Anthropology, Theatre, and Development

The Transformative Potential of Performance

Alex Flynn, Jonas Tinius

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137350602
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The contributors explore diverse contexts of performance to discuss peoples' own reflections on political subjectivities, governance and development. The volume refocuses anthropological engagement with ethics, aesthetics, and politics to examine the transformative potential of political performance, both for individuals and wider collectives.

Part I
Ethnographies of Political Performance in Developing ContextsSection 1.1
Interventions

1

Re-imagining Political Subjectivities: Relationality, Reflexivity, and Performance in Rural Brazil

Alex Flynn

I’m at the annual state meeting of the largest social movement in Latin America.¹ A lot of people have come from all over Santa Catarina, Brazil, seeking to be re-energised, to plan movement strategy with the leadership, or just to catch up with old comrades. A lot of people, a lot of conversations; the chimarrão,² the images of the movement posted up on the walls of the hall, the ribbons, flags, a sea of people dressed in the revolutionary red of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) sit expectantly in front of the stage. We’re seated in rows of chairs facing a raised platform which has been constructed at the end of the hall. On this platform is a long table with five chairs, a public address system, a mixing desk, and a couple of microphone stands. Suspended on the wall behind the stage is an enormous MST flag, and beside it, an even larger Brazilian flag, at least four metres by three. On the front of the platform are suspended smaller flags; the flags of other movements with which the MST are in solidarity, such as the Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST). In front of this platform, before the first row of chairs, is a space left clear. As the hall is entirely full of seating, it is evident that this space has been left empty for a purpose.

Each day of the state meeting begins with a mística, a type of political performance that is specific to the MST. The mística is designed to energise the audience, but also bring everyone together into the same space. I’m keen to watch the first day’s performance; the MST is well known for its mística and I finish breakfast quickly to go into the hall to have a look ‘backstage’. No one is around apart from some MST members and also some leaders I recognise from the speeches and plenaries (See Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Setting the stage

They’re rehearsing and from my seat towards the back of the hall I can see Rafa, the culture sector leader, partly obscured, standing behind a stack of speakers. The actors are blindfolded and there is someone strumming a guitar on stage. I see that Rafa isn’t on his own; Mariana, deputy head of education is there, as is Teresa, the head. The rehearsal seems to be going well as Mariana and Teresa direct the performance, and before long the hall is filling with people for the 8 a.m. start (Figure 1.2).

The performance starts with blindfolded people feeling their way across the space of the stage, all the while being menaced by other actors holding placards labelled ‘Coca-Cola’ or ‘EUA’.³ There is also a performer with an impromptu box made up to look like a television and labelled ‘Globo’,⁴ which he places over a blindfolded person’s head. Then the music, which up till now has been doleful, changes tone entirely, as actors wearing MST t-shirts and carrying rural tools (long-handled scythes and hoes) enter the stage and chase away the people waving placards. Once rid of the actors representing Coca-Cola and other corporations, the blindfolds are removed and everyone holds hands and sings a song, along to which the audience claps and joins in.

Figure 1.2 An expectant audience

What strikes me about the performance is the clear distinction between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’. There is also no interaction between the performers and the audience. The audience applauds, but there is not even any catcalling or booing when the villains are menacing the blindfolded people; the audience sip their chimarrão and watch, but seem to doing little else.

I have difficulty waking up early day after day and I’m not alone; there are many people who are slow to come to the hall for the opening mística. These people, including myself, are collected by meeting organisers and leaders and encouraged to go to the hall, otherwise they will miss the performance.

