put it, “without the oppositional politics of Kamiriithu” (Chesaina & Mwangi, p. 227). They basically

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conformed to the Theatre for Development model, focusing on themes such as nutrition, sanitation, and the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases. Kamiriithu’s independence, particularly financially, remains a rare exception in Africa (and elsewhere). “The major difference between the development success of Kamiriithu and those of … Theatre for Development programs,” writes David Kerr, “is that the funding and decision-making were almost entirely in the hands of the community, rather than in those of development agencies trying to assist the supposedly under-developed masses” (Kerr, 1991, p. 64). When asking why the whole educational and theatre complex was razed to the ground, Björkman answers herself: “The theatrical activities did not exist in isolation but had drawn strength and meaning from having emerged out of a wider cultural enterprise. … It was part of a vigorous organization that sprung from the people’s own needs and was controlled by them. … [The] centre formed an autonomous and unified entity, made all the decisions concerning the centre’s activities, bore all the responsibility and supported the centre financially. To be a member entailed more than a passive acceptance of other people’s initiatives. The members were totally committed to their centre” (Björkman, 1989, p. 94). Kamiriithu was, in effect, a self-organizing community creating what it wanted to create. While Kamiriithu had its roots in education (literacy classes) and propagated particular political views, the meaning of its activity goes beyond—or is other than—education and/or propaganda. The meaning of the Kamiriithu experiment to those involved in creating it—and, obviously to the government officials who so despised and feared it—is that creating a politically curious community, which the participants build themselves, creates power. Certainly, the activity of collectively writing, performing, and producing the two plays was an important part of creating the Kamiriithu community and generating its power, but the plays were never ends-in-themselves; they were exercises in power. Here I mean power as the activity of ordinary people creating something new that addresses their needs and desires, as distinct from the authority of the Kenyan state to ride up in Land Rovers and destroy a community center six years in the making. That act of violence succeeded in derailing in Kenya the possibilities for community building inherent in the Kamiriithu experiment. However, the fact is, it did happen and its influence is now international. It can be detected, as we will see soon, in the work of Dan Baron Cohen in Derry, Northern Ireland, and later in Brazil. Parallels

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can also be drawn to the history of the Castillo Theatre, which, in a very different cultural context, is also part of a larger grassroots community building effort, which will be explored in detail in Part III.

Dan Baron Cohen and Transformance Pedagogy In 1981 when Dan Baron Cohen, was 24-years-old, fresh out of Oxford, the head of the English and Drama Department at the Manchester College of Adult Education, and apprenticing himself to the playwright Edward Bond, he met Ngugi wa Thiong’o. Thiong’o had recently fled Kenya and was living in exile in London. “When Ngugi gave a series of public interviews, I went to listen,” says Baron Cohen. At one of these public interviews, which Baron Cohen recalls as being about the relationship between language, performance, and cultural resistance, “I asked a question which not only stimulated him but then provoked an invitation for us to continue the conversation, and in that conversation we began to talk about the work I was doing at that time with Edward Bond and also work that I had been doing in the late ’70s, particularly the way a theatre production was based in and an opportunity for, creating, in a sense, a utopian community, not just an ethical community but a way of envisioning the future and a way of actually building participatory democracy and building narratives which could both value histories that had been repressed or forgotten as well as capturing imaginary futures. I was speaking to Ngugi about that and during that conversation he just said, ‘Why don’t we work together?’” (Baron Cohen, personal communication, August 3, 2020). At first, Thiong’o was interested in staging a revival of Mother, Sing for Me! at the Africa Center, a cultural venue for African migrants and exiles in London. After reading Thiong’o’s earlier play The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, written in English with Micere Githae Mugo, about the trial of the Mau Mau leader hung by the British in 1956, Baron Cohen suggested producing it instead. “I thought it was much more appropriate as an international intervention,” he recalls, “and as a performance that could be used both for the questioning the Moi regime [in Kenya] and at the same time, for British audiences, to reflect on their own colonial histories and begin to imagine a different relationship between England and Kenya, between Europe and Africa. That was the beginning of our relationship. From that point, we worked for the best part of 15 months every single day together” (Baron Cohen, personal communication, August 3, 2020).

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They put together a cast of Kenyans along with progressive African exiles from a number of other countries and a few Britons of African descent. “Kamiriithu was an extremely vital source of inspiration. When Ngugi spoke about it in the cast meetings it was … not just as an ideological project, not just as a theatre project, there was a whole methodology, a pedagogy there that inspired the company,” says Baron Cohen. “One of the key elements of our work was the Open Rehearsal.” He remembers, in particular, Thiong’o’s willingness to listen to, and incorporate, views he hadn’t considered before. “When the feminists Africans, or Africans who were white as well, said the settler class had a patriarchal culture in which the women inside those communities were prevented from speaking out … had to remain silent, Ngugi had the courage to take scenes that they had critiqued … and to rewrite so that the settler wife had a voice. I’m sure that deeply influenced my understanding of the importance of thinking about restorative justice for everyone, not just the poor” (Baron Cohen, personal communication, August 3, 2020). After the run at the Africa Center, Ngugi and Baron Cohen took The Trial of Dedan Kimathi to Manchester and other northern industrial cities. It was the time of the great (and doomed) miner’s strike and they performed the play in small mining villages as well. Manchester, one of England’s old industrial cities, is multi-ethnic with a strong progressive trade union culture. It had a link to the “Celtic Fringe” of Europe— Ireland, Scotland, and Wales (where Baron Cohen is from), which had sent a steady stream of immigrants to work in its huge factories for over 150 years. Later immigration brought many from the Caribbean and Africa. “Ngugi was extremely excited to bring Open Rehearsals into that historic culture,” says Baron Cohen. “As for me, I did years of work with the Open Rehearsal as a key method for integrating community needs and desires and at the same time as a way for testing whether a production was ready and adapting the performance so that the theatre we were making resonated with the needs and desires of the people who had no voice.” He adds that beyond being a theatre technique, he views the Open Rehearsal as a method for creating, “a more dialogic stage and dialogic relationship with the audience. … that moved us away from the ‘creating of a performance’ into new human relationships being developed” (Baron Cohen, personal communication, August 3, 2020). Along with his work with Thiong’o, Baron Cohen credits Edward Bond, about whom he did his doctoral research and with whom he worked on several productions,

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for helping to shift his focus from ideology to methodology. In particular he points to Bond’s “Preface” to his play Lear, where he writes, “We do not need a plan for the future, we need a method of change” (Bond, 1972, p. x). This shift from understanding performance as being what you do when putting on a play to performance as a methodology for developing new kinds of human relationships, is a tectonic shift, one that we have seen permutations of throughout our examination. This shift would go on to shape not only what Baron Cohen now calls his “transformance pedagogy,” but also, in various articulations, much of what would become performance activism. After The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, Baron Cohen continued to do political theatre with and for working-class communities in Manchester, first with the Quantum Theatre Company based at the Manchester College of Adult Education and later with Frontline: Culture and Education, in the Moss Side neighborhood (Baron Cohen, 2019, p. 144). Given the long-standing family and political connections between Northern Ireland and the Irish immigrant community in Manchester and Baron Cohen’s anti-colonial political commitments, it is no surprise that in 1988 Sinn Fein invited him to lead a theatre workshop in Derry, known as Londonderry by the British and Unionist forces.3 This workshop led to the establishment of Derry Frontline Culture and Education. For the next two years Baron Cohen traveled back and forth between Manchester and Derry, settling in the latter in 1990. Derry Frontline was based in the Bogside and Creggan neighborhoods in Derry. These were/are poor working-class areas of strong Republican (Nationalist/Catholic) support. The creation of plays by Frontline Derry usually involved interviews of scores of people, long political conversations and debates, devising and revising; Baron Cohen penned the final versions of the scripts.4 Threshold, for example, which was two and a half years in the making, had one performance in 1992. Clearly the process was fore-fronted over the product, and it is the process that generated

3 Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone) is the party that led the Easter Uprising of 1916 which led to the independence of most of Ireland’s 32 counties in 1921, with the exception of the six northern counties of which Derry is a part. After various splits and transmutations Sinn Fein also played the leadership role in “The Troubles,” the so far failed attempt in the last decades of the Twentieth Century to drive the British out of the six northern counties as well. 4 Baron Cohen (2001).

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much of the power. “Workshop participants often mention how these discussions often percolated out into their personal and political lives,” Baron Cohen reported. “And because their lives cannot be separated from the lives of extended family and friends there is a tremendous sense of responsibility and risk involved. … People have said to us that this discussion and representation of such issues have enabled whole sections of the community to start talking about their emotions, recognizing that these emotions are themselves reservoirs of potent history and can operate as a significant force of reaction and collusion, which inhibits its development” (Baron Cohen quoted in Pilkington, 1994, p. 43). Nor was participation limited to the actors. “Our community audience.” Baron Cohen reports, participated in, “…the development of every step of the production. Some people were interviewed; some helped to design the set; others provided costume and props. And they all know who the performers are and what they do in ‘real’ life” (Baron Cohen quoted in Pilkington, 1994, p. 27). While much of this activity might be found in any community theatre, this was not any community. It was a community under siege, and the creation of the plays was understood by both the community and its enemies as a political act. Security was posted at all entrances to the rehearsal space and actors often rehearsed wearing bullet proof vests. “It is important to realize that without exception, every person who performed on the stage or who worked on the production … saw the stage primarily as a forum, an arena, and an opportunity to speak,” Baron Cohen told an interviewer in 1994. “And the primary reason for their community coming to see that play is to see and hear their own people in control of their own medium, talking about their lives and talking about the future” (Baron Cohen quoted in Pilkington, 1994, p. 26). Irish theatre historian Lionel Pilkington wrote in 1994 that Derry Frontline was radically different from other Irish cultural organizations of the time because it combined, “…its forthright opposition to British rule in the North of Ireland” with “simultaneous and persistent questioning of some of the traditional nationalist beliefs upon which much of that opposition tends to be based” (Pilkington, 1994, p. 17). Derry Frontline created plays, performance pieces, street art, and sculptures—Baron Cohen was beginning to move performance out of the theatre building— and engaged issues like a woman’s right to choose, homosexuality, and domestic violence about which many in the community, due to the influence of the Catholic Church, held conservative views. He was building

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a political theatre that didn’t simply propagate the views of the party or movement it supported. It was engaged in questioning and deepening the politics of its movement. While the theatre was deeply immersed in both the physical communities of Bogside and Creggan, as well as the long-established Republican political community, its play-making activity, like Kamiriithu before it, generated a new politically curious community, which the participants built themselves, and through which they exercised power. From the vantage point of the development of performance activism, this is what was most significant about the work of Derry Frontline. In 1997, Baron Cohen was invited to do theatre workshops in southern Brazil. On the plane, he read in Time magazine about the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, (MST), known in English as the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement.MST is one of largest and longest lasting mass movements in Latin America. Founded in 1984, MTS leads landless rural workers, many of whom were formerly small-scale farmers driven off the land by big landlords and industrial interests, to occupy unused parts of latifundios (large landed estates) and cultivate them through a combination of collective and family farming. They are similar to the original Diggers of the English Revolution reborn on a large scale. As of 2014, they had led 2,500 non-violent land occupations, and have managed to hold on to 900 of them, for a total of 18.75 million acres (7.5 hectares) under cultivation involving some 370,000 families across 23 of Brazil’s 26 states.5 On the lands they occupy MST has established 1,500 primarily schools, along with an extensive adult educational process called formasao, which roughly translates into English as “development.” Both child and adult education efforts utilize Freire’s methodology.6 Within a year of his arrival in Brazil, Baron Cohen had traveled to the northern Amazonian state of Pará to work with the MST on the creation of a monument to 19 landless workers massacred by the Military Police at Eldorado do Carajás on April 17, 1996. At a meeting with the community, the decision was made to erect 19 burnt trunks of the Castanheira (Brazilian Nut Tree) as a monument to the slain workers. As one person put it, “Our parents were Castanheira workers. When they burned those 5 The communities on the occupied land are run by “nonhierarchical collective units that make decisions through discussions and consensus” (Friends of the MST, 2009; McCowen, 2014). 6 Plummer (2008).

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trees, they mutilated and felled our lives. Turned us into the landless.” Baron Cohen called the resulting monument, “both an intimate theatre of reflection within the dead trees and united, global theatre for justice beyond the trees” (Baron Cohen, 2019, p. 151). In 2000 he worked with the Pataxó and other indigenous peoples in constructing a monument, “The Other 500 Years,” to commemorate 500 years of Indigenous resistance, on the very spot where the Portuguese first landed in 1500. The military police fired rubber bullets at those attending the opening ceremony, arrested 140 people and Baron Cohen was forced into hiding for six weeks (Greenstein, 2017; Rohter, 2000). Over the next few years, Baron Cohen worked with the MST to, among other things, use performance to transform confrontations into something else. He organized the activists of the MST to play with movement and dance that reverberated with the Afro-Indigenous cultural roots of both the landless workers and the police. Here is his description of one such encounter: 100 young landless activists take up their position, clenched fists touching, in front of their hearts, feet planted firmly on the highway. The setting sun illuminates lines of red flags in the distance behind and in front of them, reflected in the dusty windscreens of kilometers of queued lorries and landrovers [of the police], stretching into the distance. … 60 armed Military Police of Pará face the activists, visors lowered, behind shields tense with expectation. The theatre of confrontation that has marked every anniversary of the massacre has begun. … The song Women plays from inside the monument. The youth slowly separate their fists into windows being opened at dawn, and their Dance of the Land narrative has begun. As the young dancers become the rising sun, land being opened, seeds being sown and protected, the first rains of spring and the passing of time, the military police watch, impassively. Perfectly synchronized, the young activists return to their first gesture, opening the windows at dawn. Helmets turn inscrutably towards one another. Almost imperceptibly, soldiers at the front of the military formation begin to accompany the rhythmic movements of opening the land and planting the seeds. The dance narrative becomes bolder, the gestures become larger.

