Staging Resistance: Essays on Political Theater, and: Radical Street Performance: An International Anthology (review)

What has political theatre become at the end of the twentieth century? How does it remain useful for progressive social critique? In what locations can theatre do its most effective political work, and for which audiences? What forms of theatre best inspire political action, and which are more suited for subtler changes in consciousness that provoke, by accretion, lasting changes in attitudes and social practices? These two books address these issues sometimes explicitly, sometimes obliquely, using a diverse range of methodologies to assess theatre and performance’s political efficacy. Where Staging Resistance contributes historically and politically contextual readings of geographically varied theatre texts and performances, Radical Street Performance offers an array of political and national sites at which performance intervenes in social meanings, often prompting spectators to action. Read together, the two volumes offer a rich illustration of critics’, theorists’, and practitioners’ use of theatre and performance to promote social change.

These books also provoke not a small share of admiration (and sometimes, nostalgia) for theatre practice and critical writing that took its relation to the public sphere seriously enough to consider itself dangerous. In fact, sections of Radical Street Performance chronicle, often in compelling first-person narratives, how dangerous popular (or “people’s”) theatre remains in countries fighting against totalitarian or colonialist power regimes. Ngu]gñ wa Thiong’o notes that in the community-based theatre he began in Kenya in the late 1970s, the “empty space” of theatre sufficiently threatened the government that he was imprisoned for a year without trial in a maximum security prison. He writes, “They were trying to stop the emergence of an authentic language of Kenyan theatre” (243). Dwight Conquergood’s ethnography of his work with a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand describes how the performances he created with the refugees shared vital information about health and sanitation, using Hmong performative traditions that established cultural continuity in the midst of severe physical and cultural dislocation. At the same time, L. Dale Byam’s essay on performance in post-colonial Africa challenges the very concept of “street performance,” noting that streets in Africa were built by colonizers eager to despoil native resources.

The volume is a compilation of short essays and excerpts, mostly from previously published sources (nine of the thirty-four essays were commissioned for the book). Much of Radical Street Performance’s attraction lies in the broadly cultural way in which it defines “performance.” For example, Richard Schechner writes about carnivalesque moments in the Tiananmen Square uprising, using performance studies to investigate the radically changed use of the public space before the government tanks arrived. Cohen also includes excerpts from an essay by Tolstoy, detailing the changing face of art after the 1917 Russian Revolution and an excerpt documenting troupes of actors traveling with the Red Army in the years before the Chinese revolution. These are juxtaposed with discussions of the Nuremberg rallies as street performance (demonstrating Cohen’s admission that “radical” encompasses both left and right, although all but this essay considers leftist performances); discussions of Chilean art practices wrested from institutional settings to become graphic representations of political sentiment; discussions of Boal’s invisible theatre; and discussions of Adrian Piper’s subversive street performances, which unmasked the operation of xenophobia and U.S. racism as they played over her own body.

Some well-known activist groups and organizations are represented here in first-hand accounts of their confrontational street strategies. Lauren Berlant and Elizabeth Freeman’s essay on Queer Nation is reprinted here; the Pink Panther’s “Bash Back” outings, and Queer Nation’s “Queer Night Out” actions take on new texture when read through their borrowings from the guerilla theatre that Abbie Hoffman, elsewhere in the volume, employed in his media blitzes in the 1960s. Greenpeace’s early...