Activist Methodologies

Bodies as media
"Thriller por la Educación" - Chile

 

"...[T]his tactic of pacific occupation belongs to the early twenty-first-century moment of hybridization or, more specific- ally, intermediality—modalities of experience that are constituted by two media working together to provide mutually constitutive elements (Bay-Cheng, et al.)— between bodily practice and digital media" (Fuentes, p. 34)

"Students disguised as zombies used dance, synchronicity, and digital media tactics of spreadability to make a statement about the effects of neoliberal financial capitalism on their lives...Born from the 'complex colonial history of the Americas,' in contemporary protests, zombies have come to represent 'the slave, a silent worker whose humanity has been consumed and whose existence is living death'...Moreover, the figure of the zombie as the undead can also be connected in the Chilean case with the country’s recent history of authoritarianism that targeted political dissidents’ bodies to eliminate opposition" (Fuentes, p. 36-37)

• Use of place and space
• Disruption of public norms
• Dress, makeup, appearance

Cut-Up ("Found" Text) Performance
Robert Gutierrez-Perez, "A Letter from my Students"

• Use and transformation of found materials
• Use of body as a medium
• Use of other media to create an embodied audience experience (throwing the paper at the camera)

Intermedia
Miranda Olzman, "Worshipping Ursula"
Lip synching, choreography, sitting on audience member's laps - click on the picture to play the .mp3 of the soundtrack.

• Also a cut-up/mashup
• Embodied performance
• Use of makeup/costume

Queering/Flipping the Script
Mod Carousel, "Blurred Lines - Sexy Boys Parody"

• Rewriting lyrics
• Frame by frame reenactment
• Makeup/Costuming

Verbatim Theatre/Witness Mimesis
E. Patrick Johnson, "Sweet Tea"

• Verbatim/edited performances of interviews
• Changes in body posture, facial expression, inflection, vocal tone
• Script on the stand off to the side (semi-memorized)
• Use of pauses, fluctuations in volume, pace, tone, timbre

Hip Hop/Spoken Word/Slam Poetry

• Tension between humor and seriousness
• Use of hand gestures, voices, bodily postures
• Pauses, changes in pace, rhythm, volume, inflection
• Use of "false rhymes"

Conceptual Speed Dating

• Inner circle/outer circle 
•  Each Pair gets 4 minutes 
•  Each person must take turns explaining their final performance idea, and alternatively contributing suggestions to their partner about the following: 
•  How to refine the topic 
•  Specific activist performative techniques 
• Gong will ring at 2 minutes - conclude your discussion and begin talking about the other participant’s project 
•  20 seconds to switch partners - inner circle will move clockwise one chair 
•  Repeat - you will end up doing this process with 4 different people