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As the Dance of the Land begins its narrative for the third time, soldiers in the front lay down their shields and batons, entering the familiar choreography. The pull of ancestral and lived memory spreads to other soldiers, emboldening the landless youth, and Manoela raises the volume of the song. Soldiers at a distance relax their shields and raise their visors in disbelief. The officer stares at his soldiers, sowing and harvesting imagined fruits with the most feared ‘terrorists’ in Brazil. … The music ends. The youth step to the edges of the motorway, accompanied by the military police, as lorries and landrovers turn on their engines, and headlights. The officer looks towards me, and nods. (Baron Cohen, 2019, p. 153)

As this example illustrates, by this time, Baron Cohen’s notion of “theatre” had expanded. He had grown weary of what he now calls the “theatre of debate” and concluded that “a lot cannot be understood or resolved through spoken language alone. … It was only when I moved to Brazil that I came into contact with a popular culture that was rich in dance and rich in percussion,” recalls Baron Cohen. “In those two languages I began to find answers to very, very complex questions about the ways in which people keep compulsively reproducing their unresolved histories in their struggle for democracy. … No one knew how to resolve the confrontation between different levels or depths or dimensions of suffering which had been internalized into the musculature and into the humanity of people who no longer could explain their legacies but were suffering. … So they were capable of being deeply authoritarian in their performance of struggle. This troubled me, and I began to explore more deeply other languages which could give us access to those stories which seek refuge in silence or seek refuge in other people’s stories or that seek refuge in between the teeth of anger” (Baron Cohen, personal communication, December 7, 2017). In 2008 Baron Cohen and his life (and organizing) partner Manoela Souza settled in the impoverished neighborhood of Cabelo Seco in Marabá City. Located near the world’s largest iron ore deposit, Marabá is an industrial city of some 270,000 people situated where the Itacaiúnas and Tocantins Rivers come together in the state of Pará in the Amazonian region of Brazil. The rainforest surrounding the city has been cleared and now sustains large cattle ranches. Iron and steel production are a major part of the economy. The first organizing activity Baron Cohen and Souza engaged in Cabelo Seco was to gather some neighborhood children for a storytelling and singing session in the street. “None of the children and adolescents who participated in that first village-square storytelling

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and singing workshop knew that they lived in the Amazon or why they spoke Portuguese” (Baron Cohen, personal communication, December 7, 2017). Out of that initial storytelling circle there emerged, over the next decade, a community of cultural activists who have built Home of Rivers, a solar-powered community center which serves as a hub for a network of grassroots performatory and other cultural organizations and activities. Among them is the AfroMundi Dance Company (and more recently, also AfroMundi Kids) which has explored African and Indigenous Brazilian music and dance and reconstructed them into what Baron Cohen calls “a grammar and vocabulary of self-liberating Afro-Amazonian community” (Baron Cohen, 2019, p. 159). AfroMundi performs locally, provides classes for children and teenagers as well as for school teachers, and has toured in the United States and Europe. Other projects that emanate from the Home of Rivers are: the Rabetas Audiovisual Collective (which includes Owl Cinema, and a solar-powered Stingray radio station); Salus Good Living Gardens, which recovers, educates about, and nurtures traditional medical plants; Leaves of Life Library, which is both a physical library and writing center, and also includes the writing of original poems on walls in the neighborhood; GiraSol Energies of Life, which advocates for and installs solar panels; and, most recently the Community University of the Rivers, which is not a physical space but a recognition that everyone in the community performs as a teacher and learner of the skills and knowledge they possess, in the process deepening and developing those skills and knowledge. These projects are led by many of the same young people, the AfroRaiz Collective, now in their early twenties, who participated in that first storytelling circle. Every week Home of Rivers holds a communal dinner at which community actions and initiatives are discussed. Among the regular performatory events it has initiated are collective bike rides, usually organized around an ecological or social issue, in which scores, sometimes hundreds, of young people from Cabelo Seco bike in mass (and in the spirit of celebration) to other parts (or as Baron Cohen calls them, “significant stages”) in the city. It’s a way for them to safely see parts of Marabá they would never otherwise see, and meet people they would never meet—including the Military Police headquarters, the city council, the federal and state universities of Pará, the airport, and the privately owned radio and TV stations. Every summer they hold a Kite Festival in

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which hundreds of kids, alongside older siblings and parents, learn cooperation, community, how to make conversation along with math, physics, and aesthetics as they build and fly kites. Through all of this, Baron Cohen has developed “transformancepedagogy” which he defines as “social transformation through performance,” in daily life (Baron Cohen, 2019, p. 136). It is an approach to/understanding of performance that bares a strong family resemblance to the social therapeutic performance activism to be explored in Part III. They both approach performance not as a tool for a particular result (although they generate many processes), but performance as both a means of participatory development and the development itself. There is a through line from Kamiriithu to Cabelo Seco. From this point in history, it’s clear that the most enduring thing that Baron Cohen learned from Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s experience was the power of performance, whether it be, in Baron Cohen’s words, “organized, spontaneous or everyday” to build community (Baron Cohen, 2019, p. 136). A community that is busy performing itself (whether on stage, off, or both) is a community that is bringing itself into dynamic existence; it is questioning, transforming, and exercising power.

References Baron Cohen, D. (2001). Theatre of self-determination: The plays of Derry frontline culture and education. Guildhouse Press. Baron Cohen, D. (2019) Performing justice in the Amazon. In A. L. Østern & K. N. Knudsen (Eds.), Performative approaches in arts education: Artful teaching, learning and research (pp. 136–167). Routledge. Bond, E. (1972). Lear. Bloomsbury. Björkman, I. (1989). Mother, sing for me: People’s theatre in Kenya. Zed Books. Chesaina, C., & Mwangi, E. (2004). Kenya. In M. Banham (Ed.), A history of theatre in Africa (pp. 206–232). Cambridge University Press. Friends of the MST. (2009, July 7). History of the MST. https://www.mstbrazil. org/content/history-mst. Greenstein, G. (2017, September 14). Transformance: In search of Bem Viver, the ‘good life’ in the Amazon. Latin American Bureau. https://lab.org.uk/ transformance-in-search-of-the-good-life-in-the-amazon/. Jellicoe, A. (1987). Community plays: How to put them on. Heinemann. Kerr, D. (1991). Participator popular theater: The highest stage of cultural under-development. Research in African Literature, 22(3), 55–75.

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Kidd, R. (1984). From people’s theatre for revolution to popular theatre for reconstruction: Diary of a Zimbabwean workshop. International Council for Adult Education. Mau Mau Revolution. (n.d.). Kipande system. https://sites.google.com/site/ maumaurevolution/pre-revolution/govern/kipande-system. McCowen, T. (2014). Landless workers movement. In Encyclopedia Britannica online. https://www.britannica.com/event/Landless-Workers-Movement. Pilkington, L. (1994). Dan Baron Cohen: Resistance to liberation with Derry frontline culture and education. The Drama Review, 38(4), 17–47. https:// doi.org/10.2307/1146423. Plummer, D. M. (2008). Leadership development and formasao in Brazil’s landless workers movement (MST). Unpublished masters dissertation. The City University of New York. Rohter, L. (2000, April 25). 500 years later, Brazil looks its past in the face. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/25/world/500-years-laterbrazil-looks-its-past-in-the-face.html?mcubz=0. Southon, M. (2019, December 21). Arena—A play for Bridport [Video]. Vimeo. https://www.communityplays.com/blog/remembering-a-play-for-bridport. Thiong’o, N. W. (1981). Detained: A prison writer’s diary. Heinemann. Were, W. (1991). Forward. In K. N. Barnabas (Ed.), An anthology of East African plays (p. ix). Longman.

PART III

Re-performing the World

In the chapters of this final section, I focus on the community building approach to performance activism known as social therapeutics. While its practitioners and scholars number in the several hundred and span the globe, social therapeutic performance activism is rarely referenced in Theatre, Performance Studies, or Sociological literature. I hope here to fill in some of the missing history and unpack the methodology that underlies and is informed by that history. In so doing, I will be temporarily narrowing our geographic lens and focusing on activities that emerged in New York City in the last decades of the twentieth century. What follows is neither cultural history (as Part I) nor broad documentation of contemporary activity (as Part II). It is, rather, an in-depth case study. In these three final chapters, I look at the history and methodology of social therapeutics, which are intrinsically bound up and dependent on each other, and speculate on the implications social therapeutics might have for performance activism in general. I believe there is a lot to learn from its history of consciously building a performance community as a means of generating development and engaging an unjust social reality. So, while narrowing our geographic lens, Part III also widens the discussion of the nature and impact of performance activism.

CHAPTER 17

Performance as a Way of Life

Let us return, briefly, to the San Francisco Diggers. In the late 1960s, amidst organizing free food distribution, free stores, free housing, free concerts, free transportation, and participatory performance events in the streets, the Diggers brought performance directly into daily life through the invention of the Life Actor (see Part I, pp. 134–135). As described by former Digger Peter Coyote, the Life Actor “… consciously creates the role he or she plays in everyday life, a person who marshals skill, imagination and improvisation to break free from imposed roles and reactions and, by example, demonstrates a path that will free others” (Coyote, 1998, p. 33). Theatre historian David Callaghan adds, “Each life-actor would construct a persona that embodied this ideal [of a collective, cooperative, free society] and then perform it in his or her daily existence” (Callaghan, 2000, p. 87). The Life Actor didn’t perform only for her own (or anyone else’s) entertainment, gratification, or self-improvement (although all of those might be generated), but as a method of political activism. The Life Actor exited rather suddenly when the Diggers retreated from their urban organizing to set up rural communes, and there is no direct line from the Life Actor to the social therapeutic community which started in New York shortly after the Life Actor “exited the stage” and which I will be exploring in detail in the last three chapters of this book. As far © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_17

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as I can ascertain, neither Fred Newman nor any of the other shapers of this activist community were aware of this aspect of the Digger’s work. Yet, the Life Actor and the social therapeutic community’s work of bringing activistic performance into daily life share a striking family resemblance. “We understand performance very broadly,” Newman said in 1996. “From our point of view performance might have nothing to do with being on the stage. We think you can perform at home, at work, in any social setting…With the proper kind of support, people discover that they can, that we can, do things through performance that we never thought we could do…In a sense, we’re trying to broaden each person’s notion of ‘what you’re allowed to do’” (Newman, 1996). The distinctions are also striking. Unlike the preconceived character of the Life Actor, social therapeutic performance activism is an improvisational approach to living one’s life and embodying one’s values by consciously performing who-one-is-becoming in the context of who-oneis. The social therapeutic performance activist does not create a static character; she is constantly emergent. This difference is connected to the social/historical environments in which the Life Actor and social therapeutics emerged. The community in which the Digger’s performed was a given. It was the hippie community generated by the counter culture of the time. The Life Actor could step onto the streets of Haight Ashbury and find her stage. For the community organizers centered around Newman in the 1980s and ’90s there was no existing community. It had to be created, and the conscious performance of one’s life became an integral part of bringing that community into existence. There is also a significant political difference. The Life Actor—and the counter culture in general—considered itself an alternative to the status quo, an example that would prove ascendant due to its more humane values. Social therapeutic performance activism is, in part, a response to the failure of that politic to ascend. It is not an alternative set up in contradistinction to society as a whole. To the contrary, as political activists and mass organizers, its practitioners work to position themselves in the mainstream of society. Being part of the mix is key to transforming the mix. Social therapeutic performance activism is an ongoing organizing activity in constant interplay with everyone and everything it encounters. It tries to build with every “offer” that comes along. In this sense, the performance in social therapeutic performance activism is closer to the performance of the Kamiriithu Education and Culture Center and what is being built in Cabelo Seco. It is the overall performance of community

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that generates new possibilities and expands the boundaries of what we call reality.

Fred Newman The origins of social therapeutic performance activism go back to Fred Newman. Born in 1935, Newman grew up poor in the Bronx, served in Korea during the end of the war there, and with the help of the G.I. Bill, which paid for higher education for military veterans, was able to attend college, eventually earning a Ph.D. in philosophy at Stanford University. He spent much of the 1960s teaching philosophy at various U.S. colleges from which he was fired. His contracts were not renewed because he gave all his students “A”s. He did so for two reasons. First, he didn’t believe in grades; he called them “a form of punishment,” and felt people should learn because they wanted to. The second reason was that the War in Vietnam was raging. College students were exempted from the draft; such was the class basis of the law. Newman didn’t want to contribute to anyone flunking out of college and being drafted. He began every class by telling his students, “You all have ‘A’s for the semester. Those of you who want to learn something, stick around.” Needless to say, deans and provosts didn’t appreciate this reasoning and his contract wouldn’t be renewed. In 1968, while teaching at his undergraduate alma mater of the City College of New York, he decided that no lasting social change could be generated from the campus and left the academy for good. With a handful of student followers, Newman becomes a community organizer in New York City’s poorest communities. It is worth noting, relative to the role of that performance would come to play in the political movement he would lead, that the first group he organized was called “If/Then.” Lois Holzman, Newman’s intellectual and organizing partner for four decades, remembered the Newman of this time a few months after his death in 2011. The upheavals of the 1960s in the US and abroad radicalized him. Like millions of others, he felt the contradiction of capitalism’s success—both the benefits to humankind and the mass destruction of humankind it produced. He resonated with the ways that the cultural movements of the time were challenging the Western glorification of individual self-interest with grassroots communal experiments to transform daily life. He felt in his gut the need to confront America’s failure to honestly deal with its

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legacy of slavery and racism, as its African American population remained poor and shut out of America’s prosperity. (Holzman, 2011)

Newman’s grounding in philosophy and his ongoing philosophical (that is, self-reflective and dialogic) approach to organizing has played a crucial role in allowing this initially small grouping of primarily white middle class sixties’ radicals to: (1) successfully organize in poor and working class, primarily Black and Latinx, communities and from that initial base to both find/generate Black leadership and to organize middle class and wealthy people in support of these efforts; and, (2) reflect on their organizing experience as they went along, an ongoing practical-critical activity that helped them to eventually break out the trap of ideology which had so handicapped and distorted so many previous progressive organizing initiatives. Like so many twentieth century radicals concerned with the elimination of poverty and inequality, Newman and his followers soon embraced Marxism. However, from the first embrace it was obvious to Newman how philosophically underdeveloped (that is, how dumbeddown) Marxism had become since Marx and how little room Marxism as an ideology allowed for its own development. In particular, Newman and his followers, emerging from the very performatory sixties with its emphasis on the unity of the personal and the political, were struck by how the subjective side of social transformation—culture, psychology, education, family organization, and personal relations—had been neglected by the socialists and communists. The orthodox Marxists had focused almost exclusively on economic and political struggle leaving virtually all the social activities and institutions that shape our emotionality, our ethics and our views of who we are and what’s possible in the hands of those institutions invested in the status quo. In 2005, Newman summed up his thoughts on the role of culture and subjectivity this way. As a Marxist, I think the fundamental causes of oppression, exploitation and so on are economic. At the same time, I think that the form that underlying economic issues take in day-to-day life is cultural. I still hold to the view that in the ‘final analysis’ there has to be a fundamental change in the nature of the economy. However, I think, number one, that we’re a long way from the ‘final analysis,’ and number two, you have to deal with the cultural form of that exploitation if you’re going to help people to do

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something about it. People aren’t going to go directly from how they’re currently organized culturally to radically reorganizing economic realities. So, culture is a critical day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year issue. In some respects, it’s more important than politics, which, in my opinion, is another form of culture in any event. (Newman, 2005)

From their beginnings, Newman and his fellow organizers not only built unions, (the National Federation of Independent Unions, the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council) and a left wing electoral party (the New Alliance Party), they also began developing social therapy, a non-psychological approach to therapy that relates to emotionality as a social creation, not an inner-psychic phenomenon, and established schools with names like the Working Class Room and the Robin Hood Relearning Company. When I first met this grouping of activists in 1981, I found a determined and disciplined group of progressive organizers active across a range of grassroots cultural, educational, therapeutic, medical, and political projects. This “political tendency,” as we were apt to call it then, published a weekly newspaper (where, for nearly a decade, I worked as a reporter and then as managing editor), a quarterly journal of psychology, politics, and culture, and produced local radio and public access cable television programs. It built a working alliance with the Reverend Al Sharpton in the 1980s and played an active role in the fights against police brutality in New York City. It created medical and mental health clinics, an elementary school, the Castillo Theatre (already referenced at a number of points in this book) as well as a free university-like school for people of all ages (where I served as Associate Dean from 2010 to 2020), and free after-school youth development programs (including Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids, discussed earlier). Most were initiated as a result of listening to what people in poor communities said they needed and wanted. All depended on grassroots participation to succeed. Some lasted, many did not. Most exciting to me about these organizing efforts has been that they are entered into with the spirit of experimentation. Our praxis embodies a continuous re-thinking of the assumptions and dogmas of the United States and international Left, and, given the pull to “knowing” that our culture is prone to, working, as well, to challenge the new assumptions and dogmas generated by our own organizing. It is, I believe, this open, philosophical attitude that allowed this initially small

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band of organizers to discover/create, by the early 1990s, our approach to performance activism.1

Karl Marx, Lev Vygotsky and Ludwig Wittgenstein Much of the educational and social therapeutic work was initiated and coordinated by the New York Institute for Social Therapy and Research, founded by Newman and Lois Holzman in 1978. Today it’s known as of East Side Institute (ESI, the Institute) and has evolved into an international grassroots research and training center introducing psychologists, educators, social workers, theatre artists, community organizers, and political activists in dozens of countries around the world to its performance-based approach to learning, development, and therapy. Social therapy, as its name implies, started from the premise that emotionality, like all of the human culture, is social in its origin and in its experience. It is socially constructed and hence can be reconstructed. The building of groups (therapeutic and otherwise) is/creates the environment for such reconstruction. The roots of this are articulated in Marx’s early writings. In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, he wrote, “Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are a social activity and social mind” (Marx, 1967, p. 129). Holzman writes of social therapy’s beginnings, “Originating in the 1970s as part of the social-cultural change movements of the era, social therapy was similar in some ways to other new psychologies springing up at the time: it tied the ‘personal’ to the political; it engaged the authoritarianism, sexism, racism, classism, and homophobia of traditional psychotherapy; and its reason for being was that living under capitalism makes people emotionally sick and the hope was that therapy could be a tool in the service of progressive politics. What distinguished social therapy from the other radical therapies of that period was its engagement of the philosophical underpinnings of psychology and psychotherapy. It rejected explanation, interpretation, the assumption of self-contained individuals, the notion of an inner self that therapists and clients need to delve into, and other dualistic and problematic foundations of traditional psychology” (Holzman, 2020, p. 172).

