Activist Theatre Research Articles

Reclaiming Public Spaces in Post-pandemic India (Kolkata): Activist Theatre, Gender and a Resurgence of the Marginal

The politics of our post-Covid times are expressed through various registers. In Kolkata, one especially powerful artistic medium for such expressions was the revival of street theatre as young and senior theatre practitioners plunged into exploring critical issues that have been all-pervasive since the beginning of the pandemic. As people finally started to venture out, content to be amidst human congregations, street plays, being located in open-air spaces, proved both economical and safe. The issues these street performances highlighted and their modes of presentations could be described as what Tony Fisher calls ‘activist theatre’ – which mobilizes the people by interpellating its audience around a specific grievance or issue that possesses an emotional appeal.1 These performances are a form of artistic activism, or ‘artivism’ as termed by Chantal Mouffe: the use of aesthetic means for political activism, ‘as a counter-hegemonic move against the capitalist appropriation of aesthetics’.2

THE POLITICS OF OTHERNESS IN THE TIME OF CRISES: REVISITING TONY KUSHNER’S ANGELS IN AMERICA

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has revealed once again that the effects of health crises have been more severe for some groups compared to the others. The most prominent of these groups is non-binary or LGBTQ+ individuals who have long faced social discrimination. The disadvantaged position of LGBTQ+ people during worldwide epidemics attracted the attention of playwrights especially in 1980s and 90s. Although this could be attributed to the AIDS epidemic during the time, playwrights problematized the “otherness” issue influencing LGBTQ+ people through AIDS and the political response to it. One of the most significant of these was American playwright Tony Kushner. In “Angels in America”, Kushner put forth not only the problems of LGBTQ+ people during AIDS epidemic but also the problem of otherness in different levels as a social and political phenomenon. This article aims to explore the concepts of “responsibility” and “otherness”, which Kushner problematized in his play based on the philosophical approaches of Levinas and Benjamin, in light of the current developments regarding health crises and the political response. The article claims the disadvantaged position of minority groups during crises including AIDS and COVID-19 is more of a political issue regarding the attitudes of right-wing/conservative politics (which has not changed even today) rather than the difficulties posed by the pandemics themselves. In that respect, Kushner’s activist theatre proves to be guiding in evaluating the conditions of “the others” during the pandemic.

Hunkering down in the theatre of war: reflections on the interpersonal politics of collective resistance

ABSTRACT In this time of war – and it is always a time of war – I have found myself thinking a great deal about the relationship between activist theatre collectives and themselves – the experience of a certain kind of theatre-making, perceived from within by its makers, being perhaps more significant than the audience’s witness of the performances and other activities the group makes and shares. In what measure is this kind of theatre about the audience it seeks to serve, and in what measure does it constitute an alternative mode of being in the world, a form of semi-separatist cell or sect, in which the ‘audience’ of makers bears witness to and draws nurturance from their own extra-theatrical performance of resistance? My desire in this short provocation – I hesitate to call it an essay, it is closer to thinking aloud in print – is to tease at a response to that question by reflecting upon three sources: a history, a personal experience, and a shared testimony. This is an expanded version of a provocation prepared for the ‘Collective Resistance’ roundtable at the Borderlines IX: Seeking Solidarity and Wonder Through Performance conference at De Montfort University in 2022.

Performing memory and testimony after a national disaster: the Sewol mothers in Talking about Her (2016), VEGA (2016), and His and Her Closet (2016)

ABSTRACT In response to the Sewol Ferry disaster and mishandling of the South Korean government, Korean activists and artists mobilized collaboration with the victims’ families to produce activist theatre productions that center not only the trauma of those most affected by the disaster but also their lived experiences and wishes, especially those of the mothers. Furthermore, the performance community has come to include and represent the mothers not only as victims but as active participants whose grief is transmuted through performance into political activism. Combining tools of active viewing and participant observation, this article examines three of these works—Talking about Her (2016a) and VEGA (Jaguar 2016), which are performance pieces adapted from testimonies by the mothers, and Yellow Ribbon’s first performance, His and Her Closet (2016b). This article focuses on the ways these works, through utilizing the memories and testimonies of the mothers, have come to constitute a kind of collaborative public counter-memory against state cover-ups and unempathetic accounts, centering demands for change in commemoration practices and transforming the meaning of Sewol into a catalyst for political and social change.

