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It’s not even really a debate anymore.  It’s almost gotten to the point of cliché.  Just about everyone with even the slightest activist leaning and even many who don’t have one knows that the corporate media does not represent all sides or show a complete picture of any story.  Getting a progressive message into the press is itself a culture-jam.

In response to this and aided largely by the internet, there are new independent grassroots written, radio and even TV media springing up all the time.

Democracy Now was one of the first in recent memory to break with convention and achieve success and recognition by presenting an unfiltered take on the news.  Indymedia and it’s Quebec version CMAQ are another good example.  These have inspired others to do likewise.  Groundwire is a new monthly national Canadian radio news show put together by the National Campus and Community Radio Association and its member stations across the country, such as Montreal’s CKUT.  There are also countless blogs and sites hoping to and succeeding in breaking the corporate stranglehold on widely distributed memes.

While these outlets do plenty to reclaim the news for ordinary people and activists, they don’t change the situation for arts coverage?  It still, in large part, remains in the hands of the powers that be.  Many artists with something to say that goes truly against the grain and in many cases challenges the very institutions that traditionally are resources for arts funding still don’t have a loud enough voice in the mediasphere.

That, in a nutshell, is the raison d’être not only for this blog, but for our two sister blogs The Talking Stick and Le baton de parole as well as infringement TV, which is currently running a loop of videos from infringement artists, activists and culture-jammers (including OTL) and will be premiering live on Thursday, September 22nd at 7pm.

Hopefully more such projects will follow, because artists need to reclaim their media, too.

$100 house for the homeless

Anyone who’s been outside in Montreal lately will be able to tell you that it’s cold out there.  This is obviously most relevant to the city’s homeless.

There are some in Montreal who are compassionate about their plight and others who take steps to empower them through art, namely those involved in the annual État d’urgence which held its tenth edition this past November.  In addition to theatre, music, comedy and photography exhibits, this past edition saw Tokyo architect Kyohei Sakaguchi bring his $100 home, a small unit for the homeless to the festival.

When the temperature gets nicer, you might think that things get easier for the homeless, given the ample amount of parks and restful public spaces Montreal has to offer.  Unfortunately in 2006 the city put the 15 public squares that were open all night under a midnight to 6 am curfew.

Last summer, UK-based activist performance collective Kinetic Aesthetic (who culture-jammed Wal-Mart with OTL) tested the legality of sleeping outdoors with their durational performance Sleep Sitting Up as part of the infringement Festival.

They brought along a camera for their 12-hour experiment and here’s a sample of what happened:

Harold Pinter delivering his Nobel Prize acceptance speech by video

Harold Pinter, who died this past Christmas Eve at the age of 78, was not only an acclaimed playwright, actor, director and poet, he was an activist who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind.  He was also someone who saw how art could be used as a tool for social change and recognized, as an artist, some of the deceptive staging tricks employed by oppressors.

When he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005, he used his acceptance speech to speak out against the war in Iraq as well as American and British imperialism in general.  Always a man of the theatre (it was revealed this week that Pinter even wrote stage directions for his own funeral), Pinter not only spoke of the imperialist policies and their effect, but also of the sick theatrics used to disguise what is actually going on.  He even plays George Bush’s script writer at one point.  This week, Democracy Now played this speech, called “Art, Truth and Politics” in two parts which you can read, watch or listen to here and here.

Shortly after wining the Nobel, the New York Theatre Workshop cancelled its planned production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play taken from the diaries of the American activist who was crushed by an Israeli military bulldozer while defending the home of a Palestinian pharmacist, for political reasons.  Pinter had always been an anti-censorship activist and added his voice to the chorus decrying this move.

OTL took part in the international viral theatre protest Rachel’s Words, which saw people all around the world reading Rachel’s e-mails from Palestine.  We preceded our reading of the e-mails with a verbatim theatre mini-play The Words About the Words, which dramatized the various voices on both sides of the censorship argument.  Pinter’s quote was an important part of the script.

With all that is going on in the world right now, a voice like Pinter’s is very much needed. While it may be silent, it is one that can and should still be played loud for all to hear.

It’s New Year’s Eve, so what better time to look back on the past year and the year ahead.  2008 was a busy one for OTL on several fronts:

Sinking Neptune II: We adapted our verbatim theatre critique of Canada’s “first play” Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France and those remounting it, racism against Native peoples intact, for its 400th anniversary, to deal with another colonial celebration, the 400th anniversary of Quebec City.  We performed Sinking Neptune II twice at McGill University (including a show at the EGSS Conference), at CEGEP Montmorency in Laval, at the University of Guelph in Ontario and at the Maison de l’amitié as part of the infringement Festival.

rehearsal in Guelph (photo: Matthias Elsdörfer)

Our run culminated at co-op bar L’AgitéE in Quebec City in July, where we performed to a receptive audience which included members of the alternative 400e.  This was following a day of culture-jams, first of the ceremony where the Canadian military was given the keys to the city and later at the official Rencontres show, celebrating Samuel de Champlain and ignoring the genocide he was responsible for.