1 See Friedman (2009) for an in-depth look at the history of this political tendency.

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Social therapeutics is the name given to the approach to human development, community development, and social change that has grown out of social therapy, but is not therapy per se. Social therapeutics approaches the building of groups (educational groups, community groups, political groups, theatre groups, health groups, reading groups, whatever kind of group) as the creation of environments that allow people of all ages and life circumstances to engage as social performers and creators of their lives and culture. The premise of social therapeutics is that when groups of people work or play together, they develop through that activity and are exercising power. “We try in in social therapeutics,” explains Holzman, “no matter what the environment, what the setting, to de-alienate in the sense of involving people in a continuous group ensemble process with creating the environment, whatever that is—the therapy group, a classroom, a work group at an office building, a talent show. Creating the environment in which people are discovering something. They’re creating. They’re making qualitative changes. It could be the smallest qualitative change. I’m not talking world-shattering in that way, although it could be. The methodology is one of creating groups that you are in such a way that everyone is going to grow and develop” (L. Holzman, personal communication, October 26, 2017). As I will attempt to show in the upcoming pages, social therapeutic group building has been and remains the activity that generates our non-instrumentalist performance activism. While the conceptual origins of social therapy (and subsequently social therapeutics) can be traced back to Marx, his sketchy writings in this regard were not sufficient to generate what I will call the “performance turn” in our organizing. The most important conceptual catalyst in this regard comes from the research and insights provided by one of Marx’s early twentieth century followers, Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky was one of the first psychologists in the new Soviet Union. As a discipline, psychology was still in its infancy, with Freudianism and behaviorism vying for hegemony. Vygotsky broke through this divide with a social-cultural-historical understanding of human life. His theoretical and empirical work affirms the socialness of human beings, providing an understanding of growth and development as an ongoing creative and collaborative process that goes on between people not within discrete individuals. While his life was cut short by tuberculosis at the age of 38. His followers preserved his research throughout the long period of Stalin’s repressive rule (Newman & Holzman, 2014).

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Our “political tendency,” or, as we are more apt to refer to it today, our “development community,” was introduced to Vygotsky by Lois Holzman in 1976. At the time, she was doing postgraduate work at Michael Cole’s Laboratory for Cognitive Comparative Human Cognition at Rockefeller University after receiving her doctorate in developmental psychology and psycholinguistics from Columbia University. The Lab, which has long since relocated to the University of California, San Diego, was/is a unique interdisciplinary group of progressive social scientists exploring new methodologies for understanding the role of culture on cognition as an alternative to the dominant psychology that, they believed, perpetuated social inequality. In the late-1970s, a team headed up by Cole compiled and translated some of Vygotsky’s writings into a book entitled Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes (Vygotsky, 1978). This publication played a significant role in popularizing Vygotsky among educators. When Holzman met Newman, Mind in Society was still two years from publication; however, she and other members of the Lab were studying it in a manuscript. She would go on to become Newman’s primary intellectual partner in the development of social therapeutics. Their many books and articles have established them as the most radical voice within the Vygotsky-inspired Cultural Historic Activity Theory (CHAT) approach to psychology and other currents that posit alternatives to the dominant psychology and social sciences.2 Vygotsky’s key contribution both as a developmental psychologist and relative to the emergence of social therapeutic performance activism is his articulation of dialectics relative to the practical questions of how it is that people learn and develop. He put it this way, “The search for method becomes one of the most important problems of the entire enterprise of understanding the uniquely human forms of psychological activity. In this case, the method is simultaneously prerequisite and product, the tool and the result of the study” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 65). The importance of this articulation for social therapeutic performance activism can’t be overemphasized. Here Vygotsky is breaking with the established scientific model, in which method is understood as a tool that will, when applied, yield results. According to the natural science model (at least in its pre-quantum physics days) which continues to be applied 2 For a discussion of Vygotsky’s influence on social therapy and social therapeutics see Holzman (1999).

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to the study of social relations, the relation between the tool and the result is linear, instrumental, and dualistic, that is, it separates the tool from the result. Vygotsky, building on Marx, proposes a non-linear, noninstrumentalist, non-dualistic method—a dialectical method—in which the “tool” and “result” come into existence together, an approach Newman and Holzman have come to call tool and result methodology. It’s a method not based on the natural sciences but in the observation of and interface with the social interaction of human beings. (See Newman & Holzman, 2014 for a more extensive discussion of Vygotsky’s methodology.) “This conception of method as tool and result cannot be separated from Vygotsky’s conception of what it means to be human,” writes Holzman. “Among the many wonderful and terrible things we do, human beings have the capacity to ‘do dialectics.’ We transform totalities; we create ‘tools and results.’ Vygotsky understood the human developmental process dialectically, as an ongoing, continuously emergent social-culturalhistorical collective activity. In contemporary language, we human beings create our own development; it doesn’t happen to us. The evidence? Our capacity for dialectics: from infancy through old age we are ‘who we are’ and, at the very same time, ‘who we are not’” (Holzman, 2006, pp. 112–113). Vygotsky’s development of Marx’s method thus leads, rather directly, to an activistic concept of performance. The other major conceptual breakthrough that helped lead Newman and Holzman toward an activistic approach to performance came from Ludwig Wittgenstein (Newman & Holzman, 1996). Wittgenstein is part of what has been termed the “linguistic turn” in intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century. While the linguistic turn refers to many things across many academic/intellectual disciplines— including, but not limited to social constructionism and psychotherapeutic approaches such as collaborative therapy, discursive psychology, and narrative therapy—its gist is a move away from viewing language as representational. That is, a shift from understanding words and grammar as a means of representing things in the “objective world” (and/or subjective things, that is, “thoughts” in the mind), to language as a relational activity that shapes how we see. While many understand Wittgenstein’s contribution to be primarily the exploration of the “use value” of language, Newman and Holzman focused and built upon what they view as his understanding of language as a social activity. As they read Wittgenstein, language is not a static toolbox that we can put to various uses;

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it’s a continuously evolving meaning making activity. They understand Wittgenstein to have viewed language not as representing anything but instead, to use his words, “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life” (Wittgenstein, 1953, paragraph 23). It was Wittgenstein’s contention that this misunderstanding of the nature of language was constraining the development of philosophy (and human development in general); philosophy was so tangled up in its dead language and its deadening understanding of language that it could not go much further on its old terms. Language, by Wittgenstein’s view, is not a tool for explaining what is (which, of course, is the presumption of virtually all Western philosophy, science and “common sense”) but a continuous social activity, a form of play (“language games” he called them) by which human beings ceaselessly shape and reshape their perception, their ways of seeing. The implications of Wittgenstein’s later work, at least for Newman and Holzman with their eyes steadily on the questions of social transformation, are enormous. Language that represents or explains implies an epistemological (including an ideological) framework, i.e., there must be something objective/static to know that we then express. Language as a social activity of meaning making implies a continuous improvisatory performance that we each engage in conjunction with others. The interesting question for Newman and Holzman becomes not, “How do people use words?” but “How do people create meaning?” In grappling with that question, Vygotsky (and again, Marx) proved helpful. Wittgenstein’s view of language as a “form of life” segues well with Vygotsky’s formulation that speaking and thinking are a dialectical unity in which language completes—rather than expresses—thought. “The structure of speech is not simply the mirror image of the structure of thought. It cannot, therefore, be placed on thought like clothes off a rack. Speech does not merely serve as the expression of developed thought. Thought is restructured as it is transformed into speech. It is not expressed but completed in the word” (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 251). Vygotsky observed that children learning to speak did so long before they were “explaining” anything, indeed, long before they could possibly “know” what they were saying. Thought and language develop in tandem through social interaction, perhaps best understood as a performance with others. The adult pretends that the child is a language user and the child, performing with the adult, grows into the role. In Vygotsky’s sense, the performance of speaking involves the adult completing

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the child’s thoughts. All of which can be viewed as a specific substantiation of Marx’s contention, cited earlier, that, “Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are social activity and social mind.” Social therapy is not performatory in the sense of clients getting up and “acting out” past traumas or current anxieties as in psychodrama. It is better described as playful. The playing is with language and with usually unquestioned assumptions embedded in it. Holzman provides an example, “Someone might say, ‘I had a lousy week. It was the week from hell. I broke up with my boyfriend, and just felt suicidal.’ The playfulness is deadly serious because the playfulness could be somebody saying, ‘That sounds horrible. How come you’re telling us that now?’ People typically think they know what someone means, ‘I’m depressed. I’m depressed so I didn’t go to work today. Just stayed in bed all day.’ The play might look like, ‘How do you know you’re depressed?’ ‘Well, I stayed in bed.’ ‘Yeah. What’s the connection? How come the connection has to go that way? Maybe you’re depressed because you stayed in bed? Why are you making this connection?’ Not accusingly as in, ‘You got this wrong,’ but as a group playing with how we understand and how we speak and how we feel. It’s, ‘Let’s play with ways of speaking and understanding so that we might actually see and feel differently’” (L. Holzman, personal communication, October 26, 2017). Using the social therapy group as a starting point, Newman and Holzman took Vygotsky’s research into child development and began using his discoveries to help understand/develop the social change organizing their movement/community was engaged in.

References Callaghan, D. (2000). The perpetual present: Life as art during the 1960s. Theatre Symposium: A Publication of the Southeastern Theatre Conference, 8, 86–94. Coyote, P. (1998). Sleeping where I fall: A chronicle. Counterpoint. Friedman, D. (2009). Toward a postmodern Marxism. Dan Friedman NYC. https://www.danfriedmannyc.org/toward-a-postmodern-marxism. Holzman, L. (1999). Life as performance (Can you practice psychology if there’s nothing that’s ‘really’ going on?). In L. Holzman (Ed.), Performing psychology: A postmodern culture of the mind (pp. 49–69). Routledge. Holzman, L. (2006). Activating postmodernism. Theory & Psychology, 16(1), 109–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0959354306060110.

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Holzman, L. (2011, October 22–23). Fred Newman and the practice of method [Conference presentation]. In Third International Academic Conference on Contemporary Capitalism Studies, Hangzhou China. Holzman, L. (2017). Vygotsky at work and play (2nd ed.). Routledge. Holzman, L. (2020). Constructing social therapeutics. In S. McNamee, M. Gergen, C. Camargo-Borges, & E. F. Rasera (Eds.), The Sage handbook of social constructionist practice (pp. 171–182). Sage. Marx, K. (1967). Economic and philosophical manuscripts. In E. Fromm (Ed.), Marx’s concept of man (pp. 90–196). Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. Newman, F. (1996, June 1). Introductory remarks to performance of “Trouble” [Speech audio recording]. Castillo Theatre. Newman, F., & Holzman, L. (1996). Unscientific psychology: A culturalperformatory approach to understanding human life. Praeger. Newman, F., & Holzman, L. (2014). Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary scientist (2nd ed.). Taylor and Francis. “Newman on Newman.” (2005, June 12). A public dialogue held with Dan Friedman [Speech audio recording]. All Stars Project. Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. (1987). The collected works of L. S. Vygotsky (Vol. 1). Plenum. Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Blackwell.

CHAPTER 18

Community Organizing as Performance

Lest I leave the impression that social therapeutic performance activism sprang solely from theory, I will now sketch out the organizing activities that were, over the course of decades, interfacing with Newman and Holzman’s conceptual work. They are presented in very rough chronological order, although, as should be clear in the narrative, they overlapped and influenced with each other in various ways.

The All Stars Talent Show Network In the late-1970s, the organizers of this political tendency spearheaded the organization of the New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council (the Council). Inspired by the Unemployed Councils of the 1930s, it was a union for those on welfare; it was also an attempt to find leaders in the Black community, and it did. At its height, the Council had some ten thousand members and offices throughout New York City. It was the Council that generated and attracted the tendency’s first wave of African American leadership and established a mass base among the poorest strata of New York City’s African American and Latinx communities. In the early 1980s, that base would become the foundation of the New Alliance Party, a pro-socialist electoral party which preserved and nurtured independent electoral activity/culture during a decade when a survey revealed © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_18

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that most American high school students believed that a third party was illegal in America. Members of the Council repeatedly told organizers that their children were in need. They had nothing to do but hang out on the streets and get in trouble. The Council organizers listened, went to the young people and asked them what they wanted to do. The young people said they wanted to put on talent shows. This was the period of hip-hop’s emergence and youth in the Black and Latinx communities were eager to showcase their break dancing, rapping, and other performance skills. The organizers and the young people (and some of the parents) worked together to produce a talent show in a Bronx church basement. It proved popular and so another one was organized. Aside from their popularity, it was clear that the young people took pride in and grew through their participation. Their families and neighbors came and cheered them on, often the first time many of them had received positive feedback from adults. In addition to performing, the young people soon learned to stage manage, run tech and organize their communities to attend. As of this writing, the organization that emerged from this initial work, the All Stars Talent Show Network, involves thousands of young people as performers and producers every year and is active in New York City, Newark, Chicago, and Dallas with affiliated organizations in London, Tokyo, and Uganda. In the early eighties, all that organizational growth was in the future. At that time, political youth organizing among the African American poor proved very challenging. The victories over legal segregation achieved by the Civil Rights Movement stood in frustrating contrast to the fact that the vast majority of African Americans remained trapped in poverty and underdevelopment. Black leaders who had attempted to address the abolition of poverty—Malcolm X, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, the Black Panthers—had been assassinated. Riots in response to these assassinations and to police brutality had left many urban African American communities physically devastated. The schools were (and remain) totally unequipped to understand and deal with the historic, cultural, and developmental differences between the Black and other communities. The crack epidemic was beginning. Black youth in poor communities were demoralized, politically and otherwise. Traditional progressive political and social issues fell on cynical and deaf ears. Beyond the specifics of content, however, it became increasingly clear to Newman and his followers that the monologic and cognitive model of teaching, in which one person knows and the other(s) doesn’t, wasn’t

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working—not only in the schools but also as a means of organizing. Cognitively based teaching was experienced by Black youth (and many of their elders) as a way of talking down. Given the centuries during which cognitively based knowledge was developed by and for a white-dominated society and systematically denied to African Americans and largely used against them, it was no wonder that knowledge had come to be considered “white.” Newman and his fellow organizers on the streets of New York’s Black “ghettos” began to see that an insistence on cognitive learning was a denial of the young people’s way of being. The understanding of the African American poor was more of an understanding from within a situation, a group, a culture than a “knowing-what” or “knowing-how.” In this context, the suggestion of producing talent shows not only clued the organizers into something the young people wanted to do, it established a common ground upon which they and the youth could meet and interact developmentally. From the vantage point of the organizers, performance was necessary to make a break from the dominance of cognition. Instead of asking, “What do you know?” or “What do you believe in?” the questions became, “What are you doing?” and “What are we creating together?” It was not so much an issue of knowing your history and culture, as it was an activity of together creating our history and culture. From the vantage point of the young people, performance in the All Stars Talent Shows (on stage, back stage and front of house) has been a way out of the restrictive and destructive social roles they had been trapped in.

