Political arts are about raising awareness of issues, ideas and responses to society. Picasso’s 1937 painting Guernica showing the tragedy of bombing civilians during the Spanish Civil War has become an iconic anti-war artpiece. Visual and performance art is often in the form of protest against a government, a system, an act of war, on stage, in song or on film.

People hear Edwin Starr’s Motown song, ‘War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing…. only friend is the undertaker’, and know it’s a political, antiwar pop song. Other classics include Universal Soldier, by Buffy Sainte-Marie (1964), Eve of Destruction (1965) and It’s Good News Week by Hedgehoppers Anonymous (Jonathan King, 1965) about nuclear holocaust.

Political music is not confined to pop. Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich came into conflict with the Soviet authorities who demanded music to glorify the state, propaganda. His Symphony No. 7 (The Leningrad) in 1941 was rebellion, non-verbal music seen as a denunciation of Stalin’s totalitarian regime.

Bob Dylan, Master of Lyrics

Possibly the greatest poet/singer-songwriter of the 20th century, Bob Dylan was influenced by Woody Guthrie and folk singers and protesters on behalf of the American working man, like Pete Seeger. Dylan first became popular in the early 1960s in the folk-protest movement, although later he denied being a protest singer.

A scan through some of his early albums, like Freewheelin’ (1963). Bringing It All Back Home (1965), The Times They Are a Changin’ (1964) and Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), reveal classic protests about war, racial freedom, the threat of the atomic bomb. Blowing in the Wind, Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall, Talking World War III Blues, Oxford Town, Maggie’s Farm, Outlaw Blues, Gates of Eden, With God On Our Side, Chimes of Freedom and I Shall Be Free are anthems for the political protest movement in its various guises.

Jamaican Bob Marley used his music to protest. Get Up Stand Up is uncompromisingly a demand for recognition of his Rastafarian religion. Songs of Freedom, Slave Driver, Revolution, War and Redemption Song all speak of black, working peoples’ struggles, the ultimate protest songs. English poet singer Billy Bragg expresses radical political sentiments through the often bitter human experience and outcomes in tight lyrics and music that harks back beyond the Punk that first inspired him to Woodie Guthrie and Phil Ochs.

Bragg once said that the only way he would hear the political songs of his own generation, was to actually write them. Ochs’ song I Ain’t Marching Anymore is part of the 60s anti-Vietnam, hippie movement that used the drugs, free expression and psychedelia of the era to voice the fears, anger and hopes of that generation.

Nerina Pallot’s Everybody’s Gone to War is a cry against more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Green Day preface performances of Holiday (2005) as ‘not anti-American, but anti-war’, and they use politically charged lyrics that place them in the van of contemporary political/protest singers.

Dancing to the Political Drumbeat

US choreographer Bill T Jones and his ensemble The Bill T Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company are at the forefront of energetic, innovative, technically diverse dance work. The Last Supper at Uncle Tom’s Cabin/The Promised Land encapsulates his political drive dealing with racial, gender, sexual and faith issues. Jones himself is an articulate, forthright exponent of artistic challenge/probing questions, and a leader in the politico-performer field.

Lea Anderson’s Car is a postmodern, site-specific piece, in part about the ravages of the automobile on life and a bland mechanical future, but also about the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in Dallas, and the fact that Jackie Kennedy was alongside him in the open car. It is not overtly political, but she herself said in the UK Times in 2004, ‘I should’ve shot the Prime Minister, that would have been a useful thing to do with my life… it will ignite people’. There are few more provocatively political statements for an artists to make.

English choreographer Christopher Bruce has designed a number of classic pieces that reflect a political motive. Hurricane (2002) dances to the Bob Dylan protest song about boxer Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter being framed by police and imprisoned for murder. His Swansong (1987) is about interrogation of a prisoner by two guards, while Ghost Dances (1981) about human rights is set in Chile’s Pinochet regime about torture of dissenters.

Pina Bausch (1940-2009) was the founder of Germany’s Tanztheatre style of dance, a form of German surrealist-expressionism incorporating short sections of action and dialogue, and is regarded as an experimental, political voice in choreography. Fellow German, with whom she worked, Kurt Jooss, devised The Green Table (1932), offering commentary on war-mongering politicians who have no thought for consequences.

Contrary to what most political performers fervently hope, Jooss maintained that art should not dream of altering people’s convictions, that no war would be shorter because of performance. Sadly history proves that right, but artists are not going to stop trying. In the meantime, politicians of all shades keep encroaching onto the performance stage themselves. Nobody knows how many minds they have changed, either.

First published on Suite 101, 29 April 2010.