Stage III of the project is in the early planning stages, to get involved, please contact neptune@optative.net

Culture-Jams: In addition to our jam of le 400e anniversaire de Québec, we were busy theatrically thwarting the monoculture in Montreal this year.

Along with Uberculture Concordia, we brought our Zeus, Aphrodite and Gaïa to the Gillette Venus booth set up at Concordia University, protesting both the takeover of university space for corporate interests and corporate co-option of feminist messages coupled with the reinforcement of  body image as part of their goddess grams campaign.

In partnership with Kinetic Aesthetic, we brought a sweatshop into a Wal-Mart and managed to keep our scene going for a good ten minutes, even when security physically removed the table that the two sewing machines were resting on and tried to kick us out.

jamming Wal-Mart

In the lead-up to the federal election, we found out that Stephen Harper would be in town to give a speech.  We brought our own Harper along with a bunch of dissatisfied artists to the growing rally outside the Sandman Hotel.  In the scene, Harper stole from and generally attacked the artists, proving that art imitates life.

We also performed once again on Buy Nothing Day, this time sending Mr. Monopoly and his assistants out to four banks, the interconnected shopping malls that make up the underground city and the streets asking for some bailout money that he can use on the stock market.  Eventually, he realized that as long as people kept shopping, he’d get his money back anyways.

Not only did we do actions in Montreal and Quebec City, but we also managed to jam a Tim Hortons in Rimouski with the ZoPA.  While this is quite a bit of jamming, it doesn’t include the jams we did as part of our ongoing Reclaim The Main campaign.

Next year promises to be busier.  If you’d like to jam with OTL in 2009, please contact otl@optative.net

Reclaim The Main: With all the corporate spam flooding The Main, a heritage site and the heart of the Plateau community, during street fests and all summer long on billboard trucks, we thought things couldn’t get much worse.  In 2008, they did.  A giant billboard appeared at the corner of St-Laurent and Sherbrooke over a building that was supposedly under construction.

This “scaffolding wrap” monstrosity, put up by a company called Time2Ad, was supposed to cover the building until renovations could be complete.  It managed to stay up most of the year.  The ad came down occasionally, once when some debris fell off the building, but mostly just to change it for another ad.  Eventually, after a large public outcry and media coverage, the ad finally came down, but the building underneath was untouched.  Surprise, surprise!  We even got an after-the fact letter from the Ville-Marie borough, basically telling us what we already knew.

unrenovated building on St-Laurent and Sherbrooke aftet the giant billboard was removed

Throughout the year, we challenged this ad and all the (sadly) now-usual corporate intrusions by starting petitions, contacting public officials, contacting the media and of course by culture-jamming.  PubPartout made a few appearances in “support” of all this corporate influence and we inspired others to take action as well.

As corporate spam on the Main doesn’t seem to be going away any time soon, neither will Reclaim The Main.  If you’d like to get involved, please contact main@optative.net

Car Stories: Yes, this year we brought Montreal’s longest-running theatrical experiment back.  Car Stories, an interactive guided theatrical joyride through the Urban Wonderland for three spect-actors at a time was performed as part of  both the infringement Festival in June and les journées de la culture in September.

Car Stories during the Montreal infringement Festival (photo by Joanne Cosentino)

This year’s theme had the executives of a bottled water company sending a tainted peace offering to environmentalists with the help of the audience.  On their journey, they got a dental exam and danced in the alley with a couple of folks from down south, among other things.  This year’s show will be available in January 2009.

It’s never too early to start planning for the next edition.  If you’re interested, please contact carstories@optative.net

The infringement Festival: Although created by OTL, this event has truly taken on a life of its own.  For its fifth anniversary in Montreal, the festival ran almost the entire month of June and saw many theatrical, musical and street performances, not to mention culture-jams, visual arts shows, film screenings and spoken-word events, plus an increased Francophone portion.  The Buffalo infringement also ran its fourth edition this year and featured over 300 performances.

Plans are underway for the sixth Montreal edition, and the festival is currently looking for volunteer organizers and will be taking artist applications very soon.  For more, please visit the festival’s site.  Buffalo infringement is going into its fifth year and there is a new festival budding in Brooklyn, New York.  There’s even infringement TV on the horizon.  It’s still in test mode now, but will be broadcasting live very soon.

OTL Blog: We launched this blog back in November and it has been publishing consistently every Monday, Wednesday and Friday since then, with no plans of stopping or slowing down.  We’re even looking for more contributors to this and two other blogs.  If you’re interested, please contact media@infringementfestival.com

And now, the most important part of this message – a very happy new year to you and yours from Optative Theatrical Laboratories, see you in 2009 !!!

