OTL Blog

Today is Boxing Day in Canada (also in Australia, New Zealand and Britain). While its roots date back to the tradition of wealthier people giving gifts to the lower classes the day after Christmas (having just exchanged gifts among their “equals” the day before), today it’s pretty much considered a shopping holiday. With prices slashed, […]

Last week, OTL finally got a letter from the Ville Marie borough.  If this is their idea of a Christmas present, it’s definitely one that we’d like to exchange.  It’s in response to our question about the giant billboard from Time2Ad on The Main, asking just what the city was going to do about it. […]

I’ve played in many culture-jams, but never as a videographer and never in a city I was visiting for the first time in my life.  That changed last spring, when I was part of a culture-jam at Tim Hortons in Rimouski. Since 2002, OTL has offered a workshop called Revolutionary Theatre: Culture-Jamming and Theatrical Activism.  […]

Every activist knows that even the most anti-corporate jam can be co-opted by commercial interests.  Usually this involves some sort of subversion or re-appropriation of the techniques used but every now and then, the co-option is nothing more than sticking a corporate identity where it doesn’t belong. A few years ago OTL culture-jammed PartyPoker.net who […]

Well before Time2Ad‘s giant billboard reared its obtrusive head on St-Laurent Boulevard, OTL’s Reclaim the Main campaign had been challenging corporate and monoculture intrusions our heritage site through culture jamming. Every summer during the street fairs we were greeted with a new corporate sponsor monopolizing a celebration that’s supposed to be for the people as […]

On the occasion of today’s Quebec election and in honour of the difficulties Stephen Harper is presently facing in Ottawa, we present a mock press conference we performed with UTIL (l’Unité Théâtral d’Interventions Loufoques) on the back of a flatbed truck before an anti-war march in the freezing cold, March 2006. First, the guest of […]

On Friday, OTL continued its Buy Nothing Day tradition of jamming the corporate monoculture and our consumer culture by going to the bank and the mall. In our scene, Mr. Monopoly (monocle, moustache, top hat and all) had just lost a bunch of money on the stock market and went looking for a handout with […]

Last year, it was a clever, creative warning of what was to come if we didn’t curb our over-consumptive ways.  This year, it seems like the prophecy of the Shopocaypse is coming true, if you follow international business news, anyways What Would Jesus Buy is a film that chronicles NYC theatre activist Reverend Billy and […]

Buy Nothing Day is an international challenge to our oversaturated, unsustainable consumer culture.  For the past five years, Optative Theatrical Laboratories has challenged this glut with guerilla theatre culture jams at places like McDonald’s, Starbucks and more recently Chartwells. Mass consumption wouldn’t be possible without the banks and this year, the greed of those institutions […]

Before the recent Canadian federal election, Stephen Harper visited Longueil, not far from Montreal, OTL and others were there to meet him, including Melanie Kal, who files this report I, Melanie, performed in a jam for the first time in my life wearing an Official Man’s outfit.  needless to say – this included his face […]