I just got a fascinating email from a colleague at The Civilians (where our own Steve Ginsburg is also in residence this spring). Here’s the message, which I think will be of interest to you:
I work for The Civilians (The Center for Investigative Theater) in Brooklyn, New York (www.thecivilians.org) and we have a semi-theatrical, semi-activist opportunity that I thought might be a cool thing for many of you to do (or even just contemplate doing). The Civilians create, almost exclusively, work based upon interviews taken from real people who find themselves in a particular political or social circumstance of controversy or interest. Over the past several months we’ve been interviewing protestors and activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement. We’ve had two cabaret-type performances of monologues derived from those interviews at Joe’s Pub in New York but envision a broader, less “fee-for-service” type of theater to reflect the quality of energy of the Occupy movement itself. So we’ve devised this interactive theater program called Occupy Your Mind, wherein we’re inviting artists of all types (even artists still in the artistic closet!) to engage in the work that The Civilians do regularly, to interview Occupy activists near them, and ultimately to share their video-recorded, performative interpretations of that work with the world, online.
If this project piques your interest, I’m happy to speak to you more about it. And, perhaps as important as your own interest, if you know of other people – friends, colleagues, students – who you think might also share a genuine interest in this endeavor, please pass along this information to them, and hopefully they’ll be a part of future conversations. I’m really excited about this project and the prospect of it blurring the lines between the performed and the performer. Before I get absorbed completely by critical theory, I’ll leave you the website:
http://www.thecivilians.org/programs/occupy_your_mind.html
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me or Steve Ginsberg, the Chair of the Occupy Your Mind Project, at occupy@thecivilians.org. I hope some NoPassporters might find good reason to participate with us in the Occupy Your Mind Project!
Sincerely, Jay Stull // jstull (at) gmail (dot) com
