Performances that Change the Americas

Stuart Alexander Day, Stuart Alexander Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000439434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Performing Arts

This collection of essays explores activist performances, all connected to theater or performance training, that have changed the Americas—from Canada to the Southern Cone.

Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, the authors of this volume demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: they affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. This project offers concrete, compelling cases that emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn. In the same spirit, the chapters treat marginal groups whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre, performance, art and politics.

1 Introduction: case studies in activist performance

Stuart A. Day

The University of Kansas

DOI: 10.4324/9781003043638-1

If anyone questioned the efficacy of grassroots organizing in the twenty-first century, the US Tea Party’s success, eventually leading to the single-term election of Donald Trump in fall 2016, provided a clear answer: door knocking, social media engagement, plus locally and nationally organized rallies worked. The election stunned activists across the political spectrum—and across the world. Average people (with significant help from the US Electoral College, Vladimir Putin, conservative billionaires, the National Rifle Association (NRA), white evangelical churches, et cetera) had found a performer, a billionaire evil genius at the podium, someone to help them push back against the relatively progressive Barack Obama era in order to preserve white supremacy. Many of us looked on in despair as the 2016 election results came in, jealous of conservative success, ready to flood progressive organizations with cash, and determined to take back the power of performance, following a long tradition of progressive predecessors.

This book is about activist performances that change the Americas, from the Southern Cone to Canada. Small or large, activist performances are carefully staged and often self-referential. They add art to activism and vice versa. They are protests with dramatic structure (sometimes subtle, sometimes not), they have “scripts” (again, sometimes subtle, sometimes not; they are rarely logocentric), and they often require the participation of the powers that be, generally because they force authorities to make a choice: attack, retreat, or, occasionally, acquiesce. In this sense, they compel those in power to play a role. In their own roles, activist performers demand justice in myriad ways; at times they are humorous in their endeavours, at times deadly serious—at times both. Our main objective in the pages that follow is to demonstrate that the link between theater/performance and politics is anything but ephemeral. It need not be an afterthought or a “could be” but is, rather, an effective means to transform society.

Through the study of specific examples from numerous countries, we demonstrate a crucial, shared outlook: we affirm that ordinary people change the direction of history through performance. Our book is not a catalogue of successful protests, which would of course be impossible to compile. Nor does it attempt to cover all modes of activism. What we do offer are concrete, compelling cases in an attempt to emulate the modus operandi of people like historian Howard Zinn, a writer who expressed himself in many genres, including theater. Zinn wrote the seminal underdog tome A People’s History of the United States, which, as the title suggests, narrates history in a way that makes visible those who would otherwise remain in the shadows. In the same spirit, our chapters treat marginal groups (albeit of dramatically varying privilege and power) whose stories underscore the potentially unstoppable and transformative power of united, embodied voices.

In Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, Andrew Boyd and Dave Oswald Mitchell remind readers that “fools, clowns and carnivals have always played a subversive role, while art, culture and creative protest tactics have for centuries served as fuel and foundation for successful social movements” (1). Boyd and Mitchell, seasoned activists, also write that they perceive the increased importance and influence of artistic activism: “This new wave of creative activism first drew mainstream attention in 1999 at the Battle in Seattle, but it didn’t start there. In the 1980s and ’90s, groups like ACT-UP, Women’s Action Coalition and the Lesbian Avengers inspired a new style of high-concept shock politics that both empowered participants and shook up public complacency. In 1994, the Zapatistas, often described as the first post-modern revolutionary movement, awakened the political imagination of activists round the world, replacing the dry manifesto and the sectarian vanguard with fable, poetry [and] theater” (2). Heightened activist activity and awareness of the importance of performance inspire us to look to new (to some of us) forms of protest and to earlier periods, particularly the 1960s and ’70s, to uncover and document the components of their success.

