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Shawyer Dissertation May 2008 Final Version Copyright by Susanne Elizabeth Shawyer 2008 The Dissertation Committee for Susanne Elizabeth Shawyer certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: Radical Street Theatre and the Yippie Legacy: A Performance History of the Youth International Party, 1967-1968 Committee: Jill Dolan, Supervisor Paul Bonin-Rodriguez Charlotte Canning Janet Davis Stacy Wolf Radical Street Theatre and the Yippie Legacy: A Performance History of the Youth International Party, 1967-1968 by Susanne Elizabeth Shawyer, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin May, 2008 Acknowledgements There are many people I want to thank for their assistance throughout the process of this dissertation project. First, I would like to acknowledge the generous support and helpful advice of my committee members. My supervisor, Dr. Jill Dolan, was present in every stage of the process with thought-provoking questions, incredible patience, and unfailing encouragement. During my years at the University of Texas at Austin Dr. Charlotte Canning has continually provided exceptional mentorship and modeled a high standard of scholarly rigor and pedagogical generosity. Dr. Janet Davis and Dr. Stacy Wolf guided me through my earliest explorations of the Yippies and pushed me to consider the complex historical and theoretical intersections of my performance scholarship. I am grateful for the warm collegiality and insightful questions of Dr. Paul Bonin-Rodriguez. My committee’s wise guidance has pushed me to be a better scholar. In addition to my committee, the faculty and students of the Department of Theatre and Dance offered welcome encouragement during my time as a doctoral student. I would like to thank Dr. Oscar Brockett for stimulating my interest in historiography, Dr. Ann Daly for sharing resources on the 1960s, and Dr. Sharon Grady for her advice in the early stages of this project. My colleagues in the Theatre History and Criticism/Performance as Public Practice program provided comradeship and perceptive critiques of my work: Shannon Baley, Heather Barfield-Cole, Jane Barnette, Chase Bringardner, Zachary Dorsey, Bradley Griffin, Jessica Hester, Rebecca Hewett, Jennifer iv Kokai, Olivia Whitmer O’Hare, Tamara Smith, and Christin Essin Yannacci. Susan Corbin and Kim Solga motivated my writing process. This project could not have been completed without the financial support of the University of Texas at Austin Continuing Fellowship and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship. I am indebted to archivist Allen Fisher and the staff at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library for their valuable assistance. I must also acknowledge those who provided the emotional support so necessary for helping me through these years. I am thankful to Mary Kay Lutringer for her kind words, Dr. Thomas Blevins and his wonderful staff at Texas Diabetes and Endocrinology for their medical expertise, the staff at the University of Texas at Austin’s Performing Arts Center Patron Services office for their warm friendship, and all my friends for their belief in me. Finally, I thank my family for their unwavering support. v Radical Street Theatre and the Yippie Legacy: A Performance History of the Youth International Party, 1967-1968 Publication No. ____________ Susanne Elizabeth Shawyer, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2008 Supervisor: Jill Dolan In 1967 and 1968, members of the Youth International Party, also known as Yippies, created several mass street demonstrations to protest President Lyndon Baines Johnson’s handling of the United States’ military involvement in the war in Vietnam. The Yippies were a loose network of hippies, anti-war activists, and left-wing radicals committed to cultural and political change. This dissertation investigates how the Yippies used avant-garde theories of theatre and performance in their year of demonstrating against the Johnson administration. The Yippies receive little attention in most histories of American performance, and theatre remains on the margins of political and social histories of the 1960s; therefore this dissertation places performance and political archives side by side to create a new historical narrative of the Yippies and performance. The Yippies created their own networked participatory street performance form by drawing on the political philosophy of the New Left student movement, the vi organizational strategies of the anti-war movement, and the countercultural values of the hippies. They modified this performance form, which they termed “revolutionary action- theater,” with performance theories drawn from New York’s avant-garde art world, the concept of guerrilla theatre outlined by R. G. Davis of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, and the notion of Theater of Cruelty created by Antonin Artaud. Using performance theory and cultural history as primary methodologies, this project traces the Yippies’ adoption of revolutionary action-theater with three examples: the 1967 “March on the Pentagon” where future Yippie leaders performed an exorcism ritual at the Pentagon; the 1968 “Grand Central Station Yip-In” event that advertised for the Yippie movement; and the 1968 “Festival of Life” at the National Democratic Convention in Chicago where the Yippies nominated a pig as presidential candidate. The final chapter on the recent phenomenon of flash mobs argues that the Yippies’ legacy lives on in this participatory street performance form, and suggests that revolutionary action-theater can still serve as a model for political action. vii Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 The Chicago Poster: Contextualizing the Youth International Party in the Historical Archive The 1960s Archive: History and Performance..................................................... 7 The Yippie Archive: Creating a “Potlitical” Movement .................................... 22 Chapter Outline.................................................................................................. 42 Image of Yippie Chicago Poster ....................................................................... 47 Chapter One ................................................................................................................ 48 The March on the Pentagon: Elements of a Networked Participatory Street Performance Form Chapter Two ................................................................................................................ 98 The Grand Central Station Yip-In: Form into Practice Chapter Three ........................................................................................................... 147 The Festival of Life: Form Made into Chaos Chapter Four ............................................................................................................. 201 Flash Mobs: The Yippie Legacy? List of Abbreviations ................................................................................................ 225 Works Cited .............................................................................................................. 226 Vita ..............................................................................................................................245 viii Introduction The Chicago Poster: Contextualizing the Youth International Party in the Historical Archive At the heart of this project is a single sheet of paper. At first glance, it looks like a piece of blue-ruled writing paper, with exuberant red letters proclaiming “Yippie!” printed across the middle of the page. Below, more red letters read “Chicago. Aug 25- 30.”1 But a closer look reveals that this is not ruled writing paper. The dozens of orderly blue lines marching down the page are not solid, but instead consist of hundreds of tiny words. In a small font and all in capital letters, these words create the blue-ruled background of the poster. They begin at the top left corner proclaiming “SPREE— WOWEE—ARLO GUTHRIE,” and end at the very bottom of the page with “YOUTH INTERNATIONAL PARTY—32 UNION SQUARE, ROOM 607, NEW YORK, N. Y. 10003—(212) 982-5090.” In between are dozens of rows of small words separated with dashes: a riot of names, nouns, verbs, and sounds. One line reads, “INNER SPACE — HELL NO WE WON’T GO — LIPS — CHERRY PIE — LIBERTY — LSD — STREAMERS — MACBIRD — VOTE,” referencing psychedelic experiences, an anti- war chant, traditional American family values and ideals, the upcoming political conventions of the 1968 election year, and Barbara Garson’s 1966 play MacBird! that satirizes President Lyndon Baines Johnson as a modern-day Macbeth. It is near 1 See image at the end of this chapter on page 47. This image can also be found online at the University of Virginia Library Special Collections Department at < http://www.lib.virginia.edu/cgi-in/imgload.cgi/155>, and printed in black and white on page 164 of Abbie Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It. 1 impossible to read every single little blue word in order from top left to bottom right as if reading a book; the jaunty large-font letters of “Yippie!” continually command the eyes’ attention. The play of large font against the background of miniscule words disrupts a linear reading of the page, offering instead a chaotic pastiche of words. This piece
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