Photo: Green Day: Protest Songs – gillyberlin

Political performance traces back to the ancient Greeks. Stage lampooning those in authority was banned in the Greek republic after The Birds and Lysistrata; since when playwrights have used stages to convey messages, demand political action or change government policy and public opinion. Antigone is political: quoted by Aristotle on the loyalties of a citizen, adapted in 1944 by Anouilh setting it in the French resistance against the Nazis, while Brecht in 1948 made it more radically anti-Hitler.

Bertolt Brecht, at the Forefront of Political Theatre

Political performance is the expression of strongly-held beliefs, protesting at society or promoting a particular belief system. As politics is present in every corner of people’s lives, political performance includes party, gender, racial, sexual, animal, environmental and economic politics. Brecht said, ‘it’s not enough to understand the world, it’s necessary to change it’.

As he was so influential through his theories of ‘making strange’, his works illustrate the effectiveness of staging politics. The parable of Hitler’s rise to power is told through The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1941), a small-time gangster in 1930s Chicago who takes advantage of economic turmoil to seize control of the greengrocer trade. The Threepenny Opera (1928) is written from the 1728 Beggar’s Opera as a musical-theatre piece about corruption, where central protagonist Macheath the Bandit and womaniser is best friends with Tiger Brown, chief of police. Using earthy, low-life songs to drive the narrative, it’s a classic of agit-prop, music (by Kurt Weill) and songs working together.

Agit-Prop

Laurence Olivier’s war-time film of Henry V was propaganda, although written by Shakespeare. It offered audiences a stirring speech, ’once more unto the breach’ that was timely in raising patriotism. Agitprop (agitation-propaganda) became popular in the 1960s to describe radical theatre companies, at the cutting edge of influencing public opinion.

Companies like 7:84 reflected the fact that 7% of the population owned 84% of Britain’s wealth. Red Ladder, Belt and Braces, Welfare State shared working-class origins presenting anti-establishment, pro-worker, revolutionary material outside factory gates, in schools and hospitals. Monstrous Regiment and Gay Sweatshop tackled gender politics.

John Osborne’s 1956 play Look Back in Anger spawned a genre of angry young men on stage and film, presenting ordinary strugglers with relationship pressures in poor living conditions for the first time in British theatre. Steven Berkoff’s 1981 play, Decadence, links the delight of upper-class fox hunters with sex, in savage satire that drives home a message.

Performers in the arts employ a variety of influences, techniques and styles. Italian playwright Dario Fo uses commedia dell’Arte techniques to ridicule the official view that a suspect in a bombing case ‘flew out of 4th floor window at police HQ’, in his 1970 piece, Accidental Death of an Anarchist. In-yer-Face theatre of the 1990s stages taboo issues like rape, sodomy and mutilation in a violent, unpleasant manner, drawing on Shakespeare and Jacobean revenge tragedy as much as war and current affairs. Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) and Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 Shopping and F***ing exemplify down-to earth, challenging style that the Germans call Blood and Semen Theatre.

British drama like Howard Brenton’s neo-Brechtian Greenland (1988, set in the 1987 British general election and 700 years into the future), and Andrea Dunbar’s Rita, Sue and Bob Too set in a gritty 1982 Bradford, show everyday people caught in events, powerless to affect their own lives. Arnold Wesker’s Roots (1958), set in UK’s East Anglia and Caryl Churchill’s Fen (1982), stage rural life, agricultural worlds and relative isolation. Verbatim Theatre is a genre now popular in raising political awareness, which takes actual words spoken by witnesses or participants in events. Unprotected about Liverpool prostitute murders, families, punters and The Exonerated, words by US death-row prisoners, illustrate this artform.

Harold Pinter (1930-08)

UK playwright Pinter was a passionate political activist, using writing and acting skills to express anger at injustice, most notably war. One for the Road (1984) is a study in interrogation/torture techniques, harnessing his famous pauses and menace. Party Time (1991) sees a group of British expatriates in some undefined third-world place enjoying cocktails, while a revolution rages outside that they may or may not have had a hand in. Mountain Language (1988) is about Balkans’ conflicts and is a biting attack on the brutality of invading soldiers. Press Conference (2002) is a comic sketch with a sinister politico answering media questions reminiscent of Big Brother, Stalin and Goebbels combined.

Joan Littlewood (1914-2007) was a highly political left-wing activist who personified political theatre and became an innovator in performance techniques. She devised Oh What A Lovely War!, using World War 1 songs and statistics to convey the horrors of trench warfare, pointless sacrifices of young lives, the arrogance/incompetence of the leaders in a Brechtian style, through 1963 eyes.

Throughout human history, people’s desire to be entertained, informed and stimulated by the theatre, has been harnessed by political performers to powerful effect in artistic terms, though there’s a school of thought that says few government policies have actually been changed by a stage play.