Activist theatre and the agitprop legacy*

Political theatre today seems to be dominated once again by activist approaches that want to have a direct impact on political conflicts with a clear agenda. When it comes to interpreting this new liaison of theatre and activism, it seems nearly unavoidable to look back at the historical avant-gardes around 1930. With the contemporary situation as a starting point, this article analyses the agitprop tradition focusing on the German example. It discusses to what extent one can speak of an agitprop legacy in Germany despite the dissolution of the agitprop groups under the Nazi regime; when and in what this legacy becomes recognisable and how today’s activist theatre groups refer to the models, problems and crises of the historical agitprop troupes.

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Something Beautiful and Powerful: Politics, Art, and Bread and Puppet Theater

Pink Glitter: Activist Theatre against Violence

Pink Glitter: Activist Theatre against Violence

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel

Dramatizing Displacement in Israel Chen Alon (bio) and Sonja Kuftinec (bio) As coauthors, we have been in dialogue about theatre and nation-formation for close to two decades. We enter this dialogue from perspectives of ancestral displacement that index the flux of national borders, identities, and movements. In Kuftinec's Croatian family, this migration pattern traced economic opportunity to the United States, where assimilation into the dominant culture was eased by a passage into whiteness. For Alon's grandfather, migration from Europe to Israel offered asylum from the Holocaust. As Zionists, Alon's family felt saved by a return to their "homeland"; serving in the Israeli Defense Force to guard the Jewish "shelter" became a point of generational duty. But serving in the army in Occupied Palestinian territory eventually radicalized Alon. He began to see Israel not only as a safe haven, but also as a colonizing state, one which did not fully recognize Palestinian human rights. He created alliances with Palestinian ex-combatants, cofounding Combatants for Peace in 2005 (cfpeace.org). Shared rituals, theatre, and storytelling became key tools in rehumanization and dialogue, as well as prompting nonviolent direct action resisting Israeli Occupation. These practices of animating dialogue and engaging direct action—grounded in personal stories and collective analysis—informed later activist theatre work with African asylumseekers in Israel. Israel has a complicated relationship with the politics of migration and the embrace of asylumseekers. On the one hand, the state openly welcomes the diasporic return of Jewish refugees to their "homeland." Israel also strongly supported the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, advocating for global asylum. On the other, Israel struggles to navigate its relationship with the Palestinian diaspora, demands for return to (sometimes erased) ancestral communities, and with welcoming African asylum-seekers from areas such as Eritrea and Sudan. We focus in this essay on migration, movement, and polarization in Israel, with particular attention to refugees and asylum-seekers. We examine how vectors of migration align with ethno-national imaginaries—both iterated and challenged through theatre. We first sketch out the emergence of Israel as a state and as a Jewish refuge, while naming the tensions that mark its existence. We then review recent scholarship about Hebrew and Arab-language theatre that structures the social identity of the Zionist subject and reflects on the status of the refugee in Israel more broadly. Finally, we outline adaptations of Theatre of the Oppressed with Holot Theatre (2014–22). This case study of polarized alliances between African asylum-seekers and Israeli citizens models how theatre can reflect and shift the dynamics of migration and belonging, activating ethical citizenship beyond national identity. Establishing Israel as a State of Jewish Refuge The narrative of migration in and around the state of Israel is itself a polarized one, featuring two main historiographic accountings, both oriented around exile and return. For the purposes of this essay, we focus on a timeline beginning with Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century, prompted by organized massacres (pogroms) in Eastern Europe, and further migration in the 1930s and '40s around the Holocaust. This migration pattern aligns Judaism with asylum-seeking and European nationalism. In the nineteenth century, Jewish intellectuals in Europe began to understand [End Page 61] themselves as a nation rather than only as a religion (Berkowitz 84–85). Zionism emerged as a cultural framing for potential Jewish statehood in an Israeli "homeland," then known as Palestine, part of the Ottoman Empire and later British Mandate. Under the pressure of Jewish migration following the Holocaust, in November 1947 the United Nations proposed the creation of two independent states: Israel and Palestine. The Arab world refused to take part in this division, which they saw as an illegal land grab by newly arrived immigrants. The UN affirmed Israeli statehood in May 1948 and, from Israel's perspective, the Arab world attacked and Israel defended itself through the Independence War, in which Arab villagers "ran away" from their homes. In contrast, Palestinians frame the 1948 exodus as the nakba (catastrophe), a violent expulsion of natives by colonial settlers. In 1967, Israel fought allied Arab forces resulting in the occupation of Palestinian land and residents in the Gaza Strip and West...

