Activist Performance Favorite 

The Activist Performance blog - documenting protest gestures past and present

We are responding to a century that has witnessed a proliferation of theatrical forms of activism perhaps unprecedented in its global scale, from the occupation of Seattle by an emergent global justice movement in 1999, to the uncountable masses that joined the record-breaking demonstrations against war in Iraq on 15th February 2003, and the more recent uprisings across the Arab world that led to a million citizens gathering in Tahrir Square in Cairo in 2011. Artists and performance groups have often played an active role in protest events, drawing on bodies, text, image, movement as imaginative projections against the perceived order of things, and as tactical interventions and communicative tools.

This blog offers the idea of ‘gesture’ as an open-ended stimulus for contributors, signalling the aim to offer a thick theorisation and documentation of theatre and performance as an activist aesthetic. However, we are also interested in contributions to the blog that challenge this idea. Gestures of protest in recent times – camping, occupying, marching, striking, moving in cells (to avoid kettling for example), swarming, dancing, going in disguise, impersonating, playing, staging, chanting, networking, blogging, hacking, tweeting – carry traces of former activist modes, and extend the domains of activism from the public life of the street and the theatre stage, to the private domain of the mobile phone and laptop. This blog explores both the historical traces and contemporary practice.

This blog is a space for researchers, activists and artists to contribute documentation and analysis of theatrical activism and protest performance past and present.