What is Arts Activism?

Can Art Really Change The World?

Art can define cultures and be aesthetically pleasing, but can it create any real-world change? The short answer is yes, through arts activism. “Artistic Activism” is defined by the Center for Artistic Activism as “a dynamic practice combining the creative power of the arts to move us emotionally with the strategic planning of activism necessary to bring about social change.” This paper will explore how the planning of activism is linked with the profound power of the arts, through an analysis of select theatrical shows, to create lasting social change.

The Planning of Activism

In “Doing Democracy: The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements,” Bill Moyer describes four different roles of activists: the rebel, the change maker, the citizen, and the reformer (pg 21). The rebel forces society to face its problems by showing how institutions and powerholders violate public trust by dramatic and nonviolent measures. Traditional theatre, as “deliberate enactments of a phenomenon, emotion, or story for the public domain,” does this by raising awareness about issues both current and historical, building empathy towards others in the community (Dutt, Bishnupriya, Jestrovic/ page #). The role of the change agent is to promote citizen-based action in the broader society and advocate for a paradigm shift. For example, Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed places the spectator in the protagonist's role, making the spectator change the dramatic action, try out solutions, and discuss plans for change. Similarly, in what Jill Dolan calls the “Utopian Performance”, “theatre and performance create citizens and engage democracy as a participatory forum in which ideas and possibilities for social equity and justice are shared”. Viewing the theatre under this philosophy could put it under either of the aforementioned roles. This leaves two roles unaccounted for, the citizen and reformer. Social movements require all four roles in order to be successful. The citizens in this case are the audience members or spectators of the performance, as they are the ones who will be able to demonstrate a democratic society and vote on the change. The reformer is the only one that the arts does not traditionally have, as this role includes working with official political and judicial structures to create and expand new laws and policies. This can be alleviated by including these policy makers in the creative process or even just inviting them to see the work onstage.The theatre, with three out of the four roles needed to advance social movements, can be the catalyst for change if we let it.

The Power of Art

The emotional movement of art is used to educate people through consciousness raising and building empathy and intimacy with a community.

In “Theatre, Activism, Subjectivity: Finding The Left In A Fragmented World”, Adrian Kear makes the argument that art shows the political by showing past historical events onstage, which he calls the “art of historization”. Kear goes on to say that history being put on stage can interrupt everyday experiences of history and show the continuity of social conventions and ideological information. He speaks of this phenomenon happening in Hamilton, and I would also like to include other examples such as Suffs The Musical, The Laramie Project, and — especially when done in the United States in the modern day — Cabaret.

Consciousness raising through art isn't just limited to the stage. As T.V. Reed discusses in “The Art of Protest”, the feminist movement used poetry to “give a name to the ‘nameless’ forms of oppression” felt in women’s personal lives. Poetry made the subjective objective by giving personal experience an outward form. It helped change what people thought of as political and made people understand that “the personal is political”. AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) raised public consciousness about AIDS by theatrical public demonstrations, such as “Die-ins”, and campy humour, such as “republican drag”, to spread awareness about AIDS. They also had a slew of flyers, artwork, and slogans, like the infamous “Silence=Death”, to accomplish this. Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder spoke about how the Council of Federated Organizations held a mock election with real campaigns and real ballots to upend the misconception that black people in Mississippi were uninterested in voting and show how the voting registration process was racist. These all work because arts activism makes the information more accessible to the masses and is often more effective than direct forms of political communication. It’s one thing to read manifestos and listen to political debates, and another thing entirely to peek into someone else’s life and their struggles with sexism or see chalk outlines and “dead” bodies at a die-in of those who might die from AIDS. Art can force you to look at the problem that everyone else is avoiding in ways that don’t require much language or background knowledge of policies and new terminology and can connect us to issues on a more human level.

That brings us to the topic of building empathy and intimacy. “The Revolution Will Be Improvised” (Rodriguez Fielder) speaks of intimacy-making. By placing communities in dialogue with each other, we can redefine how people relate to themselves and others. An example of how art can do this is through improvisation. In a similar fashion to Theatre of the Oppressed, when a group of people play improv games, they can “prepare themselves for the inevitable conflicts, ruptures, obstacles, and disappointments that occur in human interactions.” (Boal, Augusto). Another work is crucial to this topic as well - Theatre and the Plague by Antonin Artaud. It is here that he argues that plagues are not a result of germs, but rather a contagion of the soul. In the same way that a plague spreads from person to person, infecting the body and being let in by the soul, the theatre works in the exact same way. In this way, it is the positive foil to a plague. While many scientists today would most likely argue with the first half, he was right about the power of the theatre being used to transform. Just by being in the same room as other people, we can learn from one another and not only transform the individual but society as a whole.