Our examples often provide counterweights (identified variously in the chapters that follow as counternarratives, counterstate, part of the countermachine—as opposed to the narco-machine—counterjudicial incursions, et cetera) to the equally performative practices of powerful conservative entities in business and government, which can be easily discerned at every point in history. In his Atlantic article “The Case for Reparations,” for instance, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about deceptively simple, cruel performances that, taken together, had an enormous impact on the not-so-distant past and that continue to stymie the possibility of equality throughout the United States. In a section of the article on racist housing practices in and around Chicago, Coates underscores the performative side of redlining, the discriminatory denial of loans and other services, as well as other racist housing practices:

Speculators in North Lawndale, and at the edge of the black ghettos, knew there was money to be made off white panic. They resorted to “block-busting”—spooking whites into selling cheap before the neighborhood became black. They would hire a black woman to walk up and down the street with a stroller. Or they’d hire someone to call a number in the neighborhood looking for “Johnny Mae.” Then they’d cajole whites into selling at low prices, informing them that the more blacks who moved in, the more the value of their homes would decline, so better to sell now.

The next step in this racist practice was always to sell to Black families, who were forced to pay exorbitant prices under unreasonable, and in many cases unsustainable, terms.

Richard Rothstein, in The Color of Law, writes that blockbusting and many other unethical practices might have been business run but that the US government legislated segregation—and is therefore constitutionally responsible for its effects. He tells of the time future Pulitzer Prize–winning professor Wallace Stegner was recruited to Stanford University. Even then, housing prices were steep in Palo Alto, California. Stegner joined a housing cooperative that planned to build hundreds of houses on a large plot of land next to the university; however, “banks would not finance construction costs nor issue mortgages to the co-op or to its members without government approval, and the FHA would not insure loans to a cooperative that included African American members” (11). In other words, and as seen above and in the following chapters, some change—good or bad—happens only through the power of law, which is why judicial reform is central to most activists’ playbooks. But perception is also critical, and sometime the performance is the change. Without being overly prescriptive, in the following pages of this introduction I offer numerous brief case studies that begin to delineate the types of performances highlighted throughout this book.

In the examples above, Coates and Rothstein write about the midcentury US Midwest and the Bay Area, respectively. Not long after, in the early to mid-sixties, a set of performances, what Neil R. McMillen calls “high moral drama played out in … public spaces,” were taking place in the South. Unlike the performances of predatory housing described earlier, these acts were staged as part of a large movement to challenge the small- and large-scale injustice of segregation. McMillen’s use of theater metaphors to describe activist engagement goes beyond a reference to everyday performance (the familiar notion that “all the world’s a stage”). He describes civil rights strategies and the way “black activists and their few white allies broke the back of Jim Crow by compelling a reluctant federal government to enforce the Constitution.” McMillen documents multiple staged demonstrations, in what he terms “the movement’s street theater period,” that changed the way the world saw civil rights protest. In Mississippi these included the Freedom Elections of 1963: “Aaron Henry, a Clarksdale pharmacist and state NAACP leader, and his slate of ‘Freedom Candidates,’ didn’t really have a prayer. In a state where nearly all blacks were disfranchised, they were ‘elected’ in an unofficial straw ballot by some 80,000 citizens who could not legally vote. They were victorious, however, in the theater of national opinion.”

McMillen also outlines one of the better-known examples of scripted activist performance, part of the movement in Birmingham, Alabama: “Project C—Project Confrontation—scripted by Southern Christian Leadership Conference strategists for King’s 1963 Birmingham Campaign was not an exercise in idealism. Project C, as its name implied, was calculated to provoke an excessive show of white force in Birmingham that would unsettle the national conscience and force federal intervention …. The plan required a high degree of unwitting cooperation by Birmingham Police Commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Connor and his heavy-handed cops. Connor did cooperate, playing the role of a hardhearted ‘heavy’ as though he had read the script.” The images that resulted from the Birmingham campaign are widely considered to be critical in creating the perception, especially in the North, that it was no longer possible to turn a blind eye when it came to civil rights. The children who participated in the marches and other expressions of mostly peaceful resistance were not actors per se, but they were trained and assigned roles in the series of protests that made up the Birmingham campaign. The resulting photos of people being attacked by water cannons and canines were too much—either politically or ethically—for national leaders, including President John F. Kennedy.

