[How] Does Activist Performance Work?

At a recent theater conference, my colleague Tamara Underiner and I convened a seminar exploring the intersections of performance and activism. Participants responded strongly to discussion around those topics — and their relationship to scholarship.

Tamara and I also share a research interest in border performance. While her current scholarship focuses on a border-crossing theme park in Hidalgo Mexico, I work with members of a Palestinian/Israeli theater group who have developed an interactive “checkpoint” scenario performed for and with high school students. Both performances draw attention to the border as an imagined idea as well as a physical site.

"The Daily Show" reporter Dan Bakkedahl with Dora the Explorer

One media reference to the theme of border crossing helps us to consider this point about the borders’ imagined construction, as well as others related to the topic of our seminar, how activist performance works. Reporting on TV’s “The Daily Show,” Dan Bakkedahl (see here with Dora the Explorer) narrates his experience in Mexico in a manner that adopts and mocks the “Indiana Jones-style” of on-the-spot television reportage. “I crossed the border under cover of darkness,” he murmurs, evoking images of heroic danger. Yet, this romantic posturing is immediately punctured by the next image that we see: Bakkedahl, sprawled open-mouthed and asleep in an airplane seat. This contradictory juxtaposition produces a humorous jolt, one that may also raise consciousness about the ignorance and arrogance of those who demonize Mexicans for crossing “illegally” ‘under cover of darkness’ (while benefiting enormously from their labor), yet remain largely unaware of their own cultural privilege. Like Bakkedahl in his sleep-mask, many are blind to the fact that border crossing is a lot easier for some than for others.

The capacity for a performance to reveal these kinds of contradictions, and awaken us to our own blind spots, relates to how our seminar participants argue that activist performance works. Where ideological control works by concealing the operations of power so that individuals develop unconscious habits of thinking, humorous exaggeration can make these operations visible, allowing habits of thought and behavior to be examined rather than simply reiterated. Humor also evokes joy, referencing the playfulness that can generate the shared emotions that strengthen collective actions.

Yet, the conversations in our seminar raise questions that complicate the terms of “collective action” in relation to effectiveness, activism and affect. Without attempting to summarize a discussion that took place over several weeks in virtual space, and two hours in a seminar room, I’d like to share a few of those questions and tensions:

1. Might theater, and the relationships it produces, also be the site of social change?

   ACTIVISM: What qualifies as “activism”? Is theater mainly a precondition, and if so a necessary one, for large-scale social movements, like the Czech Revolution, and U.S. feminism that require long-term duration? Or might theater, and the relationships it produces, also be the site of social change? According to Rachel Chaves, In zAmya, a theater bringing together the homeless and the housed, it is the act of storytelling that is political — the material act of homeless bodies standing on stage telling their own stories disrupts the received images of homeless people as deeply disempowered.
2. EFFECTIVENESS: Is the work of activist theater more about generating spaces of community and counter-culture (the Women’s Experimental Theatre, the Paterson Strike Pageant) or is theater more about generating public spaces of internal debate, which some argue is the foundation of democracy?
3. AFFECT: In probing the link between the feeling and substance of social justice, have we shifted a discussion about affect from righteous anger or empathy towards a longing for interaction? In doing so, have we unearthed a new set of challenges?

We also touched upon:

• The acknowledgment that “activist” does not necessarily stand in for “progressive”
• Our responsibility as scholars to archive failure with critical generosity
• Relations among scholarship, activism and performance in which we expand and think differently about how we produce and communicate knowledge. For example, rather than conceiving of artists/scholars or activist/journalists can we think about “artivists” who document their work? Squatters who think critically and communicate through multiple mediums about their actions?

A significant number of papers noted the importance of metaphor that generates a space for the audience to interact imaginatively with performance. We also marked the importance of collaboratively creating meaning that models participatory democracy, a model that allows for difference and dissent. That kind of collaborative creation finally relates to the state of theater as scholarship. While we create spaces at conferences for collaborative research, seminars, and working groups — this statement has itself been produced dialogically with my seminar co-convener and all of the participants — knowledge production in our academic field still tends to be “counted” within the framework of an individualist model.

In some ways theater scholars are figured like Dan Bakkedahl’s reporter: the intrepid singular researcher going forth into the field to generate new knowledge. We do have the freedom to cross a number of intellectual, ideological, and geographic borders, and our profession does a fair job of pointing out where we step into dangerous territories produced by our own blind spots. But, we must continue to find ways to challenge institutional structures that under-value collaborative authorship. We must find better ways of articulating ourselves as public intellectuals through multiple modes of communication mediums and a variety of vernaculars. We need to act together to honor and affirm the institutional importance of the collaborative production of knowledge in our field. As Dora the Explorer — a complex border-crossing performer in her own right — might say, “Vamanos!”

NOTE: The author would like to credit John Fletcher and Tamara Underiner for collaborating on the American Society for Theatre Research seminar (Phoenix, Arizona, November 15-18, 2007, and thank the 15 seminar participants who helped to develop the ideas expressed in this essay.

Sonja Arsham Kuftinec is associate professor of theatre at the University of Minnesota who has published widely on community-based and activist theater. Kuftinec also works as a director, dramaturg and conflict-resolution facilitator with youth. She is currently at work on a book exploring theater, facilitation and nation formation in the Balkans and Middle East, based on her own and others' performance activism.

Original CAN/API publication: February 2008