Photo: Stacy Lanyon
I had been waiting for a long time for something like Occupy
to happen. I never understood why people weren’t out in the streets for years
and years. I moved to New York City in 2003, and I remember at the beginning of
the Iraq war when they had that massive protest. I
was there. They had corralled everybody up Second Avenue. It was permitted. It
was within the barricades. It was completely ineffective and so depressing.
You’d just do your thing and go home without affecting anything. I remember
that day I had one of those rainbow flags, and there were the signs that said,
“The world can’t wait. Drive out the Bush regime.” I did a solo march. I was
screaming and yelling, ranting and raving down the street by myself, and it
felt so good. People were looking at me like I was a crazy person. So I
had been waiting for some kind of protest movement that was effective in
stopping the order of the status quo for a long time. It was really exciting that Occupy
happened.
When Occupy started, I was in Afghanistan. I was teaching
theater to Afghanistan students, and when I came back to New York, it was
September 19th. I heard about Occupy from a Facebook post from a
friend in England. I was like, “This is happening right across the bridge, and
I don’t even know it?” There was a media blackout. I knew right then that I was
going to be a part of it. I was like, “This is brilliant. I’ve gotta be there” The
first day I showed up, I met some people, and we wrote a street theater play
about the economic collapse. It was September 22nd or 23rd.
It was before the tents. People were going to meetings. Everyone was very busy.
I walked through the park, and I sat by the drummers. I had just come from an
audition, and I was in my audition outfit. Someone came up to me and asked if I
was there for the Arts and Culture meeting. I was like, “Sure. I don’t know
what the fuck you’re talking about, but yeah.” He introduced me to some people.
All the sudden there was all of this possibility and all of these like-minded individuals
that wanted to talk about something real, and the energy was
super palpable and addictive.
I was working with the puppets for a while. We did Jack and
the Corporate Beanstalk last summer at the Fringe Festival. I’ve been working
on this Bradley Manning play for a year now. I got the idea for a Bradley
Manning play because of my time in Afghanistan. I was really
deep in Occupy when I got back. Then, I went back to Afghanistan in February or
March of last year. It was after the park was lost. After coming back from
that trip, the Bradley Manning play just came out fully formed from my mind
because it felt like it was bringing together so many different issues that I
personally felt very deeply about. I had read Bradley’s chat logs, and I
feel that Bradley Manning's actions have a direct link to Occupy. One person’s individual act
has these repercussions, and it creates this collective Tsunami. Bradley
Manning released the diplomatic cables to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks released it.
Then, they got it in Tunisia, and that is believed to have helped start the Tunisian revolution. Then
when Tunisia started, it sparked in Egypt. Everybody had been waiting for
something to happen, but some little spark became this huge worldwide thing.
In the chat logs, Bradley talks about how concerned he was about civilians
being killed and how he felt personally responsible for that. Having students
that I felt so close to and that I love that lived in Afghanistan and knowing
Bradley’s connection to Occupy, I felt really personally attached to this
story. I felt like Americans, especially, needed to hear this story. I worked
on the script for a long time. I direct it. We do street
theater. That’s really been my obsession.
I think Occupy is not so important as an identity, and at
this point holding onto it is not where I want to put my energy. It was this
great spark, and we learned so many lessons from it. In America, we got squashed by the police state. I'm not sure if people are really going to rise up. Don’t get me wrong. I love protesting. I love to take the
streets. I love to scream and yell about stuff because it makes me feel like I’m doing something. I think there are so many horrible
things in the world, but to really affect change, I think that we have to do it
from within the culture and go at the real foundation. We
have to affect the system on all kinds of levels. We have to create policy
change. We have to protest, but to really shift a paradigm, I think you have to
really get at the root of all of the things that we assume, and I think
a lot of that comes from culture and advertising and the messages that we are
getting all the time. The corporate coup d'état has happened. The corporate
control is complete, so how do we create another narrative and flip the script
to play by our rules and try to come up with different ways of being with each
other? I don’t have the answer, but I ask the questions a lot, and I think
that’s the most important thing.
What Occupy
did was create bonds of solidarity, and all of these people found each
other, which is so strong and so powerful. Those bonds exist now. Something else will happen
because it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The conditions of the
world create the need for something to happen. Human beings are reactionary
characters. Occupy was the first evolutionary movement in some ways. We were onto
something that I found very exciting about how power essentially operates. All
of the power dynamics are shifting. We’re entering a new hyper-democratized
age, be it with the internet or with globalization. I
think Occupy had a spiritual component. It’s not just Occupy. You can see it in the movements around the world.