Archiving in Twilight

Archiving in Twilight

Raging in Delhi and Rajasthan: Post-show Audience Discussions of Medea

From April to November 2019, eight members of the pandies’ theatre, a Delhi-based activist theatre group, toured Delhi and Rajasthan with a fifty-five-minute version of Euripides’ Medea, in Hindustani. The group gave fifteen performances in the round, in spaces ranging from a tin shed to a plush air-conditioned conference room, addressing diverse audiences. During post-performance discussions in four spaces – Ambedkar University of Delhi, the village of Mangliawas in Rajasthan, the India Habitat Centre, and Studio Safdar in New Delhi – spontaneous debates arose between women on the one side and men on the other in which the women expressed their understanding of Medea’s actions or their ‘identification’ with her character. Anuradha Marwah, the director of the play, discusses these debates with reference to the ‘agonistic’ character of Medea (431 BCE) while framing the tour as a feminist activist endeavour in India today, where the condition of abandoned women and those considered to be outsiders has become even more precarious due to increasing divisiveness and chauvinism. Anuradha Marwah is a theatre activist and a Professor in the Department of English at Zakir Husain Delhi College, Delhi University. She was a Fulbright-Nehru Academic and Professional Excellence Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities in 2017. Her publications include two plays, A Pipe Dream in Delhi and Ismat’s Love Stories, three novels, and several academic and popular articles.

Kate Bredeson. Occupying the Stage: The Theater of May ’68.

An insightful account of the role of theatre in the uprisings of May ’68. Bredeson’s book argues that the theatre of May ’68 was a microcosm of politically engaged French theatre from 1959 to 1971. It offers significant case studies for artists and scholars interested in activist theatre.

Brazilian Black Theatre: A Political Theatre Against Racism

Black Brazilian theatre constitutes a political and artistic response to the racial discrimination characteristic of Brazilian society. As early as 1944, young members of the recently created black political movement saw theatre as a potential weapon to transform Brazilian society and created the Teatro Experimental do Negro (Black Experimental Theatre). This activist theatre continues to this day to pave the way for other black theatre companies.

Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s

Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s

Combining Theatre of the Oppressed, Playback Theatre, and Autobiographical Theatre for Social Action in Higher Education

