From May 28th – 31st the Société de Développement du Boulevard Saint-Laurent (SDBSL) hosted a four day party known as the Mainfest. Despite bad weather reports, the sun shone radiantly throughout most of the festival. This was wonderful for local merchants, musicians, performers, and pedestrians who converged at the Mainfest to participate in a multitude of activities. This was also fantastic for the Schering-Plough Corporation because their brand Coppertone set up a promotional stand at the festival to distribute sunscreen and inform pedestrians about Coppertone products as part of a guerrilla marketing campaign. An entire weekend of rain would have put a damper on Coppertone’s sunscreen publicity.

Under the bright sun, Coppertone promoters gave pedestrians free samples of sunscreen while warning them about the problems caused by the sun’s ultra violet rays. They also invited people to have a free evaluation of their facial skin to test for existing sun damage. The test was administered by a man in a white laboratory coat in the shade beneath a Coppertone branded umbrella. He performed his test with a “diagnostic camera” which took one picture, developed it in two different ways laid out side by side. On the left, the picture appeared overexposed and hid any skin blemish and on the right, the picture was underexposed revealing every wrinkle and spot on one’s face. The diagnosis was performed by comparing the two pictures. The man pointed out skin abnormalities from the underexposed picture. If he found skin problems participants were told that they could prevent further harm by using Coppertone products. If he found no damage, people were told to use Coppertone to prevent future skin problems.

Instead of thanking Coppertone for caring so much about my well being, I approached the Coppertone display to ask some very important questions. Why was Coppertone so concerned about my skin? Do they truly care or is this another marketing ploy to brand the Coppertone name? Is their diagnosis real or is it a sales tactic? How qualified is the man giving the diagnosis? I know that sun exposure can cause skin damage, but can Coppertone really protect me? Does Coppertone contain any ingredients which cause skin damage? These questions induced a little panic in the Coppertone promotion team. I guess the presence of my camera man didn’t help. Though, I didn’t get to the bottom of all these questions, I did discover some awful truths about their campaign.

Since the promoters didn’t work for Coppertone it was hard to find out anything about their products. Coppertone paid actors and event organizers from New Ad, a marketing company who delivers young people to corporations, and a nurse from Quality Health Services LTD. The nurse alleged that he could not make any formal diagnoses because he was not a doctor. In fact, none of the promotional staff could not answer any questions about how the product worked, how it was made, what ingredients were in the sunscreen or if any ingredients used in the sunscreen were harmful.

Like the glare of the sun, light shed on the true intentions of Coppertone’s promotional spectacle. Coppertone’s campaign was not designed to help people but to scare them.  If someone is told that they may develop skin cancer because they are not well protected from the sun, they should be more likely to take advice from the street promoters and apply Coppertone sunscreen. Furthermore, if people are told they have skin problems from someone that resembles a doctor, they may be scared enough to use Coppertone more frequently so the ‘damage’ doesn’t escalate, especially if the Coppertone name is associated with cancer prevention. If Coppertone was really concerned about people’s skin, they would have hired real doctors to make real medical assessments instead of contracting a nurse from Quality Health Services LTD who can only provide an unprofessional opinion. He only told me he was a nurse and that he was not making an actual diagnosis after I inquired. Those who didn’t ask may have assumed he was a doctor giving valid evaluations, prescribing Coppertone to prevent skin cancer.

If Coppertone sunscreen really prevented skin cancer, my argument could be moot. Maybe a little scare for something healthy wouldn’t be so bad after all. These tactics are commonly used in anti-smoking and anti-drinking and driving commercials. The main problem is that Coppertone sunscreen does not do very well in research conducted by independent sources.

In 2008, the Environmental Working Group conducted an investigation of nearly 1 000 brand name sunscreens. This report concluded that none of Coppertone’s 41 sunscreens met the Environmental Working Group’s criteria for safety and effectiveness. Coppertone was accused of using dangerous ingredients including Oxybenzone, which is reported to be a possible cancer causing agent (for a comprehensive list of harmful ingredients used by Coppertone, follow this link).

The other sources of research on Coppertone products are conducted and/ or  sponsored by Coppertone themselves. The Coppertone Solar Research Center is responsible for testing Coppertone’s sunscreen for safety and effectiveness. This center was opened in 1971 and is described by Coppertone as the world’s largest state of the art facility for testing the quality of their sun-care products. In addition, the Coppertone Research Fund was established to provide financial support for dermatology research in Canada. Research on Coppertone sunscreen is mainly conducted by their research center through their charity fund, a blatant conflict of interest. In addition, they hire promoters, like those at the Mainfest, who cannot answer basic questions regarding the safety or effectiveness of their sunscreen.

