Brigade d’Intervention Théâtrale-Haïti: Staging Counterpublics in Neoliberal Haiti

Abstract

This article discusses street theater actions by Brigade d’Intervention Théâtrale-Haïti (BITH), a Haitian performance collective whose work staged in 2018—preceding and in alignment with mass mobilizations that swept the nation that year—registered and interrogated the deep impacts on lived experience wrought by a process of intensified neoliberalization in post-2010 Haiti. BITH’s street performances (and subsequent online circulation) made visible and palpable certain Haitian people’s complicity in manifold inequities under such conditions as they also sparked emergent counterpublics through dialogue, affect, and popular aesthetics. Through what we term “creative interference,” BITH’s artivism catalyzed alternatives to civil society from the interstices of available modalities and infrastructures.