Combining Theatre of the Oppressed, Playback Theatre, and Autobiographical Theatre for Social Action in Higher Education Hannah Fox (bio) and Abigail Leeder (bio) Theater is a weapon. . . . For this reason, the ruling classes strive to take permanent hold of the theater and utilize it as a tool for domination . . . but theater can also be a weapon for liberation. For that, it is necessary to create appropriate theatrical forms. —Augusto Boal1 This essay explores how personal storytelling and interactive theatre can be used as effective tools in dismantling systemic oppression on college campuses. Specifically, it argues that when woven together, the applied theatre forms Playback Theatre, Theatre of the Oppressed, and Autobiographical Theatre create a valuable, multifaceted “weapon” (to use Boal’s term) with which to address conflict, build allyship, and promote social justice. In this essay, we will explain the theatre models we draw from and share how we have combined and adapted these techniques in efforts to create more welcoming and inclusive environments on two different college campuses. At first glance, it may appear that Playback Theatre (PT) and Autobiographical Theatre (AT), which both focus on telling individual personal stories to create an emotional bond with the audience, work in direct conflict with Theatre of the Oppressed (TO), which downplays empathy to emphasize an anti-cathartic Brechtian approach that focuses on communal problem-solving. However, the forms actually complement one another precisely because they achieve different objectives. The personal and emotional elements of PT and AT create a space for vulnerability, empathy, and trust, which in turn builds community; through the sharing of personal stories there becomes a room full of “neighbors and not strangers,” as the founder of PT, Jonathan Fox, says (220). The catharsis that can come when telling, seeing, or performing a difficult or traumatic personal story is redemptive and often brings the community closer. In this way, audience members who may not easily identify with the lived experiences of the storytellers begin to understand, empathize with, and perhaps even begin to desire to act in solidarity with the people whose stories they have just witnessed; in other words, they begin to become allies. In contrast to the cathartic elements of PT and AT, with TO we can critically address social problems and strategize ways to dismantle systemic oppression, thus putting that allyship into action. Through TO techniques, the individual story becomes a collective story, and the group can use the community connection generated through PT and AT to formulate concrete strategies. Whereas traditionally TO may be more of an analytical exercise and PT and AT more affective, together they provide a unique toolkit for using theatre to fight injustice. There is not a single formula for combining the techniques; rather, there are many combinations and sequences that we have found effective. Despite their differences, storytelling is at the heart of each of the applied theatre forms. Telling and listening to our stories serves a fundamental human need as well as connects us to the larger cultural narrative. In Staging Social Justice: Collaborating to Create Activist Theatre, editors Norma Bowles and Daniel-Raymond Nadon underscore the direct link between personal storytelling and [End Page 101] fighting for social justice: “The presence of ‘the other’—the people who have been the targets of discrimination—portrayed by live, three-dimensional, multifaceted human beings, helps break down any stereotypical conceptions the audience may have held and potentially helps replace fear and prejudice with understanding” (8). As one of Fox’s students discovered, “[s]torytelling is perhaps one of the most important forms of activism right now because when someone tells their story, you can begin to recognize their humanity.”2 Personal-story performances that specifically address social-justice themes, such as racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, afford us an opportunity to build empathy and create dialogue around these complex issues, and in doing so protest standard cultural narratives. What is more, through theatre we can change the narrative: “The story can have a different ending from the one we already know. . . . We can rewrite/re-enact/redraw and retell it again. The story becomes a way of remaking the world; being a storyteller in these contexts means being...

Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s. Theater in the Americas. By Chrystyna Dail . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016; pp. xiii + 194, 9 illustrations. $40 paper, $40 e-book.

Stage for Action: U.S. Social Activist Theatre in the 1940s. Theater in the Americas. By Chrystyna Dail . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016; pp. xiii + 194, 9 illustrations. $40 paper, $40 e-book.

