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Performance Activism –
A Brief Introduction

Performance Activism is an emerging international movement of individuals and organizations that practice and promote play and performance because of their power to develop people and communities. It is simultaneously a new approach to performance and a new kind of social activism. The origins of performance activism are to be found in grassroots organizing by activists, educators, health and mental health practitioners, theatre and other artists around the world who are working to engage non-growthful and often oppressive political, economic and conceptual systems, institutions and patterns of behavior and transform them.

Performance activists see performance not primarily as art or ritual (although it can involve both), but as a social activity, most often by non-actors, intentionally entered into as a means of engaging social challenges and conflicts, an ensemble activity by which we re-construct/ transform social reality. It is emerging/developing in rural and urban settings in both the Global North and Global South, increasingly interfacing with education, therapy, conflict resolution, civic engagement, community development and social justice activism,

Performance Activism is a loosening of performance from both the prescribed behavior of ritual and the aesthetic pretense of theatre. In so doing, performance activism frees up the power of performance to generate new relationships, emotions, activities and possibilities. Richard Schechner, an innovative theatre artist, life-long progressive activist and one of the grandparents of the academic discipline of Performance Studies, speaking of performance in the context of the emerging performance activism movement, says, “To perform is to explore, to play, to experiment with new relationships. To perform is to cross borders. These borders are not only geographical, but emotional, ideological, political, personal.” The other border that performance activism crosses is the one that separates stage from street, actor from audience, classroom from playground, and it does so without the traditionally prescribed behavior dictated by ritual. It is giving the creative possibilities of performance away to “ordinary people,” providing them with the power “to explore, to play, to experiment with new relationships.”

Performance Activism and the East Side Institute

Performance activism has and continues to be created by individuals and small groups of people working primarily in isolation and obscurity—on the train platforms of India, the prisons of South Africa, the war-ravaged villages of Colombia, the favelas of Brazil and the poor communities of Lagos and London. While there is considerable overlap in values and concerns, this movement doesn’t have a unified ideology, organization, program or specific set of goals. What the individuals and small groups that make up this movement-in-the-making do have in common is that they are seeking new ways to help all people (particularly the poor and oppressed) to: develop; build community; address local and international social and political issues; bring antagonistic forces and communities together; heal; educate; and free the imaginations of those who have had their imaginations beaten or bombed or starved out of them.

The East Side Institute is playing a significant role in making the performance activist movement aware of itself, building networks between performance activists and organizations, and promoting and publicizing their work/play around the world. The Institute regularly offers workshops on “The How Of Performance Activism,” presents webinars and talks with leading performance activists, and supports research and writing on the subject, most recently the first book length study of on the subject, Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers, by Dan Friedman. Most significantly, the Institute has organized, since 2001, the bi-annual Performing the World conferences, which bring together hundreds of performance activists from all over the world and all walks of life to share their practices and research and to forge bonds across political differences, academic disciplines and national borders.

Social Therapeutic Performance Activism

The performance activism developed by the East Side and its development community over the last three decades is a particular thread within the emerging tapestry of performance activism. It is rooted in the social therapeutic method in which human beings are related to as creators of their culture and ensemble performers of their lives. It approaches performance not only as a tool for a specific goal (educating, politicalizing, building community) but also as a developmental activity in itself. Social therapeutic performance activism understands performance, the universal human capacity to simultaneously be who-we-are and who-we-are-not (who-we-are-becoming), as developmental activity through which individuals and communities can break out of social roles and cycles of behaviors that constrain and oppress them and, at the same time, creatively play with new social, cultural and political possibilities.

In 1996, Institute co-founder Fred Newman, summed up social therapeutic performance activism this way: “We understand performance very broadly. From our point of view performance might have nothing to do with being on the stage. We think you can perform at home, at work, in any social setting…With the proper kind of support, people discover that they can — that we can — do things through performance that we never thought we could do…In a sense, we’re trying to broaden each person’s notion of ‘what you’re allowed to do.’” For social therapeutic performance activism, performance is a way of life—a way of life that has the power to transform our world.

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Please Share

The Institute maintains a Performance Activism Research Center & Archives. If you have writings, transcripts and/or recordings of your performance activism that you would like to share, please submit them to mmeyer@eastsideinstitute.org