Coppertone’s Mainfest masquerade came to an end when members of the Optative Theatrical Laboratories drew attention to the hypocrisy of associating Coppertone sunscreen to cancer prevention, especially by promoters who know nothing about the product. Since Coppertone paid actors to promote their sunscreen at the Mainfest, we intervened by sending in actors of our own. Because of the insincerity of their campaign, they were culture jammed. Here is what transpired:

With the Tax Day Tea Party, it looks like Fox News and the Republicans have now embraced a form of activism: the theatrical culture jam.  Now co-opting activist tools for corporate purposes is nothing new, in fact stealth marketers have been doing it for years, but using an activist technique to bolster a right-wing message or in this case protest a tax hike for the wealthiest people in society is new.

early cultural appropriation: the Boston Tea party

This event taking place in several cities around the US today, is scheduled to coincide with American tax day and is modeled on the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773 where a group of colonists threw tea into the waters of Boston Harbor in protest of the British Parliament’s desire to tax them.  Not only was this an early example of cultural appropriation (the colonists who threw the tea overboard were dressed in Native garb) but the event that many consider sparked the American Revolution and eventually led to independence from Britain.

Now, the GOP is using this historic example of cultural appropriation as the basis for their appropriation of viral media and culture-jamming. This “collaborative grassroots effort” (yes, that’s what they’re actually calling it) involves people dumping the contents of coolers labeled “TEA” (stands for Taxed Enough Already) into bodies of water around the US.  Online, it almost looks like the real deal: there are several blogs all linking to a main page, viral YouTube videos, a live streaming broadcast and they’re even on Twitter and Facebook.

viral marketing for old ideas

When you look a little deeper, though, you’ll discover that this “new movement” is actually run by old Republican bosses and an attempt to slam Obama’s economic policies which actually cut taxes for all except the wealthy and make it look like he’s taking money away from your average American.  There’s even a YouTube video that ends with a little white girl pleading with the president to not steal from her piggy-bank.

That hasn’t stopped Fox News from jumping on the bandwagon, even to the point of denying that they are promoting the event and then, immediately following that assertion, promoting it, have a look:

While their bias in this case is not surprising, it is funny given their unconditional support of the Bush administration’s suppression of individual freedoms.

Regardless of your view on Obama and his policies, it is clear that this “rebellion” is one for more status quo, no matter how it looks online.  Let’s only hope that people can see through the façade.

Six years ago this past Monday, 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, who grew up in Olympia, Washington and traveled to the Gaza Strip as a member of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM) was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer as she defended the home of a Palestinian pharmacist in Rafah.  Her memory, though, seems like it cannot be crushed and has only grown.

She kept a journal from when she was a small child and continued writing before and during her trip to Palestine.  That, along with a series of e-mails she sent to her parents became the text of My Name Is Rachel Corrie, a play edited by Alan Rickman and Katherine Viner.

It premiered at the Royal Court Theatre in London with actress Megan Dodds as Rachel and was an instant success.  Its American premier was scheduled to be in 2006 at The New York Theatre Workshop, but was abruptly cancelled, er, postponed, according to a statement.

The play and Rachel herself had become a symbol of what was happening to the Palestinian people that people in the west and in particular the United States could identify with.  She was a passionate and talented writer and her words humanized a situation that was distant for many.  This, for some, was dangerous.

A memorial to Rachel Corrie (2007)

“In our pre-production planning and our talking around and listening in our communities in New York,” artistic director James Nicola told the New York Times, “what we heard was that after Ariel Sharon’s illness and the election of Hamas, we had a very edgy situationWe found that our plan to present a work of art would be seen as us taking a stand in a political conflict that we didn’t want to take.”

Many in the New York theatre community and in communities around the world saw this as censorship for political reasons.  From underground artists to Vanessa Redgrave and Harold Pinter, voices rose to oppose Rachel’s voice being silenced once again.  Some of the voices opposed to the censorship decided to start a viral theatre project called Rachel’s Words and placed some of Rachel’s e-mails from Palestine on the web and encouraged groups in communities around the world to read them on the anniversary of her death.  They did.