Activist Theatre: The Effects of Community Performance on System Justification and Willingness to Engage in Activism

AbstractSystem justification is a motivation to legitimize the status quo that disables individuals from changing oppressive social systems. Community performance has long been used as a tool to illuminate and challenge such systems of power. The goal of the present study was to provide an empirical test of the effectiveness of community performance in the context of gender‐based oppression. Specifically, the present study tested whether a community performance could decrease audience members' system justification and increase intentions to engage in collective and virtual action to correct these oppressive systems. The performance consisted of 18 community‐created pieces performed by 11 actresses before an audience of 165 members of the college and local communities across three days. A total of 153 audience members participated in the study. Results indicated that a 50‐min performance reduced system justification while increasing willingness to take collective and virtual‐based action. Limitations and implications are discussed. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives ed. by Florian N. Becker, Paola S. Hernández, and Brenda Werth

Reviewed by: Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives ed. by Florian N. Becker, Paola S. Hernández, and Brenda Werth Amanda Boyle Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives. Edited by Florian N. Becker, Paola S. Hernández, and Brenda Werth. New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. xii + 248 pp. $85.00 cloth. Editors Becker, Hernández, and Werth respond to and comment on the ongoing conversation regarding the intersection of human rights and theatre in [End Page 325] their collection of essays, Imagining Human Rights in the Twenty-First-Century Theater: Global Perspectives. Although we are only a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, this book addresses how far we have come in that time, and how much father we have still to go with the use of theatre and performance to effect change in improving human rights. The foreword, “Postnational Theater Studies,” written by Jill Lane, provides an example of a male flamenco singer whose song lamented a poor man who was forced into the streets by a bank in Seville, Spain, in 2012. Lane notes that this event offers a strong point of entry into “the role that theater and performance can play in relation to human rights practice today,” because of its targeted use of the body in performance to react against injustice (ix). The editors introduce key concepts such as theatre as public imaginary and Habermas’s notion of the critical public sphere, as well as describing how the two come together: “The establishment and operation of human rights has depended and continues to depend at every turn on efforts of imagination” (8). The editors argue that human rights are a “core concern” for the twenty-first century. Through its focus on the intersection of performance and activism, this collection of essays sheds new light on performance aesthetics and sites of inequality. The contributors recognize how theatre and performance act as a “distinctive representational practice” in the fight for human rights (2). This volume has two central aims: first, “to chart the extraordinary diversity, depth, and complexity of the encounter between theater, performance, and human rights over the past two decades,” and second, “to open the way toward understanding the character and significance of this encounter” (1). The book is thus an exploration of how theatre and performance are used in support of human rights. The book is divided into three thematic sections: Transnational Justice and Civil Society, The “War on Terror” and the Global Economic Order, and Transnational Publics. The three sections and twelve chapters examine plays and performances across six continents. The theatrical and performance events are closely analyzed in an attempt to investigate phenomenological and physical experiences of theatre and their impact on human rights. The editors asked their contributors to consider the aesthetics, ethics, and effects of theatre and performance as a tool for social change. Section I investigates how theatre and performance assist spectators in reimagining the politics of human rights in the face of large-scale social and national traumas. Ann Lambright focuses on how dead bodies and the mimetic embodiment of the dead can serve in the commemoration of national tragedy as she examines the relationship between the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation [End Page 326] Commission and an activist theatre troupe, Grupo Cultural Yuyachkani (chapter 1). Essays from Luís Madureir (chapter 2) and Paola S. Hernández (chapter 3) investigate contrasting spaces (urban vs. rural, military vs. public) in Mozambique and Buenos Aires, respectively. Brenda Werth examines two plays from Latin America’s Southern Cone that reference the Bosnian War and the Beslan schoolhouse massacre in Russia in order to question dramatic violence as a means for addressing state violence (chapter 4). Section II examines how theatrical practices have met challenges and obstacles (cultural and financial) in the wake of September 11, 2001, and President George W. Bush’s declared War on Terror. In this context, Lindsey Mantoan and Christina Wilson address the use of documentary theatre. Mantoan looks at Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo’s play Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (2004) (chapter 5) and the play’s pushback to the media’s spectacle...

