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

The language of performance thus allows for discussion of the elements of apolitical protest such as audience, actors, and objective. But this dissertation project alsouses the language of theatre to discuss the Yippies’ public demonstrations. Kershawargues that “protest is a type of cultural performance that has little or nothing to do withthe theatre estate and its disciplines” (91). The example of the Yippies, however, countersthis assertion. The Yippies did not produce theatre in a strict sense—on a stage, with ascript, using characters, for the benefit of a distinct audience. Instead their performancesrely on loose scenarios, and are performed for a changeable audience. Yet the Yippiesand their demonstrations have much to do with theatre. Not only do they list theatricalinfluences on their Chicago poster, but the Yippies made many references to theatre intheir manifestos and public statements. Indeed, the Yippie archive discusses the conceptof guerrilla theatre developed by R. G. Davis and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, thenotion of Theater of Cruelty outlined by French theatre theorist Antonin Artaud, andtheories of everyday life performance drawn from the avant-garde art world.Performance studies draws a distinction between performance—persuasiveactivities like rituals or demonstrations whose constructed natures allow analysis usingthe language of theatrical performance—and theatre proper, the literary and artisticdramatic tradition from which performance studies steals its idiom. Yet as Stephen J.Bottoms explains in “The Efficacy/Effeminacy Braid: Unpicking the PerformanceStudies/Theatre Studies Dichotomy,” the field follows Schechner’s conceptualization ofperformance and theatre not as two contrary phenomena, but rather as two poles on acontinuum (174). This project moves about that continuum: sometimes addressing Yippie15