The hall is full. A young man and woman are seated opposite each other in the centre of the stage. The young man is humbly dressed: a farm labourer’s straw hat, shorts, and t-shirt. The young woman is wearing a long skirt, a red MST t-shirt with Che Guevara’s image, and a bandana, printed with a movement slogan. It is unclear what the two characters are intended to represent; maybe they represent nothing at all. Surrounding the couple, seated in a circle, are other figures: two women hold a representation of a burning torch; another woman is dressed so as to be identified as an indigenous person. The young woman with the Che Guevara t-shirt begins to stand and her partner mirrors her stance. She is holding something in her arms, and together they lift it above their heads. I think at first that it is a doll but I realise now that it is a baby. There seems a deep significance attached to their union and the child, which is reinforced when the three women who have been seated in a circle around them move forward to touch the ‘mother’, ‘father’, and ‘child’ with something they’re holding in their hands. First the ‘family’ are anointed with water, before a basket is brought in, from which the family are anointed with seeds and soil. The scene has strong religious overtones. In the audience, we are rapt by this choreography, and I don’t realise until it is happening that a little girl has come to my seat to lead me into the performance. I notice that two other visitors, a Colombian interested in Marxist politics, and a Norwegian on an exchange programme, are also being led to the stage, and suddenly we are walking around and through the performance, part of the theatricality, the audience rendered performer. As we are slowly traversing the stage, more children appear, holding large drawings of sunflowers. They circle around the whole performance, as Juan, the Norwegian, and I are also anointed with water, seeds, and soil. At the end of the performance, as the audience are clapping in time to one of the MST songs, a red ribbon is tied to my wrist by the little girl who has been leading me through my steps since I left my chair. It is printed with black lettering: XXIII Encontro Estadual MST/SC (23rd State meeting of the Santa Catarina MST). The whole performance has been expertly managed; I didn’t know I was to participate, but once I did, there was a clear role for me to perform. The ribbon itself seems a symbol of collective belonging, but despite the curation of the performance, having this ribbon tied to my wrist feels like an intensely personal experience. Upon reflection, it seems unclear whether taking part in this mística has been a performance of landlessness or a performance of my own transformation.

* * *

Introduction

The MST is Latin America’s largest social movement, with over 1.5 million members, and is part of a wider alliance of transnational agrarian reform movements confronting globalisation (Borras et al. 2008; Desmarais 2002; Petras and Veltmeyer 2001; Teubal 2009; Vergara-Camus 2009; Welch and Fernandes 2009). Its struggle to create a more just society is rooted in issues pertaining to the distribution of land and it advocates a programme of agrarian reform, prioritising agro-ecological farming and smallholder production. The challenges the movement faces are immense; land in Brazil is extremely unequally distributed, as much due to a legacy of colonial systems of administration as to ongoing aggregations of estates premised on economies of scale and monoculture production. Using relatively recent data, Sauer and Leite have revealed the full extent of the disparity:

Estates with less than ten ha represent over 47 per cent of the total number of farm units but occupy only 2.7 per cent, or 7.8 million ha, of the total area of rural establishments. At the other end of the land area spectrum, farms that are larger than one thousand ha correspond to only 0.91 per cent of the total number of farms but concentrate more than 43 per cent, or 146.6 million ha, of the total area (2012: 876).

Such are the entrenched interests that connect land to power in Brazil that the last time a serious programme of agrarian reform was mooted, the president advocating reform, João Goulart, was ousted from office by a military coup (Ondetti 2008: 12). The military government which controlled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 further entrenched inequalities through modernisation programmes conducted in concert with multinational corporations. Volkswagen (VW) entered into such an agreement in 1973, accepting government incentives to develop agricultural ventures to modernise the Amazon basin. As Wolfgang Sauer, the chief executive officer of Volkswagen Brazil details, Volkswagen bought the 140,000 hectare estate Vale do Rio Cristalino in Pará and put 60,000 head of cattle to pasture. The estate was only disposed of in 1986 when negative publicity organised by the German Green Party led to the threat of a boycott of VW automobiles in West Germany (Sauer 2012: 322).

As such, arguing the case for agrarian reform in Brazil has historically involved and continues to entail confronting powerful and well-connected interests; being a member of the MST can be extremely dangerous and even fatal. Working with data that are difficult to collect, George Meszaros has estimated that there have been 1,167 assassinations of rural workers and activists from 1986 to 1998 (2000: 7), and there have been many more since.⁵ Despite the danger and the struggle that it requires to be a part of the MST, members join from a wide variety of backgrounds. They may be rural farm workers, rural trade unionists, or dwellers of the urban peripheries, but marginalisation is a common experience, as is the desire to own land and thereby achieve a degree of autonomy and better access to programmes of education and health.