“A somber passion strengthens her voice”: The Stage as Public Platform in British Women’s Suffrage Drama

Writing in The Freewoman in 1912, Rebecca West--herself a supporter of women's suffrage--denounced with characteristic acerbity increasing popularity of degradations of drama written by propagandists, complaining that the public taste has already been so perverted that Suffrage speeches... stand chance of wide popularity. (1) Despite her dismissive tone, West's description of suffrage plays as dislocated Suffrage speeches is worth taking seriously, and it is this generic overlap between political oratory and theatre that is subject of this paper. Many plays written in support of British women's suffrage movement capitalize on similarities between stage and public speaking platform to encourage women to raise their voices in a public forum. While suffrage movement inspired a variety of theatrical activities in Britain, ranging from processions and public demonstrations to dramatic works performed in mainstream West End theatres, plays that concern me here are dramatic works written in overt support of women's suffrage and performed by activist theatre groups such as Actresses' Franchise League and Pioneer Players. Many of these dramatic works break down distinction between play and suffrage speech, creating a distinctive form of political drama. In staging women's struggle to find a public voice, these plays demonstrate importance of audience in successful public expression of a feminist point of view, in keeping with recent feminist theories of voice that have stressed role of listener in feminist writing. The propagandist plays I examine here invoke two very different audiences, both of which play a role in encouraging feminist protagonists to speak publicly: on one hand, an oppositional audience, often hostile or condescending, provokes feminist speaker to engage in debate; on other, a more sympathetic audience encourages speaker to keep going and to see her quest as worthwhile. While supportive audiences tend to be presented in an idealized or fantastic manner, their convergence with actual audience at these suffrage-era productions encourages political action by breaking down distinction between stage and public challenging actual audience members to join suffrage cause and to act on what they hear. The generic convergence of suffrage oratory and drama is enabled by suffrage playwrights' and performers' unapologetic use of theatre for propagandist purposes. Feminist critics interested in British suffrage drama have long recognized and defended propagandistic aspects of these plays, though in so doing they have tended to focus more on plays' female roles and political content than on genre and staging. Suffrage plays, though well received by suffrage supporters, were often dismissed by theatre reviewers as propaganda rather than art, as Katharine Cockin has noted. (2) Suffrage playwrights and performers, however, defended their use of theatre for propaganda purposes. Edith Craig, founder and director of feminist theatre group Pioneer Players, for example, openly admitted in an interview that our plays take place of tracts, (3) while Cicely Hamilton announced proudly in The Vote that suffragists had started a new system of propaganda by means of plays, that was so successful that everybody was trying to steal plays or imitate them in some way (4) Expanding on Ellen Ecker Dolgin's observation that in suffrage drama there exists a dialogic and yet dichotomous relationship between stage and public platform, I argue that suffrage playwrights deliberately exploited connection between drama and political tract or speech to create a new, hybrid genre to authorize their political message. (5) Several critics have noted this connection, but its generic implications have not been fully explored. Carolyn Tilghman and Claire Hirshfield have both recognized these plays as new forms of protest drama that use stage as a public but they also emphasize authors' appropriation of conventional genres and formulae such as melodrama or fallen woman play. …

Innovation through Collaboration

The true meaning of collaborative contemporary arts practice is personified by El Hadji Sy (El Sy), the internationally renowned painter, curator and live performance installationist who – along with fellow Senegalese intellectual and activist Issa Samb and theatre director Yussufa John – founded the influential Dakar-based collective Laboratoire AGIT’ART.

Outperforming activism: reflections on the demise of the surveillance camera players

When the Surveillance Camera Players disbanded in 2006 after a decade of political activist theatre on the streets of New York City, they had already achieved international recognition for a unique style of performance that focused on the numerous ways in which surveillance cameras undercut long-established notions of privacy and consent. Beyond that important focus, however, this essay paper suggests that the Surveillance Camera Players pursued a mode of performance activism that underestimated the ways that surveillance technologies themselves perform. Understanding how those technologies perform and how they continue to evolve through those performances, the essay argues, is an indispensible prerequisite for an effective activism against a society that is increasingly structured by the tools, mechanisms and technologies of surveillance.