The theatrics of the movement were critical to the success of mid-sixties social change, as was the idea that well-designed actions will force political foes to play a required role, a type of coerced improvisation that limits the responses available and plays to a person’s tendencies. (Improvisation is an art form that is, ironically, known for a high level of structure.) McMillen is clear about the impact of performance: “The Birmingham Campaign alone did not produce the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But no one should doubt that the weight of King’s demonstrations, combined with the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1962 University of Mississippi integration crisis, and the broader southern struggle for suffrage and desegregation pushed the politically cautious Kennedy administration to introduce the sweeping legislation that President Lyndon Johnson later signed into law in 1964.” This is the type of link we underscore in the chapters that follow to add to global writing on the power of activism and, to a certain extent, to realign our reading of history as influenced by explicit performances that encompass the performative machinations not only of conservative elites but also of performers who resist the status quo.

A different but equally complex context—the 1976 to 1983 dictatorship, or proceso, that left up to 30,000 murdered and disappeared at the hands of the Argentine government—offers another example that civic engagement can induce change. Diana Taylor, writing about the activist performances of the groups HIJOS and Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, contends that “the short- and long-term effects of these performances are difficult to measure. Over four hundred torturers have been brought to trial and are now serving life sentences. Did the activism by Mothers and HIJOS make that happen? It’s hard to prove, although we would probably be correct in saying that justice would not have been done had the groups not persisted.” Taylor explains further: “As the Mothers and HIJOS have made evident, the search for justice is a long, durational performance. Although the tactics and circumstances change over time, it’s the endurance and perseverance that prove efficacious” (153). As the acronym in Spanish implies, HIJOS represents children of the victims of the war, many of whom were forcibly taken and given to the families of the military; while the Mothers (and Grandmothers) of the Plaza de Mayo have gained worldwide attention for the constant presence they and others have held in Buenos Aires in front of the Argentine presidential palace. The incremental pressure both sets of activists fomented has led—and continues to lead—to real change in Argentina.

Taylor is spot-on in her assertion that “the search for justice is a long, durational performance,” though she would also certainly agree that some performances result in more immediate—or immediately promising—change. The striking impact of activist performances, as was the case in Birmingham, can lead to swift action (granted, swift action followed by painfully slow, uneven change), often from politicians who either find an excuse to act or act because they can no longer find an excuse to remain silent. No matter the way people go about activist performances, both slow and dramatic change often occurs because people put their bodies on the line at a given time in history. Woven throughout the chapters that follow are performances that changed society in the moment—their very existence ushered in a different reality.

A recent example from my own experience is a meditation, livestreamed from the University of Kansas, by professor and playwright Darren Canady after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The performance and its framing were remarkable: it began with a bold statement by the university’s chancellor, followed by eight minutes and forty-six seconds of silence—the length of time a police officer knelt on Floyd’s neck—accompanied by nighttime views of the campus’s campanile, a World War II memorial and one of the university’s most iconic landmarks. What followed were Canady’s words, performed by the artist himself:

This will be a year of burning

The streets are sweating

We are a nation measured in masks and infections and march numbers and solidarity posts and caught up in a crucible of rage and pain and bewilderment

Pressure packing us in to a confrontation

A reckoning

A collision with flesh and blood and spirit

Spirits named George and Breonna and Tony and Ahmaud joining this great hovering host of blackness

Beautiful, aggrieved, still vivid blackness

A mighty throng of witnesses who have felt the terror and the breaking and the bringing to heel of American Black bodies

Black bodies across genders and ages and sexualities and places and times

They throng up there with Emmett and Mary and Sandra and Amadou and tonight we fall before them and we shout them out and feel them pulling their names out of our throats, pushing some to tears

Wrapping others in a precise, focused, steadfast anger that plants itself in front of batons and shields and closed gates and indifference.

