Fighting in the Streets: Dramaturgies of Popular Protest, 1968—1989

Abstract

Everybody would agree that agitational political theatre has fallen on hard times, but whether this is due to a changed political climate, a changed theatre, or a more politicized relationship between companies and funding bodies remains a matter for debate. Here, Baz Kershaw adopts a lateral approach to the problem, looking not at dramatized forms of protest but at protest as an action which has itself become increasingly theatricalized – in part owing to its own tactics and choices, in part to the ways in which media coverage creates its own version of politics as performance. After looking at the major focuses of protest in two decades after 1968, Baz Kershaw examines the ways in which political and performance theory has and has not addressed the issue. Presently Head of the Department of Theatre Studies in the University of Lancaster, his previous publications includeEngineers of the Imagination: the Welfare State Handbook(with Tony Coult, 1983) andthe Politics of Performance: Political Theatre as Cultural Intervention(1992).

Performing “in the red”: transformations and tensions in repertoires of contention during the 2012 Quebec student strike

“…These tended toward the non-hierarchical logic of the 'multitude' and organizing tactic of the 'swarm' made popular during the anti-WTO Seattle protests of 1999 (Hardt & Negri, 2004;Virno, 2004). They also embodied a range of protest dramaturgies inherited from late twentieth century theatrical protest repertoires (Kershaw, 1997;Schechner, 1992). What allowed the events of 2012 to become recognized not only as a student strike but as a popular movement such that by March 2012 it had garnered national and international media attention and been dubbed the 'Maple Spring' was how these three types of organizing modalities functioned in uneasy alliance.…”

Rêve Général Illimité?The Role of Creative Protest in Transforming the Dynamics of Space and Time During the 2012 Quebec Student Strike

“…In the early twentieth century, the surrealists sought to blur the division between the “real” world and the world of “dreams” as a revolutionary gesture to bring that which seemed impossible into existence, and the Situationists sought to democratize this act with a rejection of consumer culture and a re‐appropriation of culture by those who live it (Plant ). Legacies of these movements can be seen through their re‐invention in the “reclaim the streets” movement, theatrics of Act‐up and various other colorful gay and queer activism particularly in the 1980s, as well as in the re‐invention of de‐centralized carnivalesque protest in the alter‐globalization movement (Hardt and Negri ; Kershaw ; Routledge ; Shepard ). However, by the end of the twentieth century, the infinite ability of capital to appropriate even the most revolutionary of visions and acts as commodity object or prototype for the “experience economy” has raised substantial skepticism toward this approach to challenging capitalist dynamics and systems (Epstein ; Plant ).…”

“…Such usages of street art within social movements have a long history in Quebec (Lamoureux ). Indeed, much of the discourse and tactics utilized in the streets of Quebec in the spring of 2012 were borrowed and adapted from previous student strikes and social movements, locally, nationally and globally, drawing on protest repertoires popularized in the 1960s and 1970s (Kershaw ; Plant ; Shepard ). Following the Seattle protests at the end of the twentieth century, “swarm” theories of street activism began to proliferate (Arquilla and Ronfeldt ; Hardt and Negri ).…”

“…Over the past several decades, numerous scholars have detailed the importance of cultural memory and the development of performative protest repertoires in mobilizing resistance and challenging ways of conceiving and engaging in social organization (Mische et al ; Taylor ; Tilly ; Shepard ). The role of play and creativity in transforming a sense of possible social configurations (Kershaw ; Lamoureux ; Schechner ) and the relationships between the personal and the political (Kolonel Klepto and Major Up Evil ; Routledge ) have been increasingly stressed in the literature on creative and artistic activism. The risks that such playful resistance could act as distraction from direct action and ongoing social organizing have also been noted (Graeber ; Shepard ).…”

Wild times and domesticated times: the temporalities of environmental lifestyles and politics

“…In Turner's terms, the typical protest is a social drama with a standard narrative form-that of breach, crisis, redress then reintegration. Of course, different protests can follow different plots; the changing form of protest over recent decades-from the orderly, linear CND march to the riotous carnivals of reclaim the Streets or Seattle in 1999-can themselves reveal much about the nature of the societies that generated them (Kershaw, 1997;Szerszynski, 1999).…”