Re: RAT Politics and Theatre

[Eric Galatas <eric@freespeech.org>]

Maybe this isn't useful, but the first thing that comes to mind is another 
question, where do political activism and theater break apart?

Broadly defined, there's a lot of "theater" going on in our modern world 
that serves to distract, to literally remove people from any part of the 
political arena.

Shopping Malls, integrated electronic publicity communications (ie, 
Commercial Mass Media), and Broadway Musicals are just a few examples.

A very decent theater history professor of mine once turned me onto the 
"jongleur" tradition of Italian street theater, back in early colonial 
times.  To these artists, theater should become a "sharp tongue," and burst 
the bubble of dominant discourse.  For the jongleur, the bubble was a 
political problem.  It enabled ordinary people to go about their daily 
lives without any sense of their complicity in the brutalities happening in 
their name.  It was also an illusion, a pragmatic social hallucination, 
maintained and fostered by elites, to keep the masses from recognizing 
their own very real capacity to change power relations.  Not too far from 
some other definitions of theater, making visible that which is hidden.

These folks had to stand on street corners to do their work, mostly.  They 
weren't invited into the parlours of aristocrats, or into most history 
books for that matter.

Theater that does not seek to distract, or to buttress existing systems of 
power, is quite a challenge -- particularly in the best entertained and 
least educated, yet most powerful and brutal, nation on the planet.  I'm 
curious to see what other RATs think about this topic.


Eric


At 09:59 PM 05/31/2001 -0600, Mare Trevathan Philpott wrote:
>Okay wonderRATpowers activate!
>
>I'm at Anne Bogart's SITI workshop in Saratoga Springs, NY.  As part of her
>"Composition" class, I'm directing and composing with 4 actors a piece on
>the Group Theatre.  The question we are looking at addressing is:
>
>"Where do theatre and political activism intersect?"
>
>There is some disagreement within OUR group about whether or not this is an
>intriguing question as "all theatre is political."
>
>What do you think?  Is it redundant?  A dead horse?
>
>My position is that there is a distinction between politics and political
>activism.  But I'm having trouble honing in on the articulation of that
>distinction.
>
>Thanks!
>mare
>Mare Philpott
>
>
>
>
>---------------------------------------
>To [un]subscribe to the rat-list, send an email to 
>"majordomo@ratconference.com"
>with [un]subscribe rat-list" in the body of the message.
>For information on other functions send a message containing the word
>"help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.
>---------------------------------------
>You may also [un]subscribe on the web at 
>http://www.ratconference.com/cgi-bin/web_domo.pl?list=rat-list




---------------------------------------
To [un]subscribe to the rat-list, send an email to "majordomo@ratconference.com"
with [un]subscribe rat-list" in the body of the message.
For information on other functions send a message containing the word
"help" to the same address. Do not use quotes in your message.
---------------------------------------
You may also [un]subscribe on the web at http://www.ratconference.com/cgi-bin/web_domo.pl?list=rat-list