The other side of the coin, of course, is how politicians have themselves become actors and all round performer/entertainers in the pursuit of political theatre (and their careers).

First published at Suite 101, 27 April 2010.

Photo: Brecht: Master of Political Theatre – Spree Tom

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Almost everything people do regularly has a ritualistic feel. Getting dressed every morning, preparing/sharing food, anniversaries, courtships, conducting business and great occasions of state – are rituals, patterns of regular human behaviour. Often, social convention rites/rituals dictate further ritual: for example, shaking hands on greeting, waving goodbye. Devisers of performance must reflect that in their creating. Then they have to experiment with it.

In psychiatry an action performed obsessively can be interpreted as evidence of compulsive disorder. It is often revealed in manic dance. A ritualistic dance or going through the regular motions of a life with all its tasks, may be called a rite. However, physical theatre practitioners use dance as but one element in the creative and experimenting process.

There is religious ritual as well as secular, a set of ceremonial actions like public worship, hallowed by time. Public performance and spectacle from the ancient Greeks to Medieval Mystery plays have drawn on religious imagery and symbolism to tell stories with messages. Performance is the enactment or creation of a version of myth, belief or historical event. It may be political, personal, social but it reflects human life through dance, drama, music or a mix of all three, performing arts.

Ritual in Performance Arenas

In ancient times, the sacrifices and appeasement of various deities informed crowd behaviour which became rites which became absorbed into theatrical convention. The films Apocalypto (2006) and Wicker Man (1973;2006) show ancient, atonement-sacrifice ritual at its horrific best. Nowadays, sporting events like boxing, wrestling, football, cricket, rugby, baseball are played out in often circular spaces, a large audience around, perhaps increased by television viewers, and although it’s sport, it’s also entertaining spectacle that stirs strong emotions. The same applies to bull-fighting, the Edinburgh military Tattoo, Son et Lumiere events, some street theatre activities and circus, whether people like the genre or not. When the floodlights go on, the event is heightened into pure theatre.

The New Zealand national rugby union team ritualistically precede games with the ka mata haka, a traditional Maori dance. This combines ancient warrior practice with psychological advantage for the participants by demoralising opponents through a dance performance. In Japanese Noh theatre, slow, deliberate, ritualistic, symbolic movement characterises theatrical tale-telling, unchanged for centuries.

The theory that theatre originated in ritual was accepted by such practitioners as Jerzy Grotowsky (Polish), Peter Brook (English, but mainly resident in France), Arian Mnouchkine (French), Eugenio Barba (Italian) and Richard Schechner (American), all of whom have contributed ritual elements into theatre performance to restore its lifeblood at different times. Schechner has said that while performance is an inclusive term, theatre is one node on a continuum that reaches from the ritualisations of animals through life’s everyday rites to performances of great magnitude.

Artaud and Theatre of Cruelty

Attending traditional theatre has rituals of its own: tickets, ordering drinks, programmes, lights down, usually polite attention to the performance. Listening to a concert is similar, plus the convention of no-clapping between movements. Bertold Brecht broke traditions with his making strange (verfremsdungseffeckt), forcing audiences to know they’re watching performance by actors demonstrating a viewpoint.

Physical theatre tends to break old traditions. Antonin Artaud, (1896-1948) led with theories about assaulting the senses of the audience. His Theatre of Cruelty, total theatre ideas were heavily influenced by surrealism, oriental theatre, Balinese theatre, masks, magic and myth, colour, rhythm, sound, ritual, ceremony, spectacle, psychoanalysis, the drugs he took and the mental illnesses he suffered from.

He explored the cruelty of existence rather than mere bloodshed or torture, the works he devised attacked spectators’ subconscious to release deep-rooted fears that they normal suppress and made them face their inner reality. The technique is both derided and imitated today. Anything in-yer-face, from the dark psychosis is broadly Artaud, and useful in physical theatre creation. To be ‘Artaudian’ means to risk everything in an experimental performance, acknowledging ritual or not. His name now signifies the theatre of scream, despair and inner torment.

One group who are exponents of physical theatre, risking through experimentation, challenging the traditional stage/performer/audience settings, are London-based Complicite. Founded in 1983, this is a constantly evolving ensemble of performers and creators. Artistic Director, Simon McBurney, says that there is no Complicite method, but collaboration is essential. They constantly incorporate new stimuli, new integrations of music, text, image, visual art and action to create what he calls disruptive theatre.

Experiments arising from ritual produce fruit in the devising process. Most people are unaware they‘re partaking in minor daily rituals, but are deeply conscious of the great rites of life. Physical theatre, draws on that great force to create and experiment and so adds to the richness of that life they are celebrating, examining, exploring and fulfilling.

First published on Suite 101, 22 April 2010.