In Montreal, OTL staged Rachels Words with Rachel’s e-mails read by actress Cassandra Witteman.  This was preceded by The Words About The Words, a verbatim theatre script taken from all the raised voices in the media and online debating the censorship of the play from both sides.

video from the Montreal reading of Rachel’s Words (2006)

In addition to raising awareness about Rachel’s story and what people in Gaza were going through, Rachel’s Words raised money for The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice.  The foundation hosts forums, gives out a scholarship and helps to finance projects such as The Rebuilding Project to rebuild the Nasrallah home that Rachel died protecting and The Olympia-Rafah Sister City Project.  In general, it hopes to continue the work that Rachel began.  Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie sit on the board.

Despite the global outcry and show of solidarity, Rachels Words were censored again by CanStage in Toronto when they cancelled their proposed production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie for similar reasons as the NYTW later the same year.

The play eventually made its way to the New York stage when the Minetta Lane Theatre  finally staged it off-Broadway in October 2006 with Dodds as Rachel and was presented in Canada as a co-production between Vancouver’s Neworld Theatre and Montreal’s Teesri Duniya Theatre in 2007 and 2008 with Adrienne Wong as Corrie.  It has since been staged in many different cities.

promo image for Neworld Theatre/Teesri Duniya production

Hardships and war in Gaza haven’t gone away, as was made perfectly clear with the bombardment a few months ago.  Neither have the voices speaking out against occupation and oppression, be they prominent or not.  Rachel’s voice is still among them.

On Monday, Theaters Against War and Rachels Words combined readings of Rachel’s e-mails wtih a reading of Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children written in response to the events in Gaza this past January.  They also ran some videos of those events as part of an evening in tribute to Rachel’s memory.  Musicians have written and continue to write songs about and for Rachel and artists and activists around the world still continue to mark her death and remember her life.  Many use the occasion to reflect not only on her and what she stood for but for those she fought and died to protect.

Rachel Corrie’s words are still with us and the world is better for it.

So what’s the Montreal infringement festival going to be like this year?  Good question!

While the infringement may have been mentioned several times on this blog already and anyone who knows OTL has heard of the festival, we have never really discussed it in any detail in this space.  The sixth consecutive edition of the Montreal infringement will run from June 18th through 28th 2009 and is now accepting artist applications (and still looking for volunteer organizers and helpers), so what better time to try and answer the question of what may be in store.

In 2004, the infringement was created to offer a new way of doing things.  It was a bridge between the worlds of activism and the arts and its very first edition saw over 25 acts jump on board in just a few months, including Montreal playwright David Fennario, award-winning transgendered performer and writer S. Bear Bergman performing in a real bathroom and Car Stories, the interactive theatre piece that had sparked the creation of the festival after being kicked out of the corporate St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival.  It was clear that a festival rooted in resistance to oppression and offering a place for artists and activists with something to say to speak out was both needed and welcome in Montreal and later the same summer in Toronto.

original infringement logo

2005 proved that it was also a welcome and needed change south of the border in Buffalo, where a festival was established which is currently the biggest one in the circuit (it’s going into it’s fifth edition this summer) and in New York City, which hosted a one time event in Manhattan (and this year will play host to the first-ever Brooklyn infringement).  In Montréal the same year music came to the festival full-force.  There was one music show the last night in 2004 and by 05, music made up more than half of what was being offered.

In 2006, the theatre section of the Montreal festival featured Gary Corbin’s …four one-legged men, a show about four different characters, each with only one leg.  Corbin is himself disabled and had experienced many difficulties breaking onto the theatre scene until he eventually put together his own show and staged it at the Buffalo infringement the previous year.  This was also the first year that the festival built its own black box theatre space, with lights, sound and curtains.  The music section grew in Montreal and the festival spread to Ottawa and Regina and returned to Toronto.

Gary Corbin

The francophone side of the Montreal infringement grew significantly in 2007 thanks to Landriault and his Chansons a Double Dose series (which later became Le Maître Chanteur).  The same year, the first infringement on European shores happened in Bordeaux, France.  Over the years, the festival had always tried to challenge corporate intrusions on the Main during street festivals that ran at the same time and this year, the Reclaim the Main campaign was fully integrated into its culture-jamming framework in the form of the fake ad company PubPartout.

