It began with Kanye West. It was his audacity, jumping on stage, unscripted: he was an interrupter. How rude!
There’s POWER in this. I want to harness this! How can I harness this?
But then: What is a relationship? What defines one? I was curious about the idea of how the relationships I have affect my life: how am I changed by the people with whom I associate? I wanted to dissect this. Years ago I got into voice recording conversations with a friend. Largely they were intended to capture the fragments of “genus” that we believed were spewing out of us, constantly. But looking back, it was something more like self gratification and obsession; both of these things, the cocky manner with which I spoke about ME, and the thought that what I had to say about anything was important enough to have its own digital plot added only to my ego.
So this poam began and I wanted to do something with all this digital landscape. I began carving from this ground work a new informing landmass. But what I found was an egotistical aim that I was fulfilling through the exploitation of other’s criticisms. I have an audio stream flowing into selfish thought after selfish thought. All in the name of art.
BUT I want to do something selfless! Like in the Verse I posted “When the ego interferes in the rhythms of process, there is so much doing! But nothing is done.” I felt as if I was doing something sitting in front of the glowing computer screen making my bits and pieces line up like little links in a chain. But what I was really doing is creating a piece to be trashed. That’s why…
All of this is valuable because it got me here to this point, to this moment where I feel I am doing something that I can be proud of. That is why this selfish movement is not worthless. This path of discovery made what I am doing more meaningful because of the juxtaposition.
A big influence:
Paulo Freire’s work with true words. I want to say true words. There is a difference. We are often bombarded on a daily basis with false words. We are told that because we live in the U.S.A we are granted the right to become anything we set our mind to. To work hard is to achieve anything. This is a LIE! There are plenty of people (we ignore) in this country who’s lives are never told in fairytales and who never have a choice about who they will become.
We are so busy being consumed by consumption that we lose sight of what it means to be completely human. What is a human? There is humanity in all but there is a cloud of possession which obfuscates the realities of what it means to be a human (it is not the possession of, identification with, and consumption of things). This consumption affects the daily routine: It is expected that as we pass one another in the morning, we will not say hello. If you smile you are crazy, something must be wrong with you. At least that’s the way I feel sometimes when people smile at me. I have my things, my friends, my life, why should I validate yours?
Guerrilla theatre posses the same kind of power that Kanye had on stage the night of the VMA’s.
I will now attempt to capture, with words, the first invasion:
I had five people set for the first Moosejaw performance, three showed up. We did not let this detour us. We set out on Wednesday, December 16th at 4:45 from Angel Hall. We arrived at Moosejaw and our “shopper” spy indicated that there were 3 shoppers and 3 work staff present in the store. As this text message came, my partner and I watched five more people walk into the store. We knew it was now or never.
The premise: We were animals. I was a dog and Christopher, my partner in crime, a monkey. Moosejaw believes that prison existence is funny (they made a jail activities book), so we thought we would make them laugh by showing them how prisoners are really treated. We treat prisoners like animals: locked in solitary confinement made to go insane by lack of stimulation, we feed them food lacking nutrition, we kill them, all in the name of safety. After we ran around the store for about thirty seconds acting like our respective animals, Chris and I stopped at the counter and addressed the store. Telling the truth about prison, how their ad campaign is degrading and offensive. We also talked about how we work with these people and we know their names and faces and we see that they are not the stigmatized images that we thrust in the name of commercial gain. They are talented, insightful, intelligent,compassionate people. They are 2.2. million citizens of the United States. They are mothers, fathers, sisters, grandparents.
We plan to do more and more Moosejaw performances until they realize that we are relentless and will not take their simple we-apologize-but-we’re-not-going-to-change-a-damn-thing excuse for an answer.
In my video, if you can decipher anything, you can see a man standing behind the counter applauding us. He was clapping and saying that they (the employees) cannot do anything and we should contact their executive offices if we want something to change. This has already been done (there has been a letter writing effort and a petition) and nothing has changed. So, my group plans to train people on this guerrilla theatre tactic and have people going in every week, if not more often, until they receive the message that we want visible change.
What I hope to capture with my on-going guerrilla theatre project is the power of human-to-human communication. There are a lot of mediums with which we can communicate (mail, e-mail, texting, phone, cell phone) but for me the most productive, meaningful ways to transfer information is between people. You cannot ignore people acting like animals (I have learned this)!
My apple-and-oranges piece gets at this establishment of difference. With the common saying “it’s like comparing apples and oranges,” we tend to see the most monumental of differences between things and people who are fundamentally the same. If we could get away from this assumption, people will treat one another with more respect. We would have a better understanding of human life.
I consider my effort one by and for humanity. I hope to branch out and not do only politically-charged pieces but theatre that originates with this idea of a fundamental sameness. The spectrum of human emotion is representation of these essential needs.
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