Volume 24 · Number 3 · Spring 2007
Protesters wearing official-looking 'uniforms' of the 'Oil Enforcement Agency' infiltrate the November 2006 Los Angeles Auto Show. (Photo: L.M. Bogad)
Upstaging the Establishment
In a time of media overload, “guerrilla theatre” activists are using irreverence,irony and even fun to get their message across.
Edinburgh, July 2005. Riot police, mobilized to preserve public order in the face of mass demonstrations against the G8 Summit, encounter dozens of clowns doing the hokey-pokey in the middle of the street. The police shove the clowns down the road with their riot shields, but instead of running or reacting angrily, the clowns begin to cheerfully play with the police, dusting their boots and shields with feather dusters and kissing the shields. After several minutes of this confrontational silliness, the police fall back and march away at double-time. In absurdist interviews and press conferences, these members of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA: www.clownarmy.org) express serious criticism of the G8’s policies on global warming and African debt; these comments are published and disseminated as a hard center of critique wrapped up in a sweet and cushiony clownish candy coating.
Amsterdam, 1966. A group of young radicals begins giving out pamphlets to passersby on the street without a permit, despite a law that requires police permission for the distribution of political leaflets. The police move in to confiscate the material, which turns out to be blank pieces of paper. “Write your own manifestos!” shout the smiling youths, known as the “Provos” (short for provocateurs).
Los Angeles, November 2006. At the Los Angeles Auto Show, plainclothes “agents” of the “Oil Enforcement Agency” (OEA) infiltrate the Toyota and Ford display floors. They quickly remove their jackets and reveal black uniforms displaying the official seal of the OEA: a skull with crossed gas pumps. The “agents” surround the largest and least fuel-efficient vehicles, taping them off with yellow “climate chaos crime scene” tape. They inform customers that the OEA was created to fulfill the mandate expressed by the president in his most recent State of the Union address, when he said that “America is addicted to oil . . . we must move beyond a petroleum-based economy.” When security officers and police show up, the OEA agents cordially hand over the “crime scene” to their brother officers’ jurisdiction and leave the premises.
New York City, 1968. Several Yippies (members of the Youth International Party or YIP) enter the gallery of the New York Stock Exchange and dump a suitcase full of dollar bills onto the trading floor below. The brokers, already adrenalized by their normal trading activity, go into a frenzy, jumping over one another to grab the money. The voracious but abstract acquisitiveness of finance capital is made concrete on a human and rather unpleasant level, and this image spreads on the news and through verbal retelling.
These are examples of tactical performance, sometimes referred to as “guerrilla theatre” for its hit-and-run, low-budget approach to making a political point in public. Tactical performance is one of many tools that social movements deploy in their attempt to affect public policy, heighten public awareness about an issue, or simply to surprise, delight and challenge popular assumptions, opening up a dialogue where there had been only authoritarian monologue. It’s often a means of getting on TV, of speaking “through the media, not to the media,” for the cash-poor political group that hopes to communicate but cannot afford to buy commercial air time. All of the above examples contain a few commonalities, as widespread as they are in time, style and content:
• All of these “actions” allow for or perhaps expect an intense reaction or even hostile intervention, and indeed have anticipated that reaction and incorporated it into the dramaturgy of the event itself.
• All of these events attempt to use strong and unexpected imagery to make a deeper impression on the viewer.
• The form of the performance is part of the content. These activists are modeling a form of behavior — creative, bodily engaged, surprising, shocking and sometimes even fun dissent — setting an example that they hope others will follow.
Performance is nothing new to activism, of course. The civil rights movement used music, brilliant oratory and well-staged nonviolent resistance to expose the cruelty of American apartheid to the world. The Haymarket Martyrs of 1887, condemned to death for a crime they did not commit, used their gallows scaffold as a stage on which they spoke and performed their last deeds in the hope of inspiring future resistance to the wage-slavery of capitalism.
These performances were all tactical. The distinction between tactical and strategic performance is that tactical performers are operating in a terrain that they do not control; strategic players, like a president or a corporate marketing officer, have the resources to make a direct impact on the terrain, set agendas and even to dictate the rules of the game. It is the difference between the “OEA” and the DEA, between the social movement and the state.
A social movement is not an electoral party or an ethnicity, but an organized group that is engaged in sustained collective action to contest power or policy. Whatever its agenda, social movements face serious challenges in the current era. In post-Sept. 11 America, peaceful activists face surveillance, infiltration, demonization and “preventative arrest.”
Behavior in public space has been increasingly regulated — citizens have been arrested for wearing shirts with political slogans in malls or at presidential events. Indeed, as the flow of foot traffic moves from vanishing Main Streets to shopping malls, de facto public space is itself increasingly privatized, thereby abrogating constitutional First Amendment rights of freedom of assembly and expression. Such rights do not apply on private property.
However, there is a deeper challenge: How does one make a meaningful intervention in the constant flow of images, stories and scandals that citizen-consumers are flooded with every day in our digital information age? Without their own television network, product line or power base, social movements increasingly turn to performance as a savvy, nonviolent way to create irresistible, eye-catching scenes that engage or provoke critical thought. These tactical performances vary not only in content but form — some are straightforward performances where the audience-actor divide is maintained; others involve the direct participation of passersby. Some performances are earnest and sincere from the surface to the core — others, like those of the Clown Army, follow the mantra “serious but not solemn,” where irony and satire are central elements of what is ultimately deeply felt political commitment. Like in the conventional theatre, these “shows” are hardly all “hits”; indeed, many are flops, easily ignored or, perhaps worse, communicating an unintended, backfiring message.
Cliché is the bane of all creativity, and activist performance is no exception. Clichéd approaches to public protest lead to unengaged reception by viewers, who block out the clichéd protesters like so many extras from central casting fading into the background. This has led to creative critique between movement groups. Frustrated by the ineffective dramaturgy of most protesters at an enomous peace demonstration — marching with identical preprinted signs, chanting “Hey hey, ho ho, George Bush has got to go” — members of Absurd Response to an Absurd War (dressed in outrageous costumes and carrying ironic signs) began chanting “Hey hey, ho ho — hey hey ho ho has got to go!”
As viewer sophistication and cynicism increase and attention span decreases, tactical performers need to work harder and smarter to surprise, engage and provoke critical thought. There is also, of course, the inevitable co-optation of these tactics — by rival or opposing movements, or by corporations themselves in the form of guerrilla marketing.
However, the challenge of “getting on TV” that resource-challenged activists face has shifted. More and more people are watching short clips on YouTube as opposed to the nightly network news or even cable news. Indymedia and other Internet-based sites are increasingly the source of information for a fragmented and fast-thinking public.
However, getting on TV is not the only goal of tactical performance. Social movements may need shared worldviews and agendas, but they thrive on shared stories and folklore. These often-outrageous events serve a purpose within movements — creating greater group cohesion through shared risks and absurd experiences, and increasing recruitment of new members by making activism joyous, creative and participatory. While it is hard to measure the tangible efficacy of “guerrilla theatre,” this last effect seems to be consistent — whether the group is dumping money on brokers, handing out blank pamphlets or wearing red noses and making friends with riot police.
L.M. Bogad is associate professor of theatre and dance. His book Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements tells the stories of creative performance activists around the world who run for public office as a humorous prank.