The francophone side grew again in 2008 when, for its fifth anniversary, the festival ran almost the whole month of June.  This year, the pre-season saw several infringement Socials in sections of the city where the fest had never operated before such as Griffintown and St-Henri.  The festival also drew international culture-jammers Kinetic Aesthetic from the UK who aided Reclaim the Main and performed their own piece Sleep Sitting Up, to highlight the plight of the city’s homeless.

Kinetic Aesthetic

If one thing is clear, it’s that while the fundamentals of being a critical alternative to corporate mainstream arts festivals remain, the specifics of the infringement change from year to year.  This is inevitable because the festival is a composite of its parts and those parts are brought by whoever is taking part that year.  Participants are encouraged to bring what they would hope to find.

So what’s the Montreal infringement festival going to be like this year? Why don’t you get involved and tell us.

Of all the projects OTL has created, Car Stories is most certainly the longest-running, at times has been the most controversial and if it wasn’t for the infringement Festival, a true viral phenomenon, it would undoubtedly be the best known.

In a nutshell, Car Stories is a play containing several shorter plays, a piece of street performance that is at the same time visible and invisible and a challenge to how we see both theatre and the cityscape we walk through every day.  While a good chunk of any given show will be improvised, either along the lines of a story outline or completely out of the blue, parts of it can be and frequently have been scripted as well.

Car Stories '04: Obstruction of Justice

An audience, usually three spect-actors at a time, assembles in front of the show opener in a public place (a bar, a park, etc).  When that actor lowers his or her Optative Glasses (just a pair of ordinary sunglasses) over their eyes, it’s like the curtain going up.  The show begins and the audience is now in a different, theatrical world.  The opener establishes the show’s theme and sends the audience off on a mission with an Urban Guide who walks them, in character, down a street or an alleyway to a parked car.  There are more actors waiting in the front seat of the parked car with a 10-15 minute scene.  The audience sits in the back, watches and sometimes partakes.  Afterwards, another guide picks them up and usually brings them to another car.  The show continues until the audience is brought to the closer who finishes off the story and removes their Optative Glasses, sending the audience back to the world they recognize.

The individual car stories are self-contained pieces as are some of the guide routes, but they are generally incorporated into, add to or at the very least are related to the overall theme of the show.  The theme stays the same for a run of the show, while the individual parts of it will inevitably vary.  No two shows are ever the same. We will frequently keep a theme alive for an entire season but occasionally we will have a spur-of-the-moment theme for a particular run adopted to respond to something that is happening and very prevalent, as we did for our Buffalo run in 2007.

Car Stories '07 promo shot

We generally perform the show several times in a day for different groups of spect-actors who not only experience watching a show, but are also part of an invisible performance for everyone else on the street.  In fact, one of the thrills for the audience is not knowing who is part of the show and who isn’t.  Performers in the show get to experience dealing with unpredictable players such as the audience and people passing by who don’t know that there’s a show on.

In addition to being a jam on what is considered theatre and our perception of the often corporate-branded public space in a general context, Car Stories has also included some more specifically-targeted jams into it’s story’s matrix.  In Montreal, we have sent the show through the Pharmaprix on St-Laurent Boulevard on more than one occasion as a challenge to their violation of the historic character of the street with their glaring corporate signage.  In 2006, the Montreal opening of our show had the spect-actors play PartyPoker partiers in a jam on PartyPoker.net’s temporary ownership of the lower half of the Main.

Loosely inspired by Car Show, a production from the Corn Exchange in Dublin, which has the plays in cars element but not the guided tour through the Urban Wonderland or much of the ontological jolting our show is known for, Car Stories was first staged in 2001 at the St-Ambroise Montreal Fringe Festival, where it was promptly ejected for theatrically playing with a theatre critic who didn’t quite get the joke.  The critic worked for a corporate sponsor of the festival, the festival got nervous and the rest, as they say, is history.

Car Stories ran for the next few years on its own and in 2004 helped to spark and took part in the first infringement Festival in Montreal.  That summer, it toured to Ottawa and Toronto.  In 2005, it played the Montreal infringement again, the first edition of the Buffalo infringement Festival as well as in New York City’s infringement.  The next year, it played in the first Regina infringement and inspired a version in Denmark.

Car Stories Denmark

In 2006, it also returned to play the Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto and Buffalo infringement Festivals with its “Church of Capitalism” theme.  The Toronto edition of this show was turned into a 30-minute video from Guerilla Video Productions that follows one group of spect-actors from start to finish.  Car Stories isn’t a stranger to video.  The close quarters of performers and audience make this theatre show a nice fit for film and our shows have been caught on camera since 2004.