Sunday shoppers on Ste. Catherine street were startled by a cacophony of voices. Rising above the din of consumerism, a chorus of profound human anger and frustration arose, voiced by hundreds of demonstrators furious with the overnight death of over 270 people in Gaza, killed by Israeli bombs. Traffic snarled as the street was transformed from consumer mecca into critical resistance – a mass of Palestinian flags waving amongst placards denouncing Israeli aggression and genocide.

Montreal protest

As shoppers stared, stupefied, the mob stopped to denounce Chapters and Indigo, two bookstores that have connections to what was described as the “apartheid regime” of Israel. Governmental policies are designed to keep Palestinians imprisoned in their own lands, such as Gaza.

protestors march along St-Catherine

The angry voices were so loud that even the infamously noisy “spoon-man” busker, usually in front of the tony Ogilvy’s department store, stopped clacking and put down his wooden spoons down as the march passed.

protest passes spoonman

The crowd eventually arrived at Philips Square, where speeches were made denouncing the violence, including one by newly-elected member of Quebec Solidaire, Dr. Amir Khadir, himself of Iranian heritage. Dr. Khadir denounced the aggression, and demanded that the Quebec and Canadian governments take action for peace:

The next protest is scheduled for January 10th, contact tadamon organizers to get involved.

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, crowds in a frenzy and general consumer craziness around every corner, this is essentially Canada’s Black Friday. True, there aren’t any (or at least that many) 5am openings and things haven’t gotten as violent as they do south of the border every November. It is also an actual day off work for many and a day where the stores are closed in parts of the country such as Atlantic Canada and northern Ontario (don’t worry, the madness starts on the 27th there). That doesn’t change the fact that the day after Christmas in Canada fills the role that the day after Thanksgiving does in the US.

Since Black Friday inspired Adbusters to create Buy Nothing Day which is now celebrated by activists around the world including us here in Montreal, could Boxing Day inspire a similar such celebration of resistance to consumer culture? There are many reasons why it could be.

For starters, many people, including activists and culture-jammers, are off work, so there are plenty of players. Many people are out shopping, too, so there are plenty of audiences to receive an anti-consumption message. In countries where Black Friday isn’t that big of a day for consumer madness, Boxing Day is. Also, the name alone conjures up many images that could easily be played on theatrically.

At any rate, this idea could serve as interesting food for thought in our post-holiday climate and maybe it could inspire some more action next year.

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.

They responded by saying that the billboard was perfectly legal, without addressing the issue we brought up that it was on a historic site where, according to Parks Canada: “intrusive elements must be minimal.”

They also pointed out that the billboard had been removed, which is something we had mentioned in our letter, without addressing the fact that absolutely no work had been done on the building that was underneath it, which was, according to the company that put it up, the main thing that was supposed to be paid by the billboard being there in the first place.

This response, while unfortunate, is not unexpected.  In fact, it is similar to the dodging the subject and passing the buck that both the Ville Marie and Plateau borough engaged in when confronting another violation of our historic site, ad trucks.

A couple of years ago, Brandon You of PubPartout went to both borough’s meetings to give the respective mayors the Pub Partout Pub d’Or Award for allowing ad trucks to circulate unimpeded.  This gem is our Christmas gift to everyone upset with the city’s inaction and pro-corporate agenda.  Enjoy!

It’s also interesting to note that while they tried to take our footage, they voted to allow surveillance cameras on the Main later in the very same meeting.

Keep up the fight and Happy Holidays from OTL!

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.  It had already been given in places like the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, the Ottawa, Toronto and Alberta Social Forums, at the Convergence in New Orleans and for THAW (Theaters Against War) in New York City.

A group called the ZoPa, which stands for Zone Piratus Autonomus, had invited us to bring the workshop to Rimouski, a community a little over two hours east of Quebec City by car.  This time it was my turn to give it along with Montreal infringement colleague Anne Boucard.

While I was familiar with all the material, I had never given this workshop before and neither had my colleague, so after seven hours on the road in two different cars (a carpool service to Quebec, then a lift from our hosts), hanging out in an old schoolbus converted into an environmentally-friendly mobile home and a good night’s sleep, we prepared.

I had been expecting a full room of people, as many of our workshops had seen in the past but was pleased to find out that while it was to take place in a classroom on the CEGEP de Rimouski campus, the attendance would be limited to the three members of the ZoPA: Stephanie, Denis and Julie.

Rimouski is a town by the St-Lawrence river, right where it is starting to expand to meet with the Atlantic Ocean, in fact the river at this point is half-ocean, complete with a high and low tide.  The scenery is breathtaking and the community is filled with activists and quite a few ex-pat Montrealers.  We were definitely in the right place.