The Castillo Theatre The Castillo Theatre was founded in 1983 by a dozen actors, directors, dancers, musicians, and painters, including me. It’s original name was the Otto René Castillo Center for Working-Class Culture and it initially produced concerts and art shows as well. Castillo was a Guatemalan poet and activist. He was exiled three times by his country’s military dictatorship. The third time he returned to Guatemala he joined the Guerrilla Army of the Poor, was captured by the government, tortured for three days and then buried alive. That was in 1967. His poetry was translated into English in the ’70s. Some of us who founded the theatre were particularly impacted by his poem “Apolitical Intellectuals,” in which he asks the apolitical intellectuals of his country, “What did you do when

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the poor suffered, when tenderness and life was burned out of them?” (Castillo 1971, p. 17). As politically progressive intellectuals and artists living in the world’s richest and most powerful nation—a nation characterized by a huge and continually growing gap in income and opportunity, with intractable poverty, particularly among African Americans—Castillo’s words resonated with us. Building the Castillo Theatre has been our ongoing response to Castillo’s question. Castillo’s first six years were made possible by the New York (now East Side) Institute which provided it, rent-free, with rehearsal and performance space in a tenth-floor loft space. In the early years, the lines between the Castillo Theatre and the All Stars Talent Show (which also consolidated as ongoing-activity in 1983) were not yet clear. Castillo folks at first ran the lights and sound and stage managed the talent shows, and one of Castillo’s first large scale events was a two day break-dance contest, which drew crews from all over the Bronx and Brooklyn. We were a politically and artistically diverse and opinionated group drawn together by our involvement in the organizing that Newman was leading. Early on, we spent almost as much time arguing as producing. In 1986, Castillo asked Newman to direct a play. He protested that he didn’t know how to direct. He did, however, know how to organize a demonstration. With the help from his Castillo colleagues, Newman devised a performance piece that was a hybrid of the two. It was called Demonstration: The Uncommon Lives of Common Women. It started with two groups of women demonstrators: African American welfare activists and white radical lesbian feminists. They met at a “street corner” set up in the middle of the loft, where performers and audience members milled about together. The staged confrontation of the demonstrators spun off into a montage of scenes, songs, video clips, and poems that traced the history of America’s progressive mass movements since the late 1960s. The most significant thing about Demonstration was that the women performing were not actors; they actually were welfare rights activists and radical lesbians involved in the political organizing of which Castillo and its sister organizations were a part. Newman’s objective, reflected in this and subsequent plays, was to bring together communities pitted against each other due to legislation and funding practices organized around identity politics. Tension between welfare advocates and radical lesbians were real issues in the real organizing we were involved in. Demonstration set two precedents: first, it established the practice of bringing formally trained actors and community people together onstage, which remains to

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this day; second, it started Newman, at the age of 51, doing theatre. He would go on to write 44 plays and musicals and direct most of Castillo’s productions over the next two decades. This experience turned out to have a major impact on Newman’s understanding/practice of social therapy and, in general, on the organizing he was leading. Soon after Castillo moved to its own space and Newman became its artistic director in 1989, he asked one of the community’s organizers, Emmy Gay, an African American stand-up comedian and improvisor, to train him and the core group of Castillo actors in improv. The result was a troupe, Emmy Gay and the Gayggles, which, during its first few years, included Newman as a performer, doing regular weekend improv shows in the 1990s, which proved wildly popular. The Gayggles continued after Emmy Gay left, and, under various names, the most recent being the Proverbial Loons, continue to perform (alas, less regularly) as I write this. In one iteration of the troupe, “This Is Your Ridiculous Life,” the shows consisted of volunteers from the audience talking with a social therapist on stage, followed by the improvisors creating a “ridiculous,” although also often insightful and always sympathetic, version of the audience member’s life.

The Barbara Taylor School For 12 years, from 1985 to 1997 there existed a small elementary school, somewhere between 20 and 50 students at any one time, first in Harlem and later in Brooklyn, which evolved into a unique performance-based school. When the Barbara Taylor School emerged with that name, Barbara Taylor was 62 years old and already had a long career as an educator— as an elementary school teacher, a reading specialist, a vice principal, principal. She was the founder of the St. Thomas Community School in Harlem, which functioned under the auspices of the Catholic archdiocese. Throughout the early eighties a number of factors including Taylor’s commitment to the active involvement of parents in the school’s functioning, her interest in finding new ways of teaching, and her growing involvement in progressive politics, led to a protracted struggle with the Church bureaucracy. That fight came to a head when, after Taylor successfully raised money for an enrichment program for the school, church officials withdrew the archdiocese’s usual funding, “conveying to Taylor and the families that these children did not need or deserve enrichment.” (Holzman 2016, p. 54). St. Thomas became independent of the church,

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funded primarily by tuition, with Taylor as principal. As she reached out to and become involved with the Institute, differences among the school’s families over its educational direction led Taylor to resign as head of the St. Thomas School. In 1985, taking a number of the families with her, she founded the Barbara Taylor School with her as principal. With the opening of the Barbara Taylor School, the Institute was able to bring its radically non-dualist approach to Vygotsky into the field of children’s education, which is what Vygotsky and most of his followers focused on. As we have seen, Vygotsky had observed that babies and toddlers learn the language, and all other cultural skills, socially, that is, by playing and performing with adults and older children. He called the activity during which adults and children pretend, for example, that babies understand language, as zones of proximal development (zpd). Adults talk to babies as if they can understand. Babies babble back, and gradually the baby, creatively imitating the adult, without knowing how to speak, develops into a speaker. This is the process, Vygotsky observed, by which all human social skills emerge. “Play creates a zone of proximal development of the child,” he wrote in the early 1930s. “In play a child always behaves beyond his average age, above his daily behavior; in play it is as though he were a head taller than himself.” (Vygotsky 1978, p. 102). Creating the performance-based version of the Barbara Taylor School took time and a lot of trial and error. For its first six years, including the year I worked there as “school administrator” (1985–86), the school might best be described as a politically progressive community-based school. Our slogan was “developing children as leaders.” We utilized a more or less standard curriculum with a “people’s history” approach to history and social studies. We experimented with ways to increase student participation in creating their own education and worked to expand their involvement in the world beyond their neighborhood. Much of the classwork was interdisciplinary. Peer teaching and older students tutoring younger students were regular features of the school day. We painted murals of the Civil Rights Movement and progressive Black leaders on the walls, and often took the school en masse to political demonstrations or to observe (and later discuss) trials involving political prisoners or police brutality. The school created a “Stop Abusive Behavior Syndrome” program, which Holzman describes as aimed at “…minimizing the kinds of (nonphysical) abuse that are routine in schools, such as the way adults humiliate students and students humiliate one another, the standard practice of teaching to tests with no regard for the learning process, an

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insistence on following rules that have to do only with control, and the classism, racism, sexism, and homophobia that are ingrained in schools and teaching practices.” (Holzman, 1997b, p.112). Taylor herself led this work, which involved ongoing discussions between the teachers and students. The school was a success within the frame of the existing educational system. Barbara Taylor School students’ scores on standardized tests consistently exceeded those of public school students in the district.1 Taylor, Holzman, and Newman, however, considered the school to still be “too much like a school.” “We were eager,” Holzman recalls, “to develop the approach further in a Vygotskian direction which, to us, meant to create the school as a continuously emerging environment where learning leads development. How could the zpds of early childhood—in and by which children freely and enthusiastically do what they do not know how to do—be recreated in ways appropriate for schoolaged children?” (Holzman, 2017, p. 55). To emphasize the social nature of learning, they relaunched the school in the summer of 1991 with the declaration that “We teach your child to CHEAT,” which they went on to explain stood for Children Helping to Educate Another Training— a cooperative, as opposed to a competitive, way of learning. The newly reorganized school did away with grade levels and formal curricula, “in order to increase opportunities for spontaneous, unsystematic and heterogeneous groupings to come together and drift apart and play without rules, to create performances as readers, writers, scientists, historians, test makers, artists, mathematicians, poets, and so on.” (Holzman, 2017, p. 57). The school became a zpd where everything was learned through performance. “Each day the students and adults decide, together, what they will do,” Lois Holzman, the director of the school in the 1990s, wrote at the time. “The task of the learning director (they are called that and not teachers because they function much like theatre directors) is to lead the students and each other in the creative, relational activity of creating a developmental learning environment—performing the school anew each day.” (Holzman, 1997b, p. 114). As is clear from this statement, the performance that went on at the Barbara Taylor School was far less structured and codified that what goes on in the Mantle of the Expert model. Indeed, the educators at the school were not interested in 1 For more on this phase of the Barbara Taylor School’s history see Strickland and Holzman (1989).

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developing a model, but a method of ongoing improvisatory performance learning. Holzman continues, “We are most eager to create an endless stream of activities in which adults and children alike have the experience of being able to stop what they are doing and create something new out of it, either by doing it again (and perhaps again and again) or doing something entirely different. Being able to ‘do the scene over again,’ is, I believe, a critical life experience. For the claim we are making (when we are being theoreticians) is that performing one’s life is how we create development.” (Holzman, p. 118). In turning the school into a playground and a stage, Taylor, Holzman, and Newman were seeking to get past the work/play dichotomy of the general culture which alienates learning from development and turns learning into a quantifiable commodity—knowledge. The separation of play and work—“stop playing and get down to work”—is strongly reinforced, indeed, it might be seen as one of the goals of, traditional schooling. As Holzman points out, “We speak of doing school work, not school play; we play house but we do not play reading.” (Holzman, 1997b, p. 109). The performatory reorganization of the school also represented a major shift in what education is thought to be—away from the individual acquisition of facts and techniques in order to make the individual “smarter,” which usually means better adapted to function in the world as it is, to the group activity of generating overall development, which involves growing ourselves and the environments we’re a part of. “We believe that the ‘unit’ that learns developmentally is the group,” writes Holzman. “We can phrase it formalistically: When the group develops, everyone learns, when the individual learns, no one develops. The development of the group, in Vygotskian terminology, depends on the continuous creating of zpds.” (Holzman, p. 117). A typical day at the Barbara Taylor School is hard to replicate on the page, particularly since no day was quite the same as the next. The one constant was “strike,” as in “strike the set” at the end of a theatre production. Strike would take place before and after lunch and at the end of the day. Students, learning directors, and visitors (educators, psychologists and graduate students from all over often visited and observed the school for day or more) would put things away, wash the dishes, sweep the floor and vacuum the rug, clean the bathroom, and sort the trash for recycling, all directed by the weekly strike director. They were preparing the stage for the next production.

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Most days would include a formal class, which the students were free to attend or not. These classes were often led by a volunteer guest teacher, such a professional chief who did a cooking class, or a parent who was a doctor and did science classes. Playing “Jeopardy!,” the American TV game show in which the answer is provided by the host and the contestants have to come up with the question to which it is a response, was popular among the students. A couple of them would spend an hour or two coming up with categories, questions and answers, and making play money to award the winners. They would set up a stage for the show, including chairs for the audience. The audience and contestants were, of course, other students and the show would include an improvised commercial break or two. Often a learning experience would be set into motion by a small interaction. One learning director, for example, reported, “Kevin [age 7] and I were sitting next to each other in the quiet room. I put two of my fingers in the palm of his hand and asked him to guess what number. He said two. I asked him if he knew by looking. He said, ‘No, I closed my eyes.’” This led to half a day, with other students becoming involved, in learning about Braille and sign language, which culminated in a “rigorous game of deaf basketball.” While that is happening, a 12-year-old girl is sitting at a table by herself practicing writing in script. A learning director and a few other students join her and they begin a “writing-in-script” game, a writing version of “telephone” in which a phrase that is whisphered from person to person around a circle keeps changing. Increasingly elaborate script letters become doodles and eventually complex designs. They complete the game by improvising a story, one written word at a time. In the afternoon, some of the students decide that since the weather is finally turning warm, it would be nice to go to the park. “A discussion of how they will go there ensues—what will their performance be? What began as a matterof-fact conversation concerning safety (no running, holding hands, and the like) turns into a lengthy conversation about ways of walking, gravity, and weightlessness. Maybe they should be creatures from other planets; how would you walk (or would you walk?) if you were from Jupiter or Mars.” They go to the park walking as visitors from various planets. Since New York State required assessment tests at the end of the school year, the students would often make up tests for each other and perform test taking. When the “real” test was close at hand, a student would appear with the school camera and ask those taking the test to pose with their

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“test face” (like an athlete’s “game face”). Then, though no one says “No Talking,” they sit in silence for ninety minutes doing the test.2 “The idea is simple to articulate (but exceedingly difficult to practice consistently),” Holzman wrote at the time. “Children become successful learners through performing as learners. To perform you need a performance environment (often a stage). If the existing environment is not conductive to performance, then it must be reshaped into one that is performatory. Not once, but continuously.” (Holzman, 1997b, p. 109). The challenge, of course, is that by the time children are old enough to go to school, they are no longer, like a baby or a toddler, involved in an endless flow of play, performing what they don’t know how to do. They have become aware that there are social roles they’re expected to take on, that they should “behave themselves,” and that “knowing” is a human activity which they need to master. Not surprisingly then, there was sometimes resistance to the ongoing performance activity of the school, particularly when the student was new to it. Holzman writes: When one or more students did not want to perform or disrupted an ongoing performance by others, keeping the activity performatory was most challenging—given the strong tendency to step out of the scene and reprimand or remove the disruption. This situation came up again and again, providing opportunities for making alternative responses that incorporated the refusal to perform or the disruption into the performance. Among the responses I recall are the following. Someone saying, ‘Okay, include in this scene ‘the pain in the butt’ who keeps bothering us.’ Or, ‘Let’s all play the interrupting game’ (and then everyone talks at once). Or (directed at the person who is interrupting), ‘If you really can’t wait to say what you have to say, then say it again, but this time say it louder and with more emotion.’ At other times, the performance might be stopped and taken as an opportunity for the group to grapple with what they wanted to do with the changed situation. (Holzman, 2017, p. 57)

Concurrent with the Barbara Taylor School’s reorganization into a performance-based educational experiment, Newman became artistic director of the Castillo Theatre and, as discussed, began a serious study of improv. The influence of Castillo’s embrace of improvisation on the Barbara Taylor School, and the influence of the school’s improvisational 2 All of these incidents and quotes used to reconstruct a “typical day” are taken from Holzman (1997b, pp. 107–126).

