Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

The Grand Central Station Yip-In was a performance kaleidoscope, turning publicspace into theatrical space, changing from moment to moment due to improvised actions,blurring the boundary between life and art, and between performer and audience. Withthe solid base of the Yippies’ networked participatory street performance form, and theaddition of elements of the Happening, the Yip-In represented a dizzying artistic andpolitical borrowing from avant-garde art, experimental theatre, hippie street style, and theNew Left philosophy of participatory democracy. The concept of everyday lifeperformance, however, was not consciously borrowed, for the Yippies already believedthat their lifestyle was performative. They lived a dedicated counterculture lifestyle thatwas already on display and also highly symbolic. This section examines the performativenature of the Yippie lifestyle, beginning with a discussion of the costume thatimmediately identified their counterculture membership, and ending with an explorationof their constant public performance of Yippie philosophy and ideals. They didn’t justtalk political philosophy, but lived it proudly and publicly for all the squares of theEstablishment to see. Ultimately this lived performance worked both to advertise theYippie movement, and also set the stage for the revolutionary practice they envisioned.In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959) Goffman argues thatindividuals perform their persona by means of a range of symbols and actions thatcommunicate social information to an audience of other individuals. These symbolsmight include “setting,” such as the furniture choices in a home, or the geographicallocation of that home (22). The Yippies, for example, rented an office for the YouthInternational Party on Union Square, close to the activists and hippies they were trying to132