But here you are black and brown in the heartland

You here on this hill

This second Oread

This rising place above a golden valley

Your minds sharp with intellect and pierced with talent

You have come here to the Jayhawks’ Nest and followed trails made possible by the same strength that holds that throng of spirits aloft

And you have waited to be heard to be seen to be called in to community to be made at home and be celebrated

you are not crazy when you say you have been shunned

you are not lying when you say this school must do more

you are not imagining the attacks and your exhaustion

Let that same crucible scorching the nation also bring its heat here and let us scoop something new out of its ashes a place that knows this land we learn on—this land that has seen genocide and war and wagon wheels and free soil that this school set upon it will not turn away from the 2020 burning the sweating the throng of black spirits—that somehow we will fashion a place worthy of you and every bit of liberated humanity that you possess (“Meditation 2020”)

Canady’s performance does many things: it references the racial pandemic as well as the COVID pandemic; calls out to the past, specifically the history of Kansas and the land upon which the University of Kansas was built; links present-day murders to past murders; and challenges the people who make up the University of Kansas—located on its own Mount Oread, with the Jayhawk as its mascot—to do better. Remarkable performances like this sometimes lead to change and sometimes not. But it is critical to recognize that sometimes the performance is the change. While Kansas was established as a free state and the University of Kansas has its own history of political activism (e.g., Canady’s mother, Linda Canady, was a civil rights activist at KU in the 1970s), this was a counterperformance that gained power through context. Despite the fact that in 2020 almost 70 percent of Douglas County, where the city of Lawrence and the University of Kansas are located, voted for President Joseph Biden, Kansas is a red state. Words like those Canady spoke represent a contextual rupture, an authorized aberration that did what performances do best: it left a before-and-after mark on the university that—as surprising and absurd as this might seem—authorized an immediate cultural change. It was now acceptable to proclaim, from classrooms to deans’ offices, that Black Lives Matter.

Canady’s performance also complicates the link between performance training and political activism. That is, one of the central ideas in this book is to link theater and performance training to political activism. But what “training” led to the power of this performance? A degree from Juilliard? Yes. Religion? Yes. Family tradition? Yes. The experiences of a Black, gay man in the United States? Yes. Working as a creative writing professor? Yes. Canady told me that as much as through his life experiences and artistic training, his words were formed through conversations: “I knew students were in pain and were telling me that their pain was so often unacknowledged.” Performative pedagogy—that is, activist performance—is always already beyond the bounds of an academic discipline, even performance studies. And teaching—arguably the main goal of activist performance—offers an effective/affective way to fight ignorance.

In Impure Acts: The Practical Politics of Cultural Studies, Henry A. Giroux writes: “That racism exists among literate people suggests that more is at work than their ignorance of its untenable and contradictory logic …. Not only do students need to understand the economic and political interests that shape and legitimate racist discourses, they must also address the strong emotional investments they may bri...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: case studies in activist performance
• 2 Playing Creole: circus dramas, the theater marketplace, and urban society in Argentina and Uruguay
• 3 Basta: reactivating bodies and the dramaturgy of femicides in Argentina
• 4 Carnival in hell: kinetic dissidence and the new queer carnivalesque in contemporary Brazil
• 5 Absent bodies and melted weapons: art and social change in contemporary Colombia
• 6 Queering Abiayala: personal and political cartographies of the Indigenous Americas
• 7 Music, poetry, and Créolité in the songs of Carole Demesmin, singer, troubadour, and activist
• 8 An Island in crisis: theater groups and social change in Puerto Rico in the new millennium
• 9 Performing the revolution: Castro's Cuba
• 10 The queer/muxe performance of disappearance: Lukas Avendaño's butterfly utopia
• 11 “Why are the Canadian authorities afraid of this play?”
• Index