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learning on Castillo and the youth programs of the All Stars Project proved to be an important dynamic for all of them. Vygotsky (and most play theorists) make a distinction between pretend play (such as playing Mommy and baby, playing Superman or Black Panther) in which the rules emerge in the course of playing; game play, which starts with rules which define the nature of the play in advance (chess, basketball, video games, etc.); and theatre play, in which an imaginary situation is performed for an audience. (Vygotsky, 1978. p. 95). The free-flowing improv that was the educational experience of Barbara Taylor students emerged from a practice informed by Vygotsky’s notions of play, and also from learning and embracing theatrical improv. Reflecting on improvisation as a mode of learning/development at the Barbara Taylor School, Holzman, clearly informed by Spolin as well as Vygotsky, writes of improvisation that it is, “…a unique kind of play, combining elements of pretend play, game play and theatrical play to create something other than any of them. To do improv (play the game) players need to follow the rules (no matter where their imagination might want to take them), but to do improv (perform) players need collectively to create the imaginary situation in such a way that the rules will emerge in their playing. Like pretend play, it has no end point or goal outside of itself; like game play, mastering the rules is essential to becoming skillful; and like theatrical play, it is play in front of an audience.” (Holzman, 2017, pp. 61–62). The Barbara Taylor School closed in 1997 because it could not be sustained financially. Throughout its history, its student body remained primarily children from poor working-class families of color and therefore the tuition had to be kept low. That, and the school’s ongoing grassroots fundraising efforts, were never enough to sustain it. It’s legacy, however, has been lasting and profound. The performance that took place at the Barbara Taylor School created conditions for a learning process that leads to all-around (cognitive, emotional and social) development—an activity with a strong family resemblance to Baron Cohen’s “Transformance Pedagogy.”

Performance of a Lifetime In the early 1990s, while Newman was writing, directing, and improvising at Castillo, and the Barbara Taylor School was becoming an ongoing learning performance, the Institute would hold what it called summer and winter “institutes.” They were weekend retreats where Newman

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and others could share and experiment with new developments in social therapy. They were open to all and usually attracted about 200 therapists and other helping professionals, along with social therapy clients. In 1994 Newman called the summer institute “The Play is the Therapy: Emotional Growth Through Performance.” The participants took part in a series of improv workshops, sometimes working together as a whole and sometimes in smaller groups. The weekend culminated with the production of a sprawling improv comedy in which virtually all those attending performed. Approximately six months later, Newman again gathered a couple of hundred people and continued the experiment. He asked every participant to get on stage and do a one-minute performance of their lives. After each performance Newman or David Nachman, a Castillo actor and director (and Gayggle), would give the performer what in improv is called a re-direct. They were asked to re-perform her or his life in response to the direction. Using the personas, images, and situations generated by these one-minute performances of a lifetime combinations of people got together and worked on improv scenes. Once again, the weekend concluded with the entire ensemble performing an improvised play. Cathy Salit, a jazz singer and veteran Castillo Theatre actor and improvisor, recalls: Over the course … of the day, a minute at a time, every one of us gave the performances of our lifetime. People sang, danced, mimed, created poems, played characters. We witnessed every kind of performance you could think of: being born and giving birth, death and survival, emigrating and immigrating, getting married and breaking up. People came out, ate dinner, heard voices, got and lost jobs, scored the winning touchdown, went skiing and broke both legs, got evicted, said good-bye to their father, and heard their daughter say mama for the for the first time. Every performance was different, and everyone got huge applause. After our performances, Fred and David gave each of each of us a directorial suggestion and asked us to perform for forty-five more seconds a ‘sequel.’ Their directions were wild and unexpected, yet they built creatively on the specific performance we gave. Play your father as a child this time…Do it again, this time in Creole…Sing it as an opera; dance it like a ballet, make it a haiku. … The performances and then the sequels were like nothing I had ever seen before. … Each and every one of us discovered, saw, and created something for ourselves and for one another, all in less than two minutes. (Salit, 2016, pp. xviii–xix)

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Within a year of these workshops, Newman, along with Nachman, Salit, and other improvisors from Castillo, launched the organization Performance of a Lifetime (POAL) that originally billed itself as “A Performance School for the Rest of Us.” The idea was to give non-actors a chance to experience the growthful and therapeutic impact of being allowed to play and perform. Those who signed up to be in an “interactive growth play” would get together once a week for four weeks, and using the one-minute performance of a life time exercise as the starting point, devise a play and perform it in front of a paying audience. Between 1996 and 1999, about 400 people participated in these plays, with about 2000 more attending as audience members. (Holzman, 2017, p. 97). A steady stream of participants would approach POAL and ask if it would be willing to come to their companies and lead performance workshops to help with workplace tensions, teamwork, harassment, diversity, etc. POAL said yes, and this work grew to such an extent that in 2000 POAL turned its full attention to the corporate world. Along with Second City Communications in Chicago (the corporate arm of the Second City improv troupe), POAL was a pioneer in bringing theatre and improv into businesses, non-profits, and government agencies. It has worked with some 300 organizations and corporations as diverse as the U.S. Olympic Committee, J.P. Morgan Chase, Twitter, American Express, John Hopkins University Hospital, and Nike. Each year it employs approximately fifty facilitators. In total, it has trained and hired over 200 facilitators from 20 countries. (Maureen Kelly, email correspondence, November 28, 2020) For the last quarter of a century, POAL has been the major funding source of the East Side Institute, donating its profits back into the development community which gave it birth.

Street Work to Street Performance In the late 1980s and early 1990s I spent virtually every weekend and many weekday evenings on the streets of New York City asking people for money. Along with a team of other organizers, we would set up a card table on a busy street corner, attach a poster to it and, armed with a clip board, sign-up sheet and pen, begin introducing ourselves to strangers. “Hi, I’m Dan Friedman, an adjunct professor at Baruch College [or whatever my paying job was at the time]. I’m volunteering to raise money for a theatre that doesn’t take government or corporate money. We want a theatre with no strings attached, where we can take artistic and political

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risks without always having to look over our shoulder to see who’s going to pull the plug on us…” Most people didn’t stop, some were hostile, and some would pause and have conversation. A few of those who stopped to talk would give a dollar or five or ten, and then I would say, “Thanks so much. I’d love to get your name and telephone number so we can call you back, invite you to a show, and ask you for more money.” At that point they would usually smile or chuckle and say either, “Naw, just keep the money,” or they would say “Okay,” and fill in my sign-up sheet. If they did share their contact information, within a month or so they got a call from one of my fellow Castillo Theatre builders inviting them to a show and, whether they said they were going to attend or not, the caller would end the conversation with an ask, “I see you met Dan Friedman on Flatbush Avenue back in June and gave ten dollars. Thank you so much for your generosity. Could you double that today and make it twenty?”. That is how, after it left the auspices of the Institute and had to pay a mortgage, Castillo raised the money, created the audience, and built the community of the Castillo Theatre. We set ourselves quotas and worked until we reached them. At the height of this operation, in 1994, our all-volunteer operation was doing street outreach and door-to-door canvasing seven days a week with approximately 30 people doing 12 hours a week each and another 15 people doing street outreach 4 to 12 hours a week. In addition, we had some 15 people each doing 24 hours a week of follow-up phone conversations (and some cold calling) every week. Through the totality of these efforts, that year we raised $1,300,024 from approximately 98,000 people. (B. Gildin, personal communication, June 29, 2016). The money went to pay the mortgage, produce shows both at Castillo and the All Stars Talent Show Network and to help out with a number of other grassroots educational and cultural projects. This approach to theatre building was both responsive to the time and place we found ourselves in, and, at the same time, a political/philosophical choice. Castillo came into being during the eight years that Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, when many of the gains that poor and working people had won from the 1930s through the 1960s, including modest public funding of the arts, were being rolled back. Federal arts funding was slashed, and what remained was primarily being funneled away from community-based arts initiatives to large established institutions like museums and opera houses. That being the environment, we chose to see if people (other than leftist cultural workers like us) would see the value in building an independent

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community-based political theatre. We didn’t just want to make theatre for the people, but with the people. We wanted theatre as a part of our community organizing, but we didn’t yet know if the community wanted theatre. Our outreach on the streets was, therefore, not only a fiscal necessity, it was also an organizing strategy. All of our organizing, including our street solicitation, embodied our understanding that to build activities and organizations that could, in the long haul, seriously engage and challenge society’s systemic injustices, we needed those activities and organizations to be financially independent of the state and other traditional funding sources. Each conversation on the street or at the front door was a chance to talk politics, to talk culture, to see what a cross section of New Yorkers thought about the value of an independently funded political theatre. We were having conversations with a lot of New Yorkers—to raise money from 98,000 people, you have to speak with many more. Each conversation was an offer, an offer to do something out of the ordinary, to contribute to a progressive cultural project. When people give they have a stake in what is being built, and giving is not limited to money. Sometimes a stranger would, say, “I can’t give any money, but I know how run lighting board. Would that be helpful?” We always said yes, and they might wind up running lights for Castillo’s next production. Other people we met on the street would come to see a show and ask how they could become involved, and we told them—as house staff, in the tech booth, in the costume and set shops, in the box office, as fundraisers, as actors. The borders between audience members, performers, technical, and house staffs at Castillo have been, from the beginning, fluid, shifting from production to production. Someone you saw on stage in the last show may be performing as an usher in the next, and performing at the concession stand for the third. The theatre and the community that it serves, and that supports it, came into being simultaneously. Newman, in 1997, said of this process, “We were never theatre people trying to bring art to the people; we were, and are, community builders and our theatre-like activity has emerged from that organizing practice.” (Quoted in Friedman, 1999, p. 179). Obviously, this model of organizing/funding is dependent on a dedicated core of activists maintaining the work over an extended period of time. The challenge we faced was the emotional strain of sustaining it. No matter how much one believes in one’s cause, given the hyper-capitalist culture of the United States, asking strangers on the street for money seemed, to some of us, to be begging and felt humiliating. When you

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encounter what seems like an endless stream of “No-s” it become increasingly difficult to ask again. When people on the street or at the door are nasty or attacking, as they sometimes were, it was hard, particularly for those of us socialized as men, not to be nasty, attacking, or angry in response. Finally, the people doing this organizing had various levels of social skill and ease. For some, it was difficult to simply look a stranger in the eye and try to start a conversation. I, for one, had all these issues. I felt humiliated; I responded to provocations with anger; and I found it hard to look a stranger in the eye and try to start a conversation. During the first years of this outreach work I dreaded my shifts on the street and was one of our worst fundraisers. I remember one particular Saturday afternoon. A colleague and I had spent six hours knocking on doors in Stuyvesant Town, a middleclass housing project on Manhattan’s east side. No one had even opened their door to speak to us. When I returned to Castillo, I ran into Newman and he asked me how I was. I told him I was terrible. After six hours of fruitless door knocking I was frustrated, humiliated and angry. He said to me, “Dan, you’re not going to be able to keep doing this unless you perform it.” I remember that moment as if I was in a cartoon in which a light bulb, floating in the air over my head, flashed on. I “got it.” This encounter was one among many that Castillo organizers were having with each other. Gradually we came to realize that we could make the choice when organizing on the street to perform rather than behave in prescribed and predetermined ways. It became clear that if we remained only the humiliated, angry and shy people we were, it would remain difficult to hold interesting conversations with and successfully raise money from strangers. We collectively “decided” (although that word implies a cognitive choice which somewhat distorts how it came to be) that to make it work, we had to find a way to become/perform someone else (or, more accurately, a different version of ourselves, who-we-werebecoming). Some of us even created street personas to help us sustain our performance. I, for example, became the Jolly Professor. I was primarily earning my living at this time as an adjutant professor teaching remedial writing and public speaking at various colleges of the City of New York University system. The Jolly Professor enjoyed discovering a new neighborhood each weekend and loved chatting with people about his passion for the theatre and social change. If folks weren’t interested, well, that was their loss and he was happy to turn to the next stranger who came hurrying down the sidewalk. The Jolly Professor was clearly part of who

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I was, but not the part that rose “naturally” to the surface. I had to consciously perform him, and, as I did so, it became easier to project that part of me. Eventually, I even became a respectable fundraiser. All of this was facilitated by the fact that some of us in the mix of street organizers were trained actors. We were performing in plays at Castillo (rehearsals usually began after street outreach around 9:00 p.m. and often lasted until 1:00 a.m.) and so, for us, it wasn’t too far a leap to performing on the street. At the same time, most of the organizers had little or no theatre experience, so the street teams functioned as Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), to use Vygotsky’s language, where the more experienced and skilled helped the less experienced and skilled to perform beyond what they thought they were capable of. Each street team became an “ensemble” and chose a “director” to help the performance along if it flagged or was disrupted. We began each outreach with theatre warm-up exercises on the street. (Sometimes curious or bemused passer byes would join in the exercises.) We related to the strip of sidewalk where we had set up our card table as our stage. When people stepped onto our stage we, in effect, invited them to have an improvised conversation with us. Thus “street work,” became, over a period of years, “street performance.” It was during all of this that Newman put in writing for the first time his view of performance as both a way of living one’s life and a challenge to the world as it is. In 1989 in the first issue of a short-lived cultural journal published by Castillo, he wrote, “For in a world so totally alienated as ours doing anything even approaching living requires that we perform. To be ‘natural’ in bourgeois society is to be dead in life. Unnaturalness is required if we are to live at all.” (Newman, 1989, p. 6). With these few sentences, Newman articulated a qualitative development in our community’s understanding of performance: not only is performance something done on stage, and not only is it useful as a tool for a result (such as raising money on the street), it can also be a way to live one’s life as a creative challenge to alienation and other social traps, a method of engaging and challenging that “dead in life” reality and creatively transforming it.

All Stars Youth Programs Most immediately, this approach was taken up by the free after-school youth development programs of the All Stars Project, (ASP), which had developed from of the All Stars Talent Show Network discussed above. By

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the early 2000s, the ASP, in addition to the talent show network, sponsored two other free performance-based youth programs. The programs primarily involve teenagers from poor communities and make use of performance not so much for education in any formal (or even experimental) sense of that word, but as a means of re-igniting the social development of those involved. “A lot of what we have learned (as children through performance) becomes routinized and rigidified into behavior,” Holzman wrote in 1997, “We become so skilled at acting out roles that we no longer keep creating new performances of ourselves. We develop an identity as ‘this kind of person’—someone who does certain things and feels certain ways.” (Holzman, 1997a, p. 33). By the time most people are teenagers—in some cultures even earlier—we have adapted the fixed social roles and identities that are expected of us. Maintaining that identity is understood as necessary for social, and sometimes physical, survival. We have stopped trying out performances and started behaving; we have learned to “behave ourselves.” The conventional notion of identity, Holzman points out, “…is not something people can get better or worse at; it is something people have. Once formed it remains unchanged throughout a lifetime (and the ‘loss of identity’ is considered a psychopathology). As a permanence, identity is nondevelopmental … [on the other hand] As a socially completive activity … [i]t is not formed but preformed. Continuing to develop as a person past childhood, then, would involve continuing to perform identity.” (Holzman, 2017, p. 72). This is the primary use—and meaning—of performance in the All Stars’ youth programs. While each program is engaged in specific tasks—in the All Stars Talent Show Network, the young people produce and perform in neighborhood talent shows; in Youth Onstage!, they are trained in acting, playwriting and other theatre skills and put on plays; in the Development School for Youth they meet with business executives and other professionals and learn the “performance of the business world,” which they then use in paid summer internships—the overarching activity of all of them is learning that they can re-perform identity. They don’t have to remain (using American terms) thugs, sluts, nerds, goths, jocks, brainiacs, etc. They can become more of who they are by performing who they’re not, and, in the process, broaden their notion of, in Newman’s words, “what they’re allowed to do.” That is, through performance in daily life, people can, and do, develop—and embody alternatives to the social roles that have been imposed on them.

