In his book Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers, Dan Friedman gives us an overview of a global emergent movement. He attempts, quite successfully, to comprehensively illustrate the development of the movement many of us call performance activism, which Friedman summarizes as "the conscious activity of approaching performance as a means of engaging social issues and conflicts in order to reconstruct/transform social reality" (142). As he accurately describes in the introduction, "this book ... can only capture a particular moment" in the evolution of the movement and it is "at best, a snapshot" (4). Nevertheless, the information is both accessible to the uninitiated and enriching for the experienced practitioner.
The book is divided in three parts: Part I "Performance Leaves the Theatre and Joins the Revolution," Part II "(Some of) What Performance Activism Does," and Part III "Re-performing the World." In the first part, Friedman traces the history of how performance moved into the sphere of social change. The stage is set with "Ritual, Performance, Activism" a chapter that gives a broad summary of the ancient world-wide use of performance as participatory ritual and where Friedman borrows George Thomson's theory of where and how theatre—which Friedman describes as "the separation of actors from audiences"—became the dominant form of performance (10). All the remaining chapters in this section focus on a series of performance revolutions during the 20th century, where the traditional ideas of the theatre as they were established by the Greeks, Chinese and Indians began to be widely challenged.
"Agit-Prop" gives the reader an overview of the movement that developed during and in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917 where "hundreds of thousands of industrial workers embraced performance as something they could, and should, do to help promote and shape the revolution they were participating in," making it the largest performance movement to date (18). Later in the chapter, as he will continue to do throughout the rest of the book, Friedman cites the contributions of agit-prop to the broader performance activism movement as: shifting who gets to perform (industrial workers instead of trained actors) and the context of those performances which, despite exhibiting the traditional split between audiences and actors, were performed at "rallies, meetings and ... [through] direct action" (30). By continuously moving between historical account and present discussion, Friedman helps bring his readers along, so that as we progress through the pages, we can make meaningful connections.
The chapter on "Improvisation," is centered around the life and work of "the mother of modern [theatre] improvisation" Viola Spolin (35). Spolin's work used games, and play more broadly, as a building block for performance, really focusing on "cooperation and the building of the group" between players—how Spolin referred to actors (40). This opened the door to the development of improv theatre as we know it today, making her contributions to performance activism significant "in democratizing who is allowed to perform and blurring the borders of acting on stage and performing in other aspects of life" (35). In the chapter on "Psychodrama and Sociodrama" Friedman shares Jacob Moreno's use of theatre and performance for therapeutic means, and he cites him as "the first in modern times to successfully retrieve performance from the theatre and attempt to return it to explicitly clinical, that is, healing ends" (48). Friedman goes on to contextualize Moreno's contributions in the broader landscape that developed in the later portion of the twentieth century including the "drama therapy" movement and its "most widespread, influential, and direct descendent" Playback Theatre (52).
"Happenings, Be-Ins, and Flash Mobs" summarizes these contributions to performance activism which in different ways contested the "view of/approach to performance itself" and demonstrated that "not all performing is acting" (62). Continuing to deepen on the contribution of visual art to move performance away from the stage, Friedman dedicates chapter 7 to "Performance Art." Here, he cites the importance of this movement emerging hand in hand with Second Wave Feminism, where pioneers like Carolee Schneemann and Yoko Ono made significant contributions centering the individual body as material, reinforcing the possibility of performing as oneself instead of a character, and challenging "the assumption that performance was an activity distinct from daily life" (68).
Contributions from inside the institution of the theatre are documented in the chapter on "Avant-Garde Theatre," where diverse movements like Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism and Epic Theatre questioned the notion of what theatre was and shared "the assumption that challenging our accepted ways of seeing and behaving was their role as artists in the historic task of social and cultural transformation" (76). Part I ends with the most comprehensive chapter of the bunch, on "Performativity and the Sixties" focusing on the period between 1955-1974 where key developments "extended the concept and practice of performance beyond the stage and expanded the range of who was allowed to/did perform" (96). Here, Friedman begins with the contributions from Richard Schechner and the Performance Group through Environmental Theatre, where Schechner "was including the environment as an aesthetic element in the totality of the production" making room for the space to be used in its entirety by both performers and audiences (97); then introduces us to Ritualist Theatre through the work of the Living Theatre who created participatory rituals where a play was "no longer an enactment but the act itself" (108); Street and Guerilla Theatre tracing the influence of "the four most influential street theatres of the time:" Bread and Puppet Theatre, the San Francisco Mime Troupe, El Teatro Campesino, and the New York City Street Theatre Caravan (116); and ends with Pranksters, Hog Farmers, and Diggers who exemplify the crucial shift for the performance activism movement that the Sixties brought, where "much energy [was] being directed toward making life more like the theatre" (130). Performance was beginning to be used "not simply as a tool to be applied to the struggle for social change ... but performance, brought into daily life, as itself the social change" (131).
