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

emotion and hope, like the “utopian performatives” Dolan describes in Utopia inPerformance: Finding Hope at the Theater, point to the sharing of communitas betweenparticipants and audience members at the Yip-In.A feeling of communitas among the Yippie participants specifically also emergedat the Yip-In from the insider/outsider dynamic produced. Unlike the unwitting audienceof commuters who happened upon the Yip-In by accident, the thousands of participantswho came specifically to celebrate the spring equinox were “in the know.” Only artists,activists, and hippies who lived or spent time on the Lower East Side would have seenthe flyers advertising the Yip-In. Only those with connections to those communitieswould have known what was going on that night in March. At the same time, the Yip-In’ssetting of the public space of the terminal contributed to this insider/outsider dynamic.Using a theatrical metaphor, novelist D. Keith Mano argues that the Yippies’countercultural improvisations in public spaces like the train station placed the audienceof onlookers in the role of the straight man to the comic Yippie (1293). The train station,with its very ordered space organized by clock and schedules, represented all the traditionand inflexibility of the Establishment. On the other hand, the Yippies and their madcaprevelry represented the radical participatory experience of their movement. It was“improvisation, naturalness v. dull and predictable line-study [sic],” Mano writes,comparing the unexpected theatrical creativity of the Yippies to the uninspiredEstablishment (1293). As Yip-In insiders, participants could differentiate themselvesagainst their “straight” audience of police, commuters, and transportation workers, andfeel a sense of insider togetherness. Furthermore, as they attacked the crowd, the police145