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References Castillo, O. R. (1971). Let’s go! (M. Randall, Trans.). Curbstone Press. Friedman, D. (1999). Twenty-two weeks of pointless conversation. In L. Holzman (Ed.), Performing psychology: A postmodern culture of the mind (pp. 157–196). Routledge. Holzman, L. (1997a, June/July). The developmental stage. Special Children, 32–35. Holzman, L. (1997b). Schools for growth: Radical alternatives to current educational models. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Holzman, L. (1999). Life as performance (Can you practice psychology if there’s nothing that’s ‘really’ going on?). In L. Holzman (Ed.), Performing psychology: A postmodern culture of the mind (pp. 49–69). Routledge. Holzman, L. (2017). Vygotsky at work and play (2nd ed.). Routledge. Newman, F. (1989). Seven theses on revolutionary art. Stono, 1(1), 6. Newman, F. (1996). Performance of a lifetime: A practical-philosophical guide to the joyous life. Castillo International. Salit, C. (2016). Performance breakthrough: A radical approach to success at work. Hachette Books. Strickland, G., & Holzman, L. (1989). Developing poor and minority children as leaders with the Barbara Taylor School educational model. Journal of Negro Education, 58(3), 383–398. https://doi.org/10.2307/2295671 Vygotsky, L. (1978). Mind in society: The development of higher psychological processes. Harvard University Press.

CHAPTER 19

Ontology, Community, Sustainability

As these organizing examples, I think, illustrate, an identifying characteristic of social therapeutic performance activism has been its interest in and insistence on approaching performance as a way of living life. Newman, in 2002, when distinguishing his work from Theatre of the Oppressed said, “I think that what Boal is working with is a theatrical sense of performance, and I’m not working with a theatrical sense of performance. Performance for me is an ontological term. [It] means the fundamental activity of human beings collectively participating in a creative process of reconstructing ourselves.” (F. Newman, personal communication, February 18, 2002). Holzman, coming at the issue from the vantage point of a developmental psychologist, sums up the basis of the social therapeutic approach to performance activism this way: “Which picture comes to mind when you hear the phrase ‘stages of life’? A stepladder or a theatre? If you’re like most people, it’s probably the former or some other step-like image. After all, from the late and great experts on human nature—Freud, Piaget, and Erikson—to their lesser known contemporaries, researchers have told us that the human life process is best understood as a series of progressively ‘higher’ stages that people pass through. I prefer the theatre image and here’s why. I believe that we human beings create our development—it’s not something that happens to us. And we create it by creating stages on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3_19

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which we can perform our growth. So, to me, developmental stages are like performance spaces that we can set up anywhere—at home, school, the workplace, all over.” (Holzman, 1997, p. 32). Thus, in the social therapeutic stream of performance activism, performance becomes a way of living life developmentally.

Performance and Cultural Hegemony Performing different social roles, as All Stars youth are encouraged to do, however helpful to individuals, doesn’t in and of itself address the larger question of how social roles—and social assumptions in general— are constructed (and re-constructed). We, of course, don’t live life (or perform) alone; we live, perform and develop in groups. As David Diamond says, it is the “patterns of behavior” between people that create oppressive social structures, and as Fred Newman said to an audience of some 400 people at the Performing the World conference in 2007, “We need to perform the world again, because this one—and we’re all involved—stinks.” (East Side Institute, 2009). Which brings us to the overarching (or underlying) question of performance activism—power. To what extent, and in what ways, is performance activism, of any type, actually capable of “making anew”? We have seen many examples of performance activism’s impact in a micro sense. We have seen how it helped the people of Trujillo Valle to deal with the horrendous massacre of loved ones. We have seen it bridge the suspicion and fear between Arabs and Jews in Israel and cops and kids in New York. We have seen it allow for unprecedented conversation between Dalits and other castes in Pakistan. What does it all add up to? What potential, if any, does performance activism have beyond intervening in particular situations? The social therapeutic community, as a multi-general experiment in social change, has long been concerned with this question. Can we stimulate mass systemic performances and, if so, how? Can performance activism develop into a macro re-performing of the world as Newman called for? Marx famously wrote that the, “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force” (Marx & Engels, 1973, p. 63). These “ruling ideas” are the explanations and assumptions, the modes of behavior, and the emotional constructs that we grow up with and which define the limitations of what we consider

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to be possible. Depending on what part of the world you live in, these ideologies and cultures are an overlay, in varying ways and degrees, of religious/feudal concepts and values with secular/scientific/capitalist concepts and values. Few Marxists after Marx gave much thought to the implications of or extended much effort on how to engage society’s “ruling ideas.” For the most part, they set up their own ideology (Marxism) as “correct” and claimed that those who didn’t embrace it had “false consciousness” (for example, Lukács, 1967). The important exception in this regard is Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, who developed a more nuanced understanding of the interplay between economic, political, and cultural (ideological) power. In addition to the institutions of the State (prisons, police, courts, etc.), Gramsci pointed out that society was held together through a complex of concepts, narratives, perceptual and emotional constructs, which he summarized in the phrase, “cultural hegemony.” For Gramsci it was not simply a matter of “ruling ideas” being imposed from the top, nor were the ruling ideas simply a “reflection” of the way the economy was structured, as most of his Marxist contemporaries held. Cultural hegemony was something that developed over generations and centuries of interplay between various social strata/classes as they together—although in very unequal ways— built the economy and the political institutions that make up society. The ruling class through its control of the means of intellectual production—church/mosque/temple, university, printing press, public schools, radio, television, etc.—clearly has the upper hand in this production of “common sense,” but the rest of us also play a role in the creation and perpetuation of cultural hegemony—it is, after all, what we teach our children every day. Gramsci’s organizing point—and this bares heavily on the question of performance activism and power—was that the engagement and ongoing transformation of cultural hegemony was an essential part of the revolution. It was not—as most of Marx’s, and later, Lenin’s followers maintained—something that would only be possible after the economic and political superstructure was overthrown. To Gramsci’s thinking, without the engagement of cultural hegemony there could be no revolution, at least not one capable of qualitatively changing the patterns of painful and destructive behavior we have internalized, what Baron Cohen calls the, “suffering which has been internalized into the musculature and into the humanity of people,” not a revolution capable of transforming

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ways of seeing and feeling, not a revolution that could generate genuinely new values. Gramsci had no notion of performance or performance activism as we understand it today, but he did point to the need for working-class people to develop their own cultural and educational institutions in order to consciously begin to challenge the prevailing hegemony and generate, as part of the mix, cultural, perceptual and emotional constructs better matched with their needs, wants, and interests. (Here think of Kamiriithu, House of Rivers, the social therapeutic community.) Gramsci had no opportunity to engage in this kind of organizing. He spent the last eleven years of his life in a fascist prison where he died at the age of 46 in 1937. His most important writings on this subject, composed in a convoluted style to get by the prison censors, were not translated into most languages until the 1970s. His writings, therefore, had little impact on the Marxist orthodoxy of the twentieth Century (Gramsci, 1971). Although Vygotsky had far more direct influence than Gramsci on the development of social therapeutic performance activism (indeed, many of the early builders of the social therapeutic community didn’t learn about his writings until their political/cultural work was well under way), all of the organizing efforts of the development community described above— and I think much of performance activism in general—can be understood as an effort to engage cultural hegemony, that is, to organize environments in which “ordinary people” can generate culture and development, in the process discovering new ways of seeing and being. In 1987, Newman and I wrote a philosophical/political dialogue based on a series of classes that he had taught for political activists over a twoyear period in the mid-80s. It consists of a conversation between “Fred” and two fictional composites of activists who had taken these classes. Here is the character “Fred” responding to one of the other characters opining that since the conversationalists came from different ethnic and class backgrounds they probably see the world very differently; The problem is how much we are alike. We have different histories, but there’s enough overlap in our various experiences so that we’re able to identify ourselves as living in the same world. Our social behavior suggests that we all think about the world and understand it in roughly the same way. … We know what stores are, what things are and how to buy them. We’ve been socialized to accept not identical beliefs about the world, but

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the same general ways of understanding the world. … How can we understand anything if we don’t use the fundamental categories around which the whole society is organized? How do we get out of that box? This is an old philosophical question. It’s also an old political question—whether it’s possible to create anything resembling a new society. We may all agree that new regimes come to power and that certain kinds of changes occur. We may even agree that revolutions take place. However, people often raise serious questions about whether any of those historical developments constitute profound social or ideological changes. … After all, if we accept the idea that the ideology we employ—our consciousness—is, in a very complicated way, a product of the social environment in which we live, then aren’t we in a terrible position to understand or explain things that aren’t totally determined by the social context which gave rise to those ways of social understanding? Our job is to figure out how to break out that ‘Catch-22’—how to understand these basic categories of understanding, given that we have all been socialized to understand things in terms of these very categories. How do we get out of that fly bottle? (Friedman & Newman, 1987, pp. 59–60)

The “fly bottle” is a metaphor that Newman got from Wittgenstein. A fly bottle is a trap for flies that consists of a large bottle of clear glass with a black metal top in which there is a hole. Bait is placed at the bottom of the bottle in the form of pieces of meat. Flies enter the bottle in search of food and are then unable to escape because their attraction to light leads them anywhere in the bottle except to the darker top where the entry hole is. They can only see in one way and so cannot find the way out. As Fred says in the dialogue, “You only look for what you take to be possible” (Friedman & Newman, 1987, p. 67). As the totality of the dialogue makes clear, in the mid-eighties Newman and his colleagues could not see a way out. Within a few years, we had discovered performance. Performance, after all, is about trying out new possibilities, in Newman’s words, to do, “things that aren’t totally determined by the social context,” or, as Evreinoff put it, performance is, “…the desire to be ‘different,’ to do something that is ‘different,’ to imagine oneself in surroundings that are ‘different’ from the commonplace surroundings of our everyday life” (Evreinoff, 1927, p. 22). Organizing environments that empower, encourage, and support people to perform, allows them to try something “different.” Of course, as Newman points out above, our very ability to imagine something different is constrained by the ideology/culture that we grow up in. Yet, each performance risk taken

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opens up the door to new risk—and hence new possibilities. With performance we are able to give up truth-referentiality, causality, time, space, self, the whole construct that we call “reality.” It turns out that the way out of the fly bottle of capitalist ideology is not cognitive at all; it is practical-critical; it involves body and mind. It is not an abstraction; it is a creative activity. This is not to say that performers don’t bring their ideological baggage and received values with them into the performance. Of course, we do. That’s what we play with. The world as it is provides the raw material for the world-that-will-be. As Newman often pointed out, “We build with crap”. The identities of race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, profession, gender, and sexual preference obviously assert a tremendous grip on us all. However, when approaching performance as a way of life, these received identities and social constructs are not the end; they are simply the beginning. They are the back stories that we, as performers, as changers of the world-historic play, take as the material we need to work with, not unlike the script of a play is to an actor on stage. Qualitatively new possibilities—transformations—as we have seen over and over in these pages, can and do emerge through performance. If Louis Armstrong had simply followed the rules of New Orleans jazz as he learned it, there would be no swing. If Charlie Parker had only played what was known musically and passed on by Armstrong, there would be no be-bop. If Chuck Berry just played the blues, we wouldn’t have rock’n’ roll. If the young people of the Bronx had not begun messing with the funk beats passed on to them by James Brown, we would not have hip-hop. Music, like social life in general, creatively develops through performance, not from an embrace or imposition of a set of preconceived notions. Performance activism of all kinds, at least at its best, trusts the performance to create new scenes, new plays, new music, new social relations. As with improvisational performers on stage, performance activists in daily life can build with everything that is offered. That is how a scene is constructed and a world reconstructed.

Beyond the Trap of Ideology I have touched on the fact that performance activism, at least in part, has developed as a response to the limitations and increasing failures of older types of activism. On another level, performance activism addresses the

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deeper question of the failure of activism’s successes. The French Revolution, the Haitian, the Russian, and the Chinese revolutions (among others over the last 200 years) have all “succeeded.” They succeeded in that they won military victories over the existing authorities, tore down the former economic and political institutions and began social restructuring of various sorts intended to make life better for those who suffered under the old regime. Yet they have all failed in their success. They did not do away with hierarchy (in the workplace, in the family, in the government, etc.). They have reconfigured, but not found a way to avoid privilege, inequality, and war. A successful revolution that replicates or exacerbates inherited oppressions breeds cynicism and despair. The revolutionaries involved, despite their courage and good intentions, have not had the tools at their disposal to engage Diamond’s “patterns of behavior.” Here we face again, but from a different angle, the issue of ideology. Ideology is not only the cultural hegemony of the ruling class, it is any systematized set of ideas meant to explain human behavior and history. And until now all revolutions have been guided, inspired, infused, and limited by ideology. In 1845 Marx, in his “Theses on Feuerbach,” wrote, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (Marx & Engels, 1973, p. 123). This sentence is, in fact, engraved on his tombstone in Highgate Cemetery in London, and seems to have been laid to rest with him. Since then, there has been a lot of philosophy (some more insightful and challenging than others) and many attempts to change the world (some more successful, some less; some more brutal, some less). The assumption being challenged in Marx’s Eleventh Theses, an assumption that has been shared by virtually all of us in the Western cultural continuum for millennia, is the belief that there exists a gap between thinking and doing, reflection and activity, or to use Marx’s terms, between interpretation and change. It is a gap that performance denies. For Marx, the revolutionary, the job was to abolish philosophy qua philosophy, that is, to walk away from reflection as a pursuit cloistered (or, at best, distinct) from the gritty, messy, and sometimes bloody realm of doing/activity/changing. Yet bridging the gap between interpreting the world and changing the world has not proven easy. An obvious critique of Marx in this regard, or more precisely of his followers, is that as they successfully built mass movements they “translated” Marx’s methodology into explanation. Explanation implies the acceptance of the very bifurcation between theory and practice that Marx, at least in his early