Three other shows have been given similar video treatments as the Church of Capitalism, still following the story from start to finish but flipping between different groups of spect-actors.  They are 2007’s les journées de la culture outing entitled The Last Greenspace, dealing with the real causes and effects of construction on boulevard St-Laurent, the Halloween-themed sCARe Stories of the same year and 2008’s JDLC show entitled The Search for Pure Water.  The latter was staged the end of September and the video version premiers online tomorrow night as part of the infringement TV launch which begins at 7pm eastern time.

Car Stories doesn’t show signs of being put into park anytime soon.  While our Montreal group will surely mount it again for this year’s infringement Festival, there is no reason why other groups in different communities around the world can’t do the same thing.

To watch The Search for Pure Water on infringement TV, tune into www.infringementfestival.com/tv on Thursday, January 22nd at 7pm eastern.

For more on the show and to find out how to get involved, keep checking www.optative.net/carstories or contact carstories@optative.net

In 2003, a group of New York City-based theatre artists got together in an attempt to organize a theatre-based city-wide protest against the war in Iraq.  The group stuck together and formed Theaters Against War, or THAW, a group whose goal is to nurture a pro-peace culture by standing up to attacks on civil liberties, the US’s ongoing “war on terror” and aggressive American foreign policy.

The same year, it stated to spread virally around the world, with new like-minded theatre groups, companies and artists joining up.

Today, THAW is an international network of over 230 theatre artists from places as varied as Thailand, Italy, Japan, Pakistan, Reno and Calgary.  Members include Melbourne, Australia’s Theatre in Decay, Buffalo, New York’s Subversive Theatre Collective and of course the OTL in Montreal.

It also inspired another viral theatre phenomenon, The Lysistrata Project, which was originally discussed by Kathryn Blume in one of THAW’s town hall meetings.  In addition to their town halls, they organizes a monthly series of performances, readings and speak-outs called Freedom Follies and reaches out to the community by taking part in various events.

In 2004, THAW won the prestigious Obie grant presented by the Village Voice.  They used what was left of their winnings to establish a scholarship fund in late 2006 for international theatre artists operating in areas of conflict or post-conflict.  In 2007, they presented $1000 to the Beit Jala, Palestine-based theatre company Al-Harrah which promotes having a theatre arts curriculum in Palestinian schools.  They also awarded $500 to RAPSIDA, an educational theatre group that spreads HIV/AIDS awareness in Kigali, Rwanda.

With their Obie winnings almost spent, they are once again going viral to raise money for this year’s scholarship, asking member companies not only to nominate recipients but also to donate (even as little as $10) to the fund in hopes of keeping it alive.  More information can be found at thawaction.org

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.

Even though we’re known for guerilla-style culture jams and highly improvised performances like Car Stories, OTL also has also produced a significant amount of text over the years, some of it theoretical material and some of it scripts for theatre.

We’ve started collecting some of this in what we’re calling the Optative Library.  Just like many other libraries, membership is free!  Here’s what you can currently find:

Optative Theatre: A Critical Theory for Challenging Oppression and Spectacle by Donovan King (268-page PDF with one-page html intro) A thesis that outlines the theory that OTL was founded on and still operates with today.  It speaks of historical predecessors, contemporaries and the basis of some of our projects.

Rachel’s Words Montreal: The Words About the Words (15-page PDF) A verbatim theatre piece dealing with the controversy that erupted when the New York Theatre Workshop cancelled its production of My Name Is Rachel Corrie for political reasons.  The script is compiled from news reports, interviews and message board postings on the subject from both sides of the censorship debate.  We performed this preceding a reading of Rachel Corrie’s e-mails from Palestine as part of the international viral theatre reaction to the censorship called Rachel’s Words.

Sinking Neptune November 2006 Play Script (15-page PDF) A radical dramaturgy that combines Canada’s incredibly racist “first play” (Lescarbot’s Theatre of Neptune in New France) with verbatim source material taken from news interviews with the group that was attempting to remount it and contrasts this with native voices speaking out against the impact of this play and cultural genocide in general.  This is the script used in the first phase of the project that voyaged all the way to Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.

We’re adding new material soon, including the play text for Sinking Neptune II which mixes in discussions surrounding another colonialist celebration, the 400th anniversary of Quebec City, so check back and for now enjoy what’s already available in the Optative Library.