This brief historical overview, though not exhaustive, offers important context on how the understandings of performance, theatre, audience-performer relationships, and the stage, frame the day-to-day practices that myself, and other contemporary performance activists use in a wide range of locations and situations. Thus, it gives a solid foundation to engage with Part II "(Some of) What Performance Activism Does." Here Friedman shares several examples of practitioners' efforts to democratize performance in a series of "vignettes and portraits of varying lengths and depths, intended to provide a mosaic-like overview of performance activism" at the time of the writing (143). Friedman divides these into categories, attempting to give the reader an understanding of what this movement has done/is doing around the world. Though each portrait is assigned to one of the chapters on Educating, Politicizing, Building Bridges, Creating Community Conversations, Healing Trauma, Reinitiating Creativity, and Building Community, in practice, performance activists' work often does multiple of these activities simultaneously.
In this second part of the book, we learn about initiatives like Creative Actors Initiative for Development (CRAID) in Nigeria as a contemporary example of Theatre for Development, where his leader Bashiru Akande Lasisi uses theatre to both entertain and educate villagers in rural areas about a wide range of health and social issues (153); Savana Trust in Zimbabwe, where after beginning with guerilla theatre efforts, founder and director Daniel Maposa began "re-tooling its work from producing plays to generating activities and environments in which "ordinary people" ... could through performance begin to engage the various strata of authority" (186); and the Kamiriithu Education and Culture Center in Kenya, which in the 1970s was "created through a collaboration between progressive artists and intellectuals and local peasants and workers ... [revealing] the potential of performance to catalyze community building" (216).
We also learn about artists like Colombian Héctor Aristizábal, who using his background in psychology, theatre and activism created Nightwind, a solo performance piece, where "he reenacts his arrest and torture [at the hands of the Colombian government] which then, using dynamic meditation and Image Theatre, flows into a participatory workshop in which he works with the audience ... to engage the traumas in their lives and communities" (201); English born Peter Harris, who in Israel uses "performance as a way for people with very different histories, views, and attitudes—even Arabs and Jews who have been at various states of conflict for a hundred years—to see and hear each other in ways that would otherwise not be possible" (178); and Alexandra Southerland and Luvuyo Yanta who in South Africa bring bilingual theatre workshops into Makhanda's Grahamstown Prison conducted in both English and Xhosa (206).
Part III "Re-Performing the World," is a case study of social therapeutics, a specific approach to performance activism that developed in New York City in the last decades of the twentieth century. As one of the leaders and builders of this approach, this is perhaps the biggest contribution Friedman gives to the literature concerning this movement, as he asserts himself "social therapeutic performance activism is rarely referenced in Theatre, Performance Studies, or Sociological literature" (235). The first chapter, "Performance as a Way of Life," begins by explaining how the conceptual theory behind social therapeutics developed. Citing Fred Newman, one of the main developers of this theory, Friedman emphasizes the importance of bringing performance into daily life "to broaden each person's notion of 'what you're allowed to do'" to grow out of stuck roles that keep us from developing (qtd. in 238). What this does, is allow people, in our variety of social roles, to be "constantly emergent" rather than fixed characters that we need to stay consistent with. As a performance activist that has shaped and been shaped by this community since 2011, I can attest to the power and freedom of this approach. Nowhere else have I found the support to continuously reinvent myself and my work to remain congruent with who I am becoming—even when at times, this has moved me away from the community. As Friedman states, "social therapeutic performance activism is an improvisational approach to living one's life and embodying one's values by consciously performing who-one-is-becoming in the context of who-one-is" (238).
"Community Organizing as Performance" shares the practical organizing activity that has accompanied the theoretical discoveries of Newman and his intellectual partner Lois Holzman. Sharing brief histories from a talent show, a theatre, a school, a corporate improvisation troupe and a series of youth programs, the reader can get a broad and comprehensive look at what is possible when you have an entire community performing their development and creating their culture. One of the most relevant contributions from this community, is their political commitment to grass roots fundraising and the role that performance has in their organizing of community and the building of their programs. Of building the Castillo Theatre, Friedman writes:
We didn't just want to make theatre for the people, but with the people. We wanted theatre as a part of our community organizing, but we didn't yet know if the community wanted theatre. Our outreach on the streets was, therefore, not only a fiscal necessity, it was also an organizing strategy. All of our organizing, including our street solicitation, embodied our understanding that to build activities and organizations that could, in the long haul, seriously engage and challenge society's systemic injustices, we needed those activities and organizations to be financially independent of the state and other traditional funding sources. Each conversation on the street or at the front door was a chance to talk politics, to talk culture, to see what a cross section of New Yorkers thought about the value of an independently funded political theatre .... Each conversation was an offer, an offer to do something out of the ordinary, to contribute to a progressive cultural project. When people give they have a stake in what is being built, and giving is not limited to money (263).
