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

http://www.sfmt.org/index.php

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Mime_Troupe

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare

http://www.guerrillagirls.com/