Performing Politicians: A CTR Wrecking Ball

On Monday, 28 September, just weeks before the 2015 federal election, former Prime Minister Stephen Harper appeared simultaneously on stages across the country.

In Winnipeg, Harper surfaced as an impersonal robot. Labouring single-mindedly over piles of paper, this economist-Harper tuned out all happenings of the outside world in an effort to produce what he saw as that one “sweet budget.” “This is important work, okay?” he told all those who would get in between him and his numbers: “I’m making important decisions. Decisions that will make people at my job congratulate me on my decision-making skills and tell me what a great job I’m doing!!” (Wiest).

In Toronto, Harper played host to an especially racist dinner party, his late arrival well timed to follow an unsavoury invective against refugees and immigrants. “99% of the people who are lambasting you about the bleeding Muslim fucking refugees were not going to vote for you anyways so I say fuck them and fuck the refugees!” growled Harper’s political strategist Lynton Crosby, pounding his knife into a juicy roast leg of lamb. “NO MORE REFUGEES! NO MORE IMMIGRANT FUCKING MASHED POTATOES!” (Ambrose 4).

In Edmonton, Harper took questions from a voter while hiding from ISIS inside a cardboard box … a box, quite fittingly, labelled “Old Stock beer.” When Harper exited the scene, having conveniently dodged all queries posed, he nearly tripped on a refugee lying at his feet. “Is that an Iraqi or a Syrian?” he asked, stepping over the new Canadian casually as he made his way to the wings (see Marty Chan’s The Interview in this issue).

These are just a few of the many Harper sightings on offer at The Wrecking Ball 19: #ELXN42, a night of political theatre staged in multiple Canadian cities in advance of the 2015 federal election. Hardly one-off occurrences, they form part of a much longer tradition of Wrecking Balls, cabaret-style events initiated in 2004 by director Ross Manson and playwright Jason Sherman to provide a space for emerging and established artists to showcase politically engaged theatre work. For more than a decade now, local theatres across Canada have assembled Wrecking Ball crews to respond to pressing political issues, and to respond swiftly. In this respect, Wrecking Balls are modelled after the Living Newspaper, a form of agitprop theatre used in various historical and national contexts to dramatize current events for a popular audience—from the daily headlines staged by out-of-work journalists and theatre artists as part of the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theatre Project in the US in the 1930s to the Newspaper Theatre centrally featured in the Theatre of the Oppressed pioneered by Brazilian theatre director Augusto Boal. Resonating with the Living Newspaper’s affinity for the contemporaneous and the immediate, the Wrecking Ball’s only two rules are that “the work should be ripped straight from the current headlines” and “should only be rehearsed the week before the performance” (The Wrecking Ball).

Wrecking Ball shows have tackled a wide range of political topics as they gain currency within public discourse. Among others, these have included police brutality (entitled #deadcoonTO), LGBT-related human rights (For Russia with [Gay] Love), Idle No More, Occupy, and #YesAllWomen. So too, as illustrated by the opening examples, these events routinely wrestle with ideologies embodied by political figures, parties, and platforms, and often do so when elections are just around the corner. In fact, the 2015 stagings of Harper are ghosted by the Prime Minister’s appearance at the previous Wrecking Balls organized around the 2011 federal election. At the time, audiences were treated to a vain and misogynistic Harper shown yelling at his hairstylist as she grooms him for a media appearance (Sean Dixon’s Grooming Mr. Harper), as well as an encounter between Harper, Gilles Duceppe, Michael Ignatieff, and Jack Layton in a therapy session, a fantasy space where they tried to work out their personal and political differences (Marcus Youssef, In Treatment). These past stagings, in turn, reverberate against Wrecking Ball responses to the 2008 federal elections, and also smaller-scale events such...