Heather Minette Schutmaat
23
March 2016
Guerrilla Theater
At
the beginning of the semester, during our class’s second discussion of Wole
Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s
Horseman (1975), we learned that in addition to being a playwright, poet,
and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Soyinka has also been a vigorous
and venerable political activist in Nigeria for decades.
Because Death and the King’s
Horseman was based on a real event that occurred in an ancient city in
Nigeria in 1946 when British colonial rulers prevented a ritual suicide from
taking place, and in many ways reads as a statement about culture conflict and
the devastating ramifications of the colonizers’ interference with native
customs (although Soyinka advises against reading it in this way and encourages
readers to instead focus on the metaphysical aspects of the play), I wasn’t
surprised to learn of Soyinka’s extensive political and social involvement in
Nigeria. However, what I did find surprising, owing to my lack of knowledge of
the practice, and incredibly intriguing, was Dr. White’s mention of Soyinka’s
involvement with, and contributions to, guerrilla theater—which is an unexpected
theatrical performance in a public space as a means of protesting, spreading
awareness, and encouraging masses to join political and social movements. Being
a fan of protest art and fascinated by the idea of merging theatrical
performance and political protest, I decided to take the research assignment as
an opportunity to learn about the nature and origins of guerrilla theater.
I
began my research by searching for definitions of guerrilla theater on different
online resources and surveying the consistency between the definitions. Some
sources, such as Merriam-Webster, redirect guerrilla theater to “street theater”
and define it as “drama dealing with controversial social and political issues
that is usually performed outdoors.” Most sources, however, stress that the
practice is a means of protest, and emphasize that the goal of the performance
is to raise awareness of sociopolitical issues and injustices. For example, the
Wikipedia entry for guerrilla theater states, “typically these performances
intend to draw attention to a political/social issue through satire, protest,
and carnivalesque techniques. Many of these performances were a direct result of
the radical social movements of the late 1960s through mid-1970s.” Therefore,
guerrilla theater can be considered a form of street theater, as it is performed
outdoors and in public spaces, but the terms are not interchangeable because
guerrilla theater’s ultimate goal is to bring about social change. The Wikipedia
entry for guerrilla theater also explains that the term guerrilla, (Spanish for
“little war”) was taken from the writings of the Argentine revolutionary Che
Guevara, and guerrilla, “as applied to theatrical events, describes the act of
spontaneous, surprise performances in unlikely public spaces to an unsuspecting
audience.” Moreover, “it is called ‘guerrilla’ because some of its structures have
been adapted from guerrilla warfare—simplicity of tactics, mobility, small bands,
pressure at the points of greatest weakness, surprise” (Schechner 163).
After
becoming familiar with the definition of guerrilla theater, and how it differs
from other theatrical street performances, I searched for videos of
guerrilla
theater online in order to further conceptualize, and visualize, the practice.
In my search I came across the incredibly informative YouTube video “Guerrilla
Theater Documentary” by Eastside Arts Alliance. At the beginning of the
documentary, the guerrilla theater instructor at Eastside Arts Alliance, Eden
Silva Jequinto, provides a very eloquent account of guerrilla theater:
Guerrilla theater derives its meaning from a survival approach by third world
communities, usually peasants, farmworkers, poor people, or folks who are
typically being invaded by an outside force, usually with more material
resources. So it’s been the strategy of these folks to survive by using their
land, using the little resources that they have, and attack the vulnerabilities
of their opponent rather than exhaust their resources. Guerrilla theater,
similarly, is about being resourceful, strategic, and creative in order to
obtain an objective.
Jequinto explains that in guerrilla theater, the tools are the individuals
performing, the public space that they are in, and whoever is around them
watching the performance. The objective is for the actors to get a particular
message across by acting out scenarios of injustice, and getting their audience
to interact with them and to sympathize with their situations.
The documentary also highlights and shows footage of one the oldest and
most successful series of guerrilla theater performances, which was organized by
El Teatro Campesino (farmworkers’ theatrical troupe) during the Delano Grape
Strike in the 1960s. With the help of leaders of El Teatro Campesino, farmers
and workers protested their working and living conditions by bringing guerrilla
theater to their community. Along picket lines farmworkers raised awareness by
performing plays that illustrated their working and living conditions, and the
ways that they were being exploited. Similar to guerrilla warfare, they had to
utilize the few resources they did have and be mobile, so they would perform on
flatbed trucks and go into the fields to engage with other workers and encourage
them to join the movement. As Jequinto states, “Beyond entertainment, guerrilla
theater was also a tool for recruitment.” Owing to guerrilla theater, the
movement grew to over two thousand workers united and “they were able to engage
in a collective bargaining agreement, effectively ending the strike.”
As the Eastside Arts Alliance’s documentary shows, guerrilla theater has a
long national and international history. Another key guerrilla theater group that
I discovered in my research is The San Francisco Mime Troupe that was founded in
1959. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is “a theatre of political satire which
performs free shows in various parks in the San Francisco Bay Area and around
California.” The performances of The San Francisco Mime Troupe centered on
political themes such as “political repression in the United States, the growing
American Civil Right Movement, and military and covert intervention abroad” and
“the group gained significant notoriety for its free performances in Golden Gate
Park and numerous altercations with law enforcement.”
In researching The San Francisco Mime Troupe, I found that it was by the
founder of this group, Ronnie Davis, that the term “guerrilla” was adapted from
war to theater. In Davis’ article “Guerrilla Theater,” published in 1966, Davis
states: “The motives, aspirations, and practice of U.S. theater must be
readapted in order to: teach, direct toward change, be an example of change…The
guerrilla company must exemplify change as a group. The group formation—its
cooperative relationships and corporate identity, must have morality at its
core” (qtd. in Schechner). Here, Davis is talking about his Mime Troupe, but the
nature of guerrilla theater and all the major troupes involved with the practice,
both nationally and internationally, relate to the ideas expressed in Davis’
article, and share the goal of social and political change.
In my research, especially with the help of Jequinto of Eastside Arts
Alliance, I learned much about the nature and history of guerrilla theater, the
sort of objectives that guerrilla theater aims to obtain and how the groups go
about obtaining their objectives with tactics similar to guerrilla warfare, as
well as became familiar with some of the most notable guerrilla theater groups.
For my next research post, I plan to discover to what extent guerrilla theater
still thrives in today’s society, and to research more extensively a
contemporary guerrilla theater group, such as The Guerrilla Girls, who are “an
anonymous group of feminist, female artists” who use guerrilla art tactics to
raise awareness of, and fight against, racism and sexism in the art world.
Work
Cited
Schechner, Richard. “ guerrilla Theatre: May 1970.”
The MIT Press 14.3 (1970): 163-168.
JSTOR.
Web
Links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q56Ftqem_e8
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/street%20theater
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_theatre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teatro_Campesino
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Mime_Troupe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare http://www.guerrillagirls.com/
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