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

demonstrations as performances, and other times investigating the influence of theatricaltradition on these demonstrations.While I strive to maintain the distinction between performance and theatrethroughout this dissertation, my practice is complicated by the language the Yippiesthemselves used to describe their activities. Like today’s performance scholars, theYippies in 1968 viewed a wide array of activity as performance, including New YorkShakespeare Festival productions in Central Park, street-corner theatre on the Lower EastSide, diplomatic wrangling at the United Nations, and even the capitalist flurry of tradersat the Stock Exchange (Hoffman, “Fuck” 236-237). In their manifestos they write aboutmany different persuasive activities using the language of performance. For example,Yippie Jerry Rubin proclaims that “the theatrical geniuses of today are creating the dramaof Vietnam in occupied school administration buildings” when he discusses anti-waractivists leading student takeovers of college campuses (Do It! 132). The Yippies wouldbe the first to agree that their mass demonstrations against the Johnson administrationwere performances. In their published works, however, the Yippies consistently use theword “theatre,” rather than “performance,” to describe these activities. For theperformance scholar, not all performance is theatre: activities such as demonstrations orrituals lie elsewhere along the continuum. For the Yippies, however, there is nocontinuum: all performance activity is “theatre.”Using the performance studies understanding of theatre as one pole on thecontinuum, Kershaw thinks of the traditional dramaturgical considerations of script,action, and character based on an Aristotelean theatrical rubric as he distances political16