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writings, sought to overcome. “Translated” Marxism, that is, Marxism as an explanation of history, politics, and the economy, quickly gelled into ideology, into a fixed, inflexible system of conceiving, seeing, or if you will, interpreting the world and our activities in it. This translation, while not inevitable, is understandable. Collective activity that challenges the world as it is, that asks people to put their livelihoods, families, and lives on the line, appears to need the comfort and support of a guidebook, a map, an ideology—be it religious or secular. These collectively constructed ideologies, once embraced, generate their own morality, traditions, and language. The dialogue of philosophy, constrained within the rigid frame of ideology, becomes replaced by the (often violent) sectarianism of right and wrong/correct and incorrect/orthodox and revisionist. The ability to reflect on one’s activity becomes highly constrained and compromised as the ideology devolves into an ever more closed system. Changing the world obviously involves mass activity, however, acting en masse, at least up until this point in history, appears to generate and depend upon ideology, which tends toward the elimination of reflection and dialogue, thus severely handicapping the development of the activity for change. The question that social change and justice activists face in the early twenty-first Century is this: Is there a way to participate in the collective activity of social and cultural change and simultaneously comprehend/reflect on our activity in such a way that allows for its further development, unencumbered by the dead weight of ideology? Is it possible, as Marx postulated, to bridge the gap between reflecting and doing, between interpreting the world and changing the world? Performance activism, as many of the examples looked at here indicate, provides, nothing less than an alternative to ideology as an approach to social change. It embodies in its activity the means to stop the feedback loops of emotional pain—and of cognitive dead ends—that have limited our capacity to realize qualitative change. Performance is an activity that is not possible without constant reflection/adjustment/improvisation. Reflection is perhaps less the case with a ritual which relies on its power to project stability and is most pronounced in performance activism, which is characterized, at least in its intentionality, by its power to engage and change social reality. That said, all performance is, on a basic level, a pretense and hence has built into its very doing the need to be conscious of where the pretending is taking us, and to make ongoing decisions/moves based on what is being generated by the performance

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itself. It is, therefore, active and reflective at the same time (“practicalcritical”). A performer has no need of ideology; a performer needs to accept the offers of her fellow performers. To the extent that those offers are accepted and built upon, something new is created. Further, because performance incorporates that which does not (yet) exist, it is an activity that is constantly, by its nature, changing the world, that is, bringing new possibilities into social existence. If ideology is the basis of our activism, then “consciousness raising” (including didactic theatre) is our mode of organizing. If performance is the basis of our activism, then creating something new together is our mode of organizing. Given that uncertainty is built into performance activism, it calls for a particular kind of courage, the courage to not know. Certainly, it takes courage to fight and die for what you know is right. And millions of dedicated revolutionaries (and reactionaries) have done so. A different kind of courage is required if we embrace performance as a way of living life and as a means of effecting change. Performance as ontology means living day in and day out without the comfort of a preconceived framework. It requires not knowing where we are going, not knowing what we are doing, not knowing, at any given time, who we are. Yet this state of not knowing (and the rebellion against epistemology which it implies) is a necessary premise for performance activism, including—perhaps especially—for the long-term mass performance of social transformation. If you know who you are, where you’re going, what you are doing, then you are not performing or developing, you are behaving, that is, proceeding as society has conditioned you to proceed, cognitively and emotionally. When, instead, you approach life not with static assumptions, but as an ongoing performance that we are creating with others as we go along, that shifts how we can begin to think about/act toward possibility.

Community and Sustainability After the hundreds of pages that precede this one, it perhaps goes without saying that the accomplishments achieved by various performance activism projects, however fleeting, contribute to individual and community development and generate living challenges to the dominate cultural hegemony. What we have not looked at yet is sustainability. The tenacious authority of long-established institutions, attitudes, emotional constructs, and myths, along with capitalism’s considerable capacity to commodify and adapt cultural and political challenges into the market place, raises

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the question of what is needed to sustain performance activism not only beyond the impact of individual projects, or even through an individual’s or organization’s lifetime, but in the multi-generational life of a polity. The answer is unknown and unknowable. As I said in the Introduction, performance activism as a movement is just coming into being; we are discovering ourselves. We have seen various attempts to sustain performance activism: Rohd’s and Harris’ affiliation with a university; Maposa’s and Waseem’s organizing of local troupes to create new plays; Kumar’s establishment of a free school in Nithari; the community building led by Baron Cohen in Brazil, and, of course, the fifty-year history of the social therapeutic performance activism being unpacked here in Part III. At this very early stage of the performance activist movement, I would not presume to predict what sustainability will look like, or even if it’s possible. What I can do is share the experience of the social therapeutic stream of performance activism, along with our reflections on that experience. Since performance activism is ever evolving (being what-it-is and what-it-isbecoming), and non-ideological (improvising and making new discoveries as it proceeds), political parties (either electoral or revolutionary) are not a match. They are oriented toward what is (even if that orientation is negation) and dependent on their members agreeing. Political coalitions organized around specific issues also constrain performance activism in that they are about achieving particular ends, not generating new possibilities—and they last only as long as the issues they are organized to address. This is not to say performance activists can’t or shouldn’t participate in political parties or coalitions. It is only to say that as social units they are not capable of nurturing or sustaining performance activism. The social construct that has nurtured and sustained social therapeutic performance activism is community. Community is a word with many shades of meaning depending on context and I certainly have used it with a variety of meanings in these pages. The kind of community I’m writing about here is a new kind of social unit, one that is historically connected to the emergence of performance activism. We saw it briefly foreshadowed at Kamiriithu and we see it taking root in Cabelo Seco. It is a community that self-consciously creates/performs itself, an ensemble that constantly works to add new members to its cast, and in which each new cast member has the power to impact on the totality. Community in this sense is not so much a thing as an activity, a mass improvisational performance.

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Obviously, this differs from the more conventional understanding of community as the people who live in a particular geographic area (such as a town or a neighborhood) or the people of a particular ethnic group (the “Black community”) or people engaged in a particular profession (the “commercial real estate community”). Those understandings of community are inherently conservative because they are based in the past (who we are as shaped by history, i.e. “Black”) or based only on what is (who we are by virtue of where we live or what work we do, i.e., an “Upper West Sider” or a “real estate broker”). These communities are closed and knowable in that they are organized around the past (in the case of ethnic or national identity) and/or that which already exists (in the case of professional identity). Membership is not a choice; you are a part of the said community or you are not. While they can provide a sense of belonging and comfort, they aren’t going anywhere and, often trap us in dead-in-life behavior. The kind of communities that emerged in Kamiriithu (briefly), and more stably in Cabelo Seco and in the social therapeutic organizing of the last half century, unlike traditional communities, are not based on the past or simply what exists, but on the what-is-becomingness inherent in performance. Membership is not predetermined, it is a choice. People join this kind community for many reasons—often simply because they are invited to. Staying is a decision to improvise the building of performatory environments in which they and others can develop. Their participating in/building of the community changes not only themselves, it changes the community, which is, after all, not a thing-in-itself but a work in progress. In the history of social therapeutic performance activism, this concept of community, although it was already coming into being, was first articulated by Newman. In a talk called “Community as a Heart in a Havenless World,” delivered in 1990, he said: “I want to introduce a whole new concept of community…What I mean by community…is a community which takes responsibility for defining what community is. The folks who run this cruel world usually do the defining…They do it with big dollars. They do it with major institutions that control the newspapers and television stations; they control the schools…We will be an activist community of people and no one, least of all the people who control the heartless institutions, is going to tell us what our community is” (Newman, 1991, p. 147). At the end of his talk that evening, hundreds of people poured into the street chanting. “We define community!”.

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Whether we call them performance communities or development communities (and I have called them both in this book) what was being embraced on the street that night was a new kind of social/political/revolutionary construct. It is a social activity that is able to engage, in an ongoing way, the cultural hegemony of those in authority. Unlike an electoral party, it does not accept the existing political structure as the terrain it need function in, nor does it limit itself, or even necessarily focus on, legislative reform. Unlike a MarxistLeninist “vanguard,” it is not militaristic and doesn’t assume that the old society must be destroyed by violence before a new one can begin being built. Because it is based on performance as a way of life, its activity consists of constantly engaging what is (institutions like education or psychology along with social/emotional constructs like identity or alienation) deconstructing and reconstructing them into something new and, until it emerges, unknowable. That is the revolutionary/transformative activity of a performance community. What holds this kind of community together over time is building activities and organizations that embody this cultural engagement and transformation. Colin Ward, the British anarchist writer and social historian, noted, “Anyone can see that there are at least two kinds of organization. There is the kind that is forced on you, the kind which is run from above, and there is the kind which runs from below, which can’t force you to do anything, and which you are free to join or free to leave alone.” (Ward, 1966, https://www.panarchy.org/ward/organi zation.1966.html). The first kind of organization stifles development and agency and maintains the status quo. It also fosters resentment and anger and results in an identity of being oppressed. The other kind of organization, the one in which people freely come together to build something for themselves and their communities, fosters connectivity. The examples in Part II help illustrate that when groups of people are engaged in the activity of creating and sustaining projects, performances, or organizations that address their interests and concerns, they grow and develop through the process. Part of what they develop is a sense of their own collective power, their creativity, and their connection to each other and the larger world. As Newman and Holzman wrote in 2004, “Authority goes from the top, down. It is imposed. Most importantly, it must be known. Power comes from the bottom up. It is expressed. It is created” (Newman & Holzman, 2004, p. 74). In the process of building these independent organizations and activities, the participants are re-mixing

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the culture they inherited and reconfiguring themselves and our world; they are exercising power. One significant impact of people creating their own organizations is that it gives them the experience that something beyond alienation can exist, that something other than the prescribed ways of living and doing politics is possible—and that they can do it. The building of independently funded cultural centers, youth programs, schools, dance troupes, therapy clinics, organizations that challenge the political culture is important for a very simple reason—to show that it can be done. In order to move, people need a place to move to. People will vote for Democrats and Republicans (Labour or Tory; Social Democrat or Christian Democrat) if there is nothing else to vote for. Or they won’t vote at all. They will send their kids to oppressive schools if there are not more developmental schools and youth programs available. They will rely on clergy and/or psychology-based therapists and social workers if there is not a more developmental therapy available to deal with their family and emotional problems. They will join violent, destructive groups if they see no way of creatively transforming the world. A performance community performs these alternatives into existence. Part of what is necessary for the sustainably of this kind of community is the independent funding of the activities and organizations it builds. The exact nature of “independence” can vary in different nation states and within different cultures, and taking outside money might temporally be necessary. However, the bottom line in terms of long-term sustainability is that the organizations and activities being generated not be dependent, financially or otherwise, on the state or other institutions designed to keep the world the way it is. This is not a moral point, it is a practical one. If the money and other resources come from outside the organizing of the community itself, it comes with strings. Strings can be blatant and they can be subtle—but they are strings—and they can be cut at any moment. In discussing the history of the community that generated social therapeutic performance activism, Holzman summed up its strategic perspective and praxis like this: Two guiding principles were there at the start and remain to this day. First, to be independently funded and supported, and not take money or be constrained by government or other traditional funding sources. This involved reaching out to ordinary Americans for financial support and participation, initially by stopping them on street corners and knocking

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on the doors of their homes. What has evolved over the years is a new kind of partnership between middle class and wealthy Americans and the poor. Second, to create new kinds of institutions that in their very design and activity challenge the foundations of their traditional ‘counterparts.’ Among these projects are: a labor union for welfare recipients who did not labor and, therefore, were at no point of production; a school for children that denied the individuated, knowledge-seeking model of learning that is the bedrock of schooling East and West; therapy centers with an approach to emotional help that denies the individualism and medical model of mainstream psychotherapy; a ‘university’ that is free, open to everyone who wants to participate and has no grades or degrees; a national network of talent shows for youth that denies the conception of talent; and electoral political campaigns that are not concerned with winning and political parties that exist to transform political culture—including the possibility of doing away with political parties as the mode of citizen participation. (Holzman, 2018, p. 88)

The second part of this strategic overview, that is, the creation of “new kinds of institutions that in their very design and activity challenge the foundations of their traditional ‘counterparts’” is worth focusing on. Sustainability is not an end in itself. As we have seen from the history of the avant-garde theatre—not to mention the history of political mass movements—established institutions can be adept at absorbing and coopting. The questions those concerned with transformation must ask are: What is being sustained? Is the power of performance being used to smooth over social ills and/or emotional pain, or is it being used to challenge the emotional/cultural constructs that constrain us? Are the activities and groups we are building actively challenging the foundations of their established ‘counterparts’ or are they helping adjust people to them? As with all activism, performance activism can become, instead of a means of empowering, a “service” to those involved that leaves the basic assumptions of society—the cultural hegemony—untouched in any serious way. While the building of development/performance communities needs to be improvisational, that is, not tied to an ideological script, its builders need to be sensitive to questions of power and authority. We need to ask ourselves, over and over and over again, what kind of activities and organizations best challenge the assumptions that keep masses of people oppressed, repressed, in pain and passive? The history of the social therapeutic community indicates that the third element needed for sustainability is a connection beyond cultural and

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national borders. Reperforming the world is not the business of any one cultural continuum, nation state, city, town. A performance community—as a voluntary association of people who are using performance to engage the world—need not, and, our experience counsels, should not, be defined by geography, nationality, or culture. Cultural and/or geographic isolation leads to parochialism. The more diverse the mix, the more potential for the emergence of new ways of perceiving and relating. Performance activists need to know about each other’s work, learn from and influence each other and, most importantly, connect. Reaching out and connecting to other individuals, projects, groups, and communities is an essential part of building the performance community and its sustainability. Reaching out and making connections expands all of the communities involved. I see this book as a part of that effort. The biggest driver of global connection between performance activists, projects, and communities has been the social therapeutic performance community and that work has been spearheaded by Holzman. For decades she crisscrossed the globe attending conferences, giving talks and workshops, sharing our work and perspectives on psychology, education, play, and performance to anyone who would listen and seeking out others whose work had any resemblance to what we were experimenting with. Through her, and those who joined and followed her, we now have an extensive global network. The first organizational embodiment of that network was the Performing the World (PTW) conference. PTW started in 2001, cosponsored by the Institute and the social constructionist Taos Institute, founded by sociologist Kenneth Gergen. It was held in the seaside village of Montauk, New York, one month after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th. Most of the 250 participants came from the US, with about two dozen from other countries. There has been both continuity and transformation over the ten PTW gatherings that have taken place between 2001 and 2020. The number of participants has doubled, and international presence has increased to more than 50%, with 35–40 countries now represented. Inspired by PTW, Play, Perform, Learn, Grow, now held regularly in Europe, is another international gathering that brings performance activists together. The academic conference, Performance Studies International draws mostly Performance Studies professors, some of whom are also activists. The globalization of the economy has brought into being tools—in particular the Internet and cell phones—that allow activists to more easily

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reach out across borders. For example, the Global Play Brigade, with over a hundred facilitators from dozens of countries was organized within a couple of weeks early in the Covid-19 pandemic. It brings free play, improv, clowning, indeed all kinds of performance sessions, via Zoom, into homes of people all over the world. During the pandemic, it hosted up to three workshops a day in various parts of the world. In 2020, Performing the World also went online over six weekends, with some sessions drawing as many as 400 people, some of who could never have afforded airfare to a live conference. The East Side Institute has for years put most of its workshops, classes, seminars online. It is an indication of the international reach of the social therapeutic community that the East Side Institute as of this writing has 72 associates in the U.S./Canada, Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. * I have gone into such detail about social therapeutic performance activism not to hold it up as a model. It is no model. It has been, and continues to be, an improvisation. Its history is particular to its time, place, and the individuals who choose to contribute to it. It is only in looking back, that I can impose patterns. Each performance activist project and community creates itself in the context of its own culture and circumstance. There can be no blueprint. What we share is performance a means of engaging/impacting the world we live in. Where that takes us, only time will tell. I have unpacked the intellectual roots and organizing the history of social therapeutic performance activism for a few reasons. First, I know it the best. I lived it and it provides the lens through which I view everything else in this study. Second, it has a long history from which others can hopefully learn. Third, and to me the most important, is that it grew out a sustained political project that began and remains determined to contribute to making the world more equitable, democratic, and peaceful. The discovery of performance as revolutionary activity grew out that politic and remains inseparable from it. The unity of performance method and revolutionary politics contains, I believe, much of value to progressive political activists and politically concerned artists. While the combination of politics and performance is not unique to the social therapeutic performance activist community, it has, more than many other approaches, generated a wide range of activities and methodological analysis. In that sense, it provides a rich case study, which I have shared with you.