Contextualised by these entrenched connections between land and power and influenced by the idea that firstly modernisation programmes and, more latterly, neoliberal economic policies have only led to a further re-concentration of large estates in the hands of the few (Petras and Veltmeyer 2002), the MST’s politics are solidly Marxist. The movement argues against the influence that multinational companies such as Monsanto or Cargill have in the agro-industrial sector, and oppose the free market economics that they perceive to be hegemonic, both globally and in Brazil. On a practical level, to effect its programme, the MST’s first step is to organise landless people and mount an occupation. Since 1979, the year of the movement’s unofficial coalescence, it has prioritised a direct action tactic aimed at pressuring the government into the redistribution of land. Once a site has been identified as unproductive, landless families encamp, while the movement lobbies the government to redistribute the site. This process is not always successful, and those occupying the land may be violently evicted multiple times before a federal judgement is made. If the application is successful, however, then a settlement comprising the families that occupied the land is built, and the families are encouraged to engage in agricultural production along non-industrial, family farming lines.

Mística: imagining a new society

One of the difficulties that the MST has to contend with is the sheer size of the movement and the geographical area over which it is spread. The movement has to be extremely well organised and different activities are divided amongst different sectors. When establishing the encampments, for example, new members of the movement find themselves working closely with the frente de massa sector, whose tasks include recruiting new members, giving basic political orientation, and organising marches and demonstrations. There are sectors dedicated to gender rights, education, and production, but one of the most important sectors of the movement concerns itself with culture and the (re)iteration and promulgation of the MST’s ‘landless’ identity, using mística as its principal tool (Flynn 2013a; McNee 2005). Wendy Wolford (2003), following Benedict Andersen, puts forward the notion that mística’s key role is producing a sense of ‘imagined community’ in an organisation in which most members will likely never meet (2003: 500). And mística’s potential to create community around symbolically powerful and forcefully articulated messages is, similarly to the MST, intrinsically linked to the Catholic Church.

The MST coalesced from agrarian reform movements closely linked to the Catholic Church, and more particularly priests who had been deeply influenced by the tenets of Liberation theology, the idea put forward at the Second Vatican Council that there should be justice on Earth as well as in Heaven. The tenets of Liberation theology, and the structure of Catholic Mystery plays that in Europe date back to the 10th century, are often cited as contributing to mística (Lara Junior 2005; Löwy 2001), and Karriem (2009) comments that mística is partly a result of ‘[a]n enduring influence from liberation theology’ (2009: 319). Ondetti is even more explicit, stating that mística is ‘an updated version of popular organizing methods developed earlier by the popular church’ (2008: 123). Mística is therefore embedded within a particular historical context, but also a specific theatrical understanding of performance, one which is based upon interaction and participation. Prosser argues that almost everyone living in a medieval English town would have watched a Mystery play and many would have taken part in accompanying processions, acted in the plays themselves, or helped out backstage (1961: 7). These performances, early instances of a vernacular drama, were events that brought communities together outside of churches and away from Latin texts. Plays portrayed mysteries, based on stories from the Bible, and miracles, based on the lives of the saints. The performances also depicted allegorical moralities (for example, people’s struggle against sin), and later on in their development certain cycles of performances became sharp texts of satire on people in positions of responsibility (Prosser 1961: 86). The tradition of performance in the Catholic Church, exemplified by Mystery plays and the Passion play, which is still annually performed in Brazil, together with the tenets of Liberation theology, allows us to be...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Reflecting on Political Performance: Introducing Critical Perspectives: Alex Flynn and Jonas Tinius
• Part I Ethnographies of Political Performance in Developing Contexts
• Part II Theatre as Paradigm for Social Reflection: Conceptual Perspectives
• Index