On our way to the campus, we stopped off in an abandoned circus tent that was set up with chairs and a stage for some sort of conference that evening.  We went inside and took over the space, albeit temporarily, which really set the tone for the rest of the weekend.

us and the ZoPA

The workshop deals with some of the theories behind theatrical activism, historical examples and different types of culture jams.  It has a flexible format and we decided to incorporate performance elements to highlight some of what we were talking about.  After the break we showed videos of some previous OTL culture-jams and talked about some of the jams the ZoPA had performed in Rimouski, namely their sending Stephen Harper to the penalty box outside one of his speeches.

After sharing ideas and discussing techniques, we realized that what this weekend needed was a performance.  One of the easiest jams to put together that still has a strong theatrical element is our adaptation of Reverend Billy‘s Death by Latte.  It involves different groups of people going into a Starbucks one at a time, each arguing a specific problem with Starbucks (unfair business practices, GMO milk, etc.).  Those arguing the anti-Starbucks side aren’t drinking lattes, those arguing pro-Starbucks are and end up simultaneously performing an over-the-top death scene.

Through the activists the ZoPA knew, we had enough players for the scene.  One thing Rimouski didn’t have was a Starbucks to jam (wow, somewhere in the world without a Starbucks!), but they did have a Tim Hortons.  They also have Canadian Armed Forces recruiting center, right on the town’s main street.  Tim Hortons profits off Canadian involvement in Afghanistan with an outlet in Kandahar.  Inspired by (or rather in protest of) this situation, we adapted the scene to the surroundings.

After all the fake dying, someone gets up and starts to explain why we did the jam and then Wendy, the mascot of Wendy’s Restaurants which owns Tim Hortons, rushes in, kicks the jammers out and then tells everyone to keep drinking their coffee and supporting war for profit.  She concludes by saying “du sang, toujours frais” playing on Tim Hortons slogan “always fresh” with a new slogan “always fresh blood.”

The scene went very well and got a reaction, pretty good considering not all of the players had jammed like this before.  The only thing that was a little sloppy was the camera work.  Since we didn’t have a real videographer or a real camera, I agreed to shoot it with my cellphone camera.  Technical glitches and getting too involved with the scene led to me only capturing the very last part:

While it might not have been the best first videography experience, it was a great first time for me giving this workshop and culture-jamming in Rimouski, a community that could clearly benefit from more such actions and already has the people there to do them.

By now everyone has seen the video or at very least heard the story of how Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi threw not one but two shoes at George W. Bush.  Most people have probably also seen some of the parodies and offshoots (forgive the pun) circulating around the internet.  There’s even a game!

What you may not know is that al-Zaidi suffered broken arms and ribs as a result of being roughed up by security and could face up to seven years in jail.  That’s a little harsh, considering his crime was only a little more dangerous than throwing a pie in someone’s face.

Over the past week, protests have erupted all around the Middle East in solidarity with al-Zaidi and demanding his immediate release.  Tomorrow, solidarity with al-Zaidi comes to Montreal in the form of the Montreal Shoe Action being organized by Block the Empire.

People are invited to meet at 1pm in front of the US Consulate (1155 St-Alexandre, métro McGill) and bring their old shoes to throw.  The action is also a statement against the occupation of Iraq and Canada’s complicity in the US-led “war on terror” by having troops in Afghanistan.

Theatricalizing a political demonstration is one thing.  Protesting the arrest of someone who threw a shoe is already theatrical to begin with.

And for those of you who have no TV and had no internet access until today and therefore haven’t seen it, or for those of you who just want to see the shoe toss again, here it is:

a screenshot of the re-branded clip

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 had branded and literally taken over the lower half of St-Laurent Boulevard during the bi-annual street sale.  Our jam was successful and caused quite a reaction, especially from the cops.

Guerilla Video Productions made a couple of videos of our performance and posted them around the web, including on YouTube where they got a bunch of views.  Turns out it wasn’t just culture-jammers and people interested in public space who saw it, one of the spectators was a marketer for a rival internet poker site.

Recently we discovered that this marketer or group of marketers had re-uploaded the videos to YouTube almost intact, that is except for a black screen at the end of each clip with “presented by PokerQuiz.org, test and improve your skills!” written in white.

Imagine that!  Our group of jammers working hard and risking arrest just to plug for a rival website!  As far-fetched as that sounds, that is exactly what the person or people responsible for these altered clips are trying to make everyone believe actually happened.

Reposting a video is one thing and OTL has never been an advocate of copyright law, but this is just bad form.  While it’s actually quite funny, its also a little sad that someone could be so oblivious to the anti-consumerist message of a jam that they actually feel the performance could easily translate to a plug for them.

If you want to see the jam as it was intended, here it is in two parts.  If you want to see the altered version, just imagine the image at the top of this post appearing at the end of each segment and you’ll see just how laughable it is.  This isn’t stealth marketing, its just plain bad marketing.