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Share it I have, at least to the extent that such things can be shared in words printed on paper. The most fruitful sharing is to be found in performing together. While I, personally, won’t have the opportunity to do that with you, I am hopeful that the community I helped build will be able to interact—and develop and transform in the process—with many of you. I’m firmly convinced that if our tired and bleeding species has any hope at all, it is through playing and performing together.

References East Side Institute. (2009, August 2). SpiritoPTWvideo07 [Video]. Vimeo. https://vimeo.com/5891323 Evreinoff, N. (1927). The theatre in life (A. I. Nazaroff, Trans.). Brentano’s. Friedman, D., & Newman, F. (1987). What’s possible?—A way to think about thinking. Practice, 5(2), 58–81. Gramsci, A. (1971). Selections from the prison notebooks (Q. Hoare & G. N. Smith, Eds. & Trans.). International Publishers. Holzman, L. (1997, June/July). The developmental stage. Special Children, 32– 35. Holzman, L. (2018). The development community and its activistic psychology. In R. House, D. Kallisch, & J. Maidman (Eds.), The future of humanistic psychology (pp. 87–108). Routledge. Holzman, L., & Newman, F. (2004). Power, authority and pointless activity. In T. Strong & D. Paré (Eds.), Furthering talk: Advances in the discursive therapies (pp. 73–86). Kluwer Academic/Plenum. Lukács, G. (1967). History and class consciousness. (R. Livingstone, Trans.). Merlin Press. Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1973). Thesis on Feuerbach. International Publishers. Newman, F. (1991). The myth of psychology. Castillo International. Ward, C. (1966). Anarchism as a theory organization. https://www.panarchy. org/ward/organization.1966.html

Index

A Actors Workshop, 117 Actos , 121, 122 Africa Centre (London), 225, 226 AfroMundi Dance Company, 232 Agit-prop, 23–31, 68, 72, 80–83, 86–89, 91, 97, 107, 113, 114, 116, 122, 128, 135, 163, 165, 168, 185 Ahmadu Bello University Theatre Collective, 158, 159, 164 Aitkin, Viv, 147, 148 All Stars Project, 180, 183, 259, 265 All Stars Talent Show Network, 249, 250, 262, 265, 266 Anarchism/anarchists, 76, 77, 106, 109, 126, 131, 280 Animated Poster, 23 Applied improvisation/applied improv, 44 Applied Improv Network/Applied Improvisation Network (AIN), 44

Applied Theatre, 44, 49, 146, 153 Arena Theatre, 89 Aristizábal, Hector, 195, 199–203 Artaud, Antonin, 111, 112, 114 Association of the Rural Poor (ARP), 167, 168

B Baader, Johannes, 78 Ball, Hugo, 77 Barbara Taylor School, 253–256, 258, 259 Barker, Howard, 213 Baron Cohen, Dan, 211, 218, 225–233, 259, 271, 278 Beck, Julian, 62, 76, 105–114 Be-ins, 63, 64, 67, 79, 101, 118 Belgrade Theatre, 145 Blue Blouse, 25, 31 Boal, Augusto, 54–56, 88–91, 120, 164, 186, 188–190, 192, 269 Bond, Edward, 225–227

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 D. Friedman, Performance Activism, Palgrave Studies In Play, Performance, Learning, and Development, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-80591-3

287

288

INDEX

Boyd, Neva, 37–40, 145, 148 Bread and Puppet Theatre, 104, 105, 116, 118, 126 Brecht, Bertolt, 76, 80–91, 98, 106, 107, 196 C Cabelo Seco, 231–233, 238, 278, 279 Camden Road Education, Arts Theatre Events (C.R.E.A.T.E.), 215 Castillo, Otto René, 251–253, 258–265 Castillo Theatre, 56, 179, 183, 225, 241, 251, 252, 258, 260, 262 Center for Performance and Civic Practice (CPCP), 173, 174 Cheadle, Halton, 168 Claque Theatre, 213 Collective declamation, 21 Colway Theatre Trust, 213 Commedia dell’arte, 35, 36, 97, 117 Communism/communists, 18, 20–26, 28–31, 51, 76, 80–82, 88, 91, 124, 125, 131, 163, 165, 168, 199, 240, 271 Community and Educational Drama and Theatre, Western Galilee College, 178 Community Plays, 211–215, 218 Contreras, Maria José, 65 Coyote, Peter, 132–135, 237 Creative Actors Initiative for Development (CRAID), 153–156 Cultural hegemony, 270–272, 275, 277, 280, 282 Cultural Historic Activity Theory (CHAT), 56, 149, 244 D Dadaism, 76, 77, 80

Dalit/Harijan (Untouchable), 11, 167, 168, 177, 189, 270 Dance of the Land, 230, 231 Davis, R.G., 117–121, 134 Demonstration: The Uncommon Lives of Common Women, 252 Derry Frontline Culture and Education, 227 Development community, 244, 261, 272 Development School for Youth, 266 Diamond, David, 185–190, 192, 193, 270, 275 Diggers, 128, 131–136, 229, 237 Dionysiac, 11 Dionysus in 69, 101, 103 Drama therapy, 52, 56 E East Side Institute (ESI), 242, 261, 270, 284 Edutainment, 153 Eisenstein, Sergei, 24 Eldorado do Carajás Massacre, 229 El Teatro Campesino, 116, 121–124 El Teatro National de Aztlan Federation, 123 Emmy Gay and the Gayggles, 253 Environmental Theatre, 61, 96–100, 103, 108, 111, 214 Epic Theatre, 76, 77, 80–84, 87, 91, 95, 135 Evreinoff, Nicolas, 28, 32, 273 F Fant, Brian, 171 Federal Theatre Project, 31 Fightback, 215 Flash Mobs, 64, 65, 78, 79, 121 Forum Theatre, 91, 159 Fox, Jonathan, 52–54

INDEX

Frame of reference, 5, 134 Free City Network, 133 Free Southern Theatre, 101 Freire, Paulo, 89–91, 143, 150, 167, 193, 217, 229 Frontline: Culture and Education (Manchester), 227 Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionari de Colombia (FARC), 202 Fulani, Lenora, 179–183 Futurism, 76, 78–80 G Gecau, Kimani, 217–219, 221, 223 Global Play Brigade, 284 Goffman, Erving, 51, 87 Golatt, Russell, 170 Gomez-Peña, Guillermo, 72 Gramsci, Antonio, 271, 272 Gravy, Wavy, 129 Grotowski, Jerzy, 36, 104, 112, 113, 115, 200 Guerrilla Theatre, 78, 119–121, 124, 132, 135, 136, 186 H Halprin, Anna, 97 Hamilton, Dale, 215 Happenings, 18, 42, 60–69, 72, 77, 79, 81, 85, 95, 97, 98, 107, 129, 133, 135, 150, 214, 257 Harris, Peter, 178, 179, 278 Heathcote, Dorothy, 146–149, 213, 215 Hoffman, Abbie, 78, 101, 120, 135 Hoffman, Fritz, 20, 31 Hog Farm, 128–131 Holzman, Lois, 56, 57, 131, 239, 240, 242–247, 249, 253–256, 258, 259, 261, 266, 269, 270, 280–283

289

Hope Is Vital (HIV), 153, 154, 156, 169–172, 196 House of Rivers, 272 How to End Poverty in 90 Minutes (With 199 People You Don’t Know), 172 Huizinga, Johann, 38 Hull House, 35, 37–40, 145

I Ilanga lizophumela abasebenzi (The Sun Will Rise for the Workers ), 168 Image Theatre, 91, 190 Improv Everywhere, 65, 121 Interactive growth play, 261 Interactive Resource Center, 188, 189 Invisible Theatre, 120 I Will Marry When I Want , 218, 219, 221

J Jellicoe, Ann, 212–214

K Kamiriithu Education and Culture Centre, 216–225, 238 Kaprow, Allan, 60, 62, 69, 98 Kenya National Theatre, 220, 221 Kenyan Land and Freedom Army (KLFA) (Mau Mau), 216 Kerala Forum for Science and Literature (KSSP), 150, 151 Kerr, David, 155, 157, 224 Kidd, Ross, 152, 155, 157, 158, 165, 166, 218 Kimbrell, Marketta, 123–126, 128 Kirby, Michael, 60–63, 72, 77, 78 Kumar, Sanjay, 195–199, 278

290

INDEX

L Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition, 244 Laedza Batanani, 154, 155 Lasisi, Bashiur Akande, 152–156 League of Workers’ Theatres (LOWT), 27 Lehrstüke (learning play), 88 Life Actor, 134, 136, 237, 238 Living Newspaper, 22, 23, 31, 89, 165 Living Stage, 170 Living Theatre, 62, 76, 82, 104–110, 113–115, 118, 124

M Malina, Judith, 76, 82, 105–110, 113, 115 Mantle of the Expert (MoE), 146–150, 255 Maposa, Daniel, 185–190, 192, 193, 278 Marinetti, Fillippo Tammasco, 78, 79 Marxism, 81, 83, 84, 240, 271, 276 Marxism-Leninism, 109 Marx, Karl, 50, 240, 242, 243, 245–247, 270, 271, 275, 276 Massenspiele, 29 Mass Spectacles, 28–30, 32, 212 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 23, 80 Merry Pranksters, 129 Montage, 23, 24, 81, 198, 252 Moreno, Jacob, 47–55 Mother Sing for Me, 217, 220, 221, 223 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), 229, 230 Mpofu, Joshua, 166 Mugo, Micere Githae, 225 Mutumbuka, Dzingai, 165

N Nachman, David, 260, 261 Natyashastra, 10, 12 Newman, Fred, 38, 56, 131, 179, 180, 238–247, 249–253, 255, 256, 258–261, 263–266, 269, 270, 272–274, 279, 280 New York City Unemployed and Welfare Council (the Council), 241, 249 New York Police Department (NYPD), 180, 183 New York Street Theatre Caravan (NYSTC), 123–127, 130 Ngugi, wa Mirii, 217, 223 Ngugi, wa Thiong’o, 196, 211, 216–218, 220, 223, 225, 226, 233 Nightwind, 201 Nithari, 195, 197, 198, 278 Njeeri wa Aamon, 216

O Ono, Yoko, 67 Open Rehearsal, 218, 221, 223, 226 Operation Conversation: Cops & Kids, 179, 181, 183, 241 Oram, Jon, 211–216, 218 Other 500 Years, 230

P Pandees, 195 Paradise Now, 62, 108–110, 113, 115 Participatory Community Assessment (PCA), 154, 155 People’s Cultural Forum, 168 Performance Art, 2, 59, 67–72, 77, 79, 130, 135 Performance Group, 61, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 108, 110, 112,

INDEX

115, 118, 124, 168, 170, 187, 188, 208 Performance of a Lifetime (POAL), 259, 261 Performance studies, 1, 6, 9, 13, 32, 51, 60, 63, 72, 88, 102, 283 Performing Arts Journal , 72 Performing the World (PTW), 270, 283, 284 Piscator, Erwin, 81–85, 88, 105, 108 Playback Theatre, 43, 52, 54, 56, 92, 100 Power Play, 192 Prolet-Bühne, 20, 26, 27, 31 Psychodrama, 47–56, 89, 247 Pungwe, 164–166, 185 Q Quantum Theatre Company, 227 R Radical Arts Troupes (RAT), 116 Rainbow of Desire, 54–56 Ritual, 9–14, 20, 28–30, 35, 48, 78, 102, 103, 105, 108–115, 202, 203, 276 Ritualistic Theatre, 104, 105, 108, 113, 115, 128, 130 Rohd, Michael, 169–174, 278 Rubin, Jerry, 120, 135, 136 Russian Revolution, 17, 25, 28, 165 S Salas, Jo, 52, 53 Salit, Cathy, 260, 261 San Francisco Mime Troupe, 104, 116–118 Savana Trust, 185 Schechner, Richard, 12–14, 60, 61, 68, 70, 72, 96–98, 100–104, 108, 113, 115, 120

291

Schneemann, Carolee, 67, 70 Schumann, Peter, 104, 105 Sherk, Bonny, 68, 69 Simultaneous Dramaturgy, 90, 91 Site Specific Theatre, 61 Smart Mobs, 65 Social Actor, 214, 215 Social therapy/social therapeutics, 6, 38, 56, 57, 179, 180, 233, 237–239, 241–244, 247, 253, 260, 269, 270, 272, 278, 279, 281–284 Sociodrama, 51 Sojourn Theatre, 171, 174 Souza, Manoela, 231 Soviet Union, 17, 19, 20, 25–28, 30, 31, 47, 80, 83, 212, 243 Spartacist revolt/uprising, 29, 83 Spec-actor, 91, 202 Spolin, Viola, 35, 37–44, 68, 145, 148, 170, 259 Spontaneity Theatre, 48, 53 Sprechchor, 26 Staged debates, 21 Staged trials, 21 Stiles, Diane, 183 Storming of the Winter Palace, 28, 32 Sutherland, Alexandra, 205–211 T Taylor, Barbara, 253–256, 259 Theatre for Development (TfD), 151–153, 155–158, 166, 224 Theatre for Living, 192, 193 Theatre for Social Change, 163, 164, 168, 223 Theatre in Education, 145–147, 149–152 Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), 5, 43, 54, 80, 88–92, 100, 128, 135, 159, 164, 189, 190, 192, 193, 269

292

INDEX

The Connection, 107 The Drama Review (TDR), 72, 119 The Money Tower, 114 The Poor Man’s Friend, 213, 214 The Spirit of Shiveree, 215 The Trial of Dedan Kimathi, 225–227 This is Your Ridiculous Life, 253 Thomson, George, 11–13 Threshold, 227 Tool and result methodology, 245 Transformational drama, 158, 159 Transformative Pedagogy, 225, 227, 233, 259 Trujillo Valle, 202, 270 U United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, 121, 127 University of Nairobi, 216, 218, 220, 221 V Valdez, Luis, 121, 122 Vallins, Gordon, 145

Verfremdungseffekt (making strange effect), 84 Villanueva, Ema, 71, 79 Vine, Chris, 146 Vygotsky, Lev, 56, 149, 242–247, 254, 259, 265, 272

W Ward, Colin, 280 Waseem, Mohammed, 186–193, 278 Wasik, Bill, 64, 65 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 242, 245, 246, 273 Workers’ Laboratory Theatre (WLT), 26, 27, 30

Y Yanta, Luvuyo, 205–209, 211 Yeguas del Apocalipsis , 71 Yes/And, 41, 42 Youth International Party (Yippies), 135 Youth Onstage!, 266