The last chapter of the book engages important questions about sustainability and long-term impact/change. "Ontology, Community, Sustainability" opens up the crucial question that most performance activists, regardless of their background, are trying to address: "To what extent, and in what ways, is performance activism, of any type, actually capable of 'making anew' [of generating new possibilities]?" (270). To answer this question, Friedman borrows the term cultural hegemony from Antonio Gramsci, the founder of the Italian Communist Party, summarizing it as "something that develop[s] over generations and centuries of interplay between various social strata/classes as they together ... buil[d] the economy and the political institutions that make up society" (271). He goes on to explain how even though the ruling class controls the cultural production at any given time, "the rest of us also play a role in the creation and perpetuation of cultural hegemony" (271). This acknowledgement—that we are all active creators/perpetuators of our own culture—also gives us the understanding that we are capable of, as Fred Newman would say, re-performing it (270). Yet, as Gramsci pointed out, because of the imbalance of power in our cultures, we need "working-class people to develop their own cultural and educational institutions in order to consciously begin to challenge the prevailing hegemony" (272). Therefore, by engaging people in performing in new ways, performance activism "engage[s] cultural hegemony, that is, organize[s] environments in which 'ordinary people' can generate culture and development, [and] in the process discover new ways of seeing and being" (272).
The chapter ends with a re-definition of the word community, where Friedman shares, once again the political choice of reframing how we relate to a cultural construct. The communities being created by performance activism efforts around the world are emergent, "unlike traditional communities, [they] are not based on the past or simply what exists, but on the what-is-becomingness inherent in performance. Membership is not predetermined, it is a choice" (279). This understanding of community has been crucial in the development of my own work as a performance activist in the past decade, where I have been contributing to the development and growth of social therapeutic performance activism in the Spanish-speaking world and what is currently known as Latin America. I have done this by building and participating in two communities of choice: an international network of colleagues from Costa Rica, Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Honduras, and Panamá who have been working tirelessly to make activities and theoretical materials available in Spanish, and a local community nested in the Chihuahuan desert where I live between the cities of El Paso, Texas, USA and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. In the latter, I, along with a group of committed educators, artists, psychologists, activists, and community builders have been developing two performance activist projects: The Institute for Improvisation and Social Action (ImprovISA), housed in El Paso, and our growing binational coalition Performing Communities de Esperanza (PCE) in collaboration with the Centro Fred Newman para la Terapia Social housed in Ciudad Juárez. These ventures have been continuously emergent, as Friedman states of social therapeutic performance activism, "it has been, and continues to be, an improvisation .... Each performance activist project and community creates itself in the context of its own culture and circumstance" (284). As Friedman suggests, we have been grounded in the courage of not-knowing and build, as the improvisers that we are, with what is offered at every moment (277).
This improvisation has brought, in the past few years, a big shift to the nature of the work I lead with ImprovISA and PCE. As I deepen my learning and commitment to ancestral and indigenous practices through growing relationships with teachers, colleagues, and friends from the Muisca tribe in my ancestral homeland in Abya Yala and with the Tiguas in the territory where I live, I have come to recognize the anthropocentrism of performance activism—also reflected in the content of this book. Except for the brief mention of Héctor Artistizábal's current work with Reconectando where he and his colleagues are aiming to move "beyond the anthropocentric paradigm to developing an eco-psychosocial approach," there is no mention of land, Mother Earth, more-than-human nature, our ancestors, or other invisible forces in our world being part of the communities we are part of and create (204). To correct this exclusion, we (performance activists) need to take responsibility to listen and learn from our ancestral practices, indigenous leaders and from Mother Earth herself. In my case, this has meant significantly reshaping, not only my understanding of the world, but also my practice—as a dancemaker, educator, mother, and performance activist.
After three years of committing myself to this new path, I shared in the fall of 2022, the first performance activist project I am leading through this indigenous and eco-social lens. Experiencing the Bosque, is a multi-generational, interspecies project that brings together performance making, community organizing and environmental stewardship in the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo valley. Through workshops and performances, we are inviting the public to reconsider, reimagine and indeed reperform their relationships to water, land, and more-than-human nature. As this book clearly shows, performance is a powerful tool and methodology to grow beyond who and where we are, and at this crucial time in our planet's survival, we need to, as a species, urgently broaden our conception of what community is, consider how our old performances resonate beyond the human world, and create new ones that bring us closer to our spirit, to all our relatives, and to the magic that is palpable in our world.
Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers offers a rich overview of performance in the sphere of social change. In its pages, Dan Friedman does a phenomenal job threading theory with practice, and history with contemporary activity while explicitly highlighting for the reader what is most relevant for the discussion at hand. Though it reflects the movement's overwhelming anthropocentrism, it is worthwhile for students, teachers, researchers, and otherwise curious readers eager to re-invent themselves and change the world.
— Reviewed by Sandra Paola López Ramírez, The University of Texas at El Paso
