Performance Activism
Marian’s personal history as a performance activist…
As a child of the 1960s, at the age of 12, I began my journey to become an activist. My parents taught me about the important historical bond between Blacks and Jews and that racism and poverty were unacceptable, and I took them seriously. My father was an actor who was blacklisted in the 1950s for his outspoken support for civil rights. I marched against the war in Vietnam. I embraced civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.
Fast forward to the early 1980s. I had trained as an actress but identified as an activist. Where and how could I bring these two aspects of who I was becoming together? I met Fred Newman, co-founder of the East Side Institute, in 1982. He was leading and building a multi-racial, pro-gay, women-led movement. I found my cultural and political home. I went on to co-found the Castillo Theatre (an off-off Broadway political theatre), and become a builder of the nonprofit All Stars Project. I was performing who I was becoming onstage and off.
As a lifelong independent, I led the petitioning drive to put Dr. Lenora B. Fulani on the ballot in Montana and Wyoming during her 1988 historical run for President. I then spent time as the Midwest Coordinator in Chicago and spent the last three months in the national press office in NYC. Dr. Fulani became the first woman and the first African American to appear on the ballot in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. I continue to support election reform, open primaries and independent politics.
For over a decade I have been a faculty mentor of the East Side Institute, a hub for Performance Activism. In 2001, shortly after 9/11, the very first Performing the World conference was convened. We brought together performers, theater-makers, community organizers, educators, therapists, youth organizers and young people from around the world to create this biannual festival of what became known as Performance Activism. Today, I co-lead Creating Our Mental Health workshops in the Harlem community with my longtime colleague Dr. Jessie Fields.
I am a co-founder of the Global Play Brigade, where I have proudly mentored regional “Brigadiers” - play facilitators across Asia, Africa and Latin America.
What is Performance Activism Today?
During the summer of 2020, I wrote Cracks: New York City Curfew June 3rd about Black Lives Matter, 40 years of activism, and independent politics.
Read my article about performance activism in 2020: A Year of Creating Heart in a Havenless World in POIESIS: A Journal of the Arts and Communication, Volume 18, 2021
My dear friend and colleague, Dan Friedman is the author of a new book: Performance Activism: Precursors and Contemporary Pioneers about this growing international movement that approaches performance as a means of social, political, and cultural change. Or, as Lois Holzman, Series Editor of the Palgrave Studies in Play, Performance, Learning and Development puts it, the book is about “the movement’s discovery of itself.”