There's something about the connections that were made. It changed my
life. It grounded me in my goals. I was
radicalized in college. I went to the New School, which is like a socialist
school, so we would read Foucault and all of these deconstructionist
philosophers and all of this identity politics and stuff. That was eye-opening.
After college, I was a member of the Living Theater, which is this famous anarchist
theater company from the 50s and 60s. That really radicalized me as well. Then,
I was so sad and depressed because people wouldn’t just be nice to each other
to make the revolution. This was in 2007. It just felt
very isolating. When Occupy started, I was like, “Oh my god, the beautiful
non-violent revolution is here.” I had to be there and be a part of it. Ultimately, it
made me more secure in my own voice and my own goals and my own life and the
effect I want my life to have on the world. I’m not so insecure anymore. I don't feel like I need to sell myself. Sometimes I still struggle with it, but I'm much stronger now.
There is so much wrong with the world. I feel such responsibility
for the state of the world, which kills me, which is why I felt so connected to
Bradley Manning. He’s just a private, but he sees himself as a real major operator
on the world stage, with this great responsibility for the course of the war.
It’s way above his pay grade, but he was like, “No, but I can do something
about it.” Then, he did. That’s why he is getting so badly treated because it’s
all about power and who has the power, and he was not in a position of power,
and he did this. That terrifies the powers that be because the whole thing runs
on consent. The government
has put into place indefinite detention and conflated military law and
civic law. The war has come home. I’m really concerned about the surveillance
state. That really makes me very frightened. I don’t like to think that I’m
being spied on all the time, and I know that I am, so I’m very paranoid. The fact that our food is diseased sucks. I don't want everything to be mediated by money. There’s a deep lack of common space and community and custom
and culture, and I think it’s really harmful to people physically and psychologically.
It’s scary because it’s very isolating. It's very, “I need to be surrounded by my stuff,
and I’m afraid that you want my stuff. I have to hide my stuff to protect me.”
I want everything to
change. I want the way that we relate to each other and all of power dynamics
to shift completely. The non-hierarchical thing, I
love. Everyone should be their own leader. Krishnamurti was one of my favorite
thinkers, and he was a great thinker and writer. He would say, “The truth is a
pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever…Truth, being
limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be
organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along
a particular path…The moment you follow someone, you cease to follow the truth.”
In some ways, Occupy was this incoherent signal of a rumbling of a new way of
interacting with one another. I don't feel I could say what the world is going to
look like. I think that a lot of pain
and suffering can come from expectations. We have to deal with what is.
Ever since I was really little, I’ve always wanted to disrupt the
status quo. I want to be able to be more
creative. I want to stop the wars. I want everyone to be fed, and America has
the ability to do that. Intelligence is bullshit. The smartest people in the
world have their heads up their fuckin’ asses. America has the resources and
the ability to make sure that everyone is fed and to stop these wars, and I’m so
sick of feeling attached to this horrible empire. It makes me sick. I want to
see native people have autonomy, and I want them to teach us how to live in
harmony with the earth. I think they have something to teach us. Supporting
native issues is solving the climate change issue. For me, that changes all of
our power dynamics. Why are we able to have all of these smart people with
these great studies, and there’re still fuckin’ tons of starving people and wars
all the time and raping of the planet? Well, that’s because of our hierarchical power
structure and what we place value on. I
think that native people have different ways of organizing that we could learn
from, and that might change everything, just as a model. Maybe there are other ones
too, but we could use some experimentation.
Human nature is human nature, and there is something about
certain philosophies that don’t take that into account. You have to recognize
human nature for what it is and deal with that. Violence is a thing. You can’t
just ignore it and say, “That’s not real.” It’s within all of us, so we have to
deal with that. You have to start with yourself. That sort of vigilance and
self-reflection is essential. That’s the only way that we’re going to change
anything. I think so many horrible things in the world are enacted
from insecurity and separation. We’re separated from ourselves. We’re separated
from the earth. We’re separated from our families. It’s psychotic. If there was
an integration of the self first and then moving out, moving out, moving out,
that would change everything because you wouldn’t have a need to take from others.
You can watch a video of Jack and the Corporate Beanstalk at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1Bl9PdYrwbA.
You can find the latest on Bradley Manning at:
http://www.bradleymanning.org/featured/bradley-manning-in-the-theater.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/
You can watch a video of Jack and the Corporate Beanstalk at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=1Bl9PdYrwbA.
You can find the latest on Bradley Manning at:
http://www.bradleymanning.org/featured/bradley-manning-in-the-theater.
Interview by Stacy Lanyon
http://buildingcompassionthroughaction.blogspot.com/
https://www.facebook.com/stacylanyon
https://instagram.com/stacylanyon/
https://twitter.com/StacyLanyon
http://stacylanyon.com/