Marilyn DeLaure
MARILYN DELAURE. Tell me about the origins of Reverend Billy.
SAVITRI D. Bill was talked into this by an Episcopalian priest, Sidney Lanier, who wasn’t preaching anymore (though he was always quick to point out that he had never been defrocked). In a funny way Sidney is a very early culture jammer. He left the church in the late 1960s, but he was always deploying his religiosity in a pretty strategic way toward our culture-making. . . .1
BILL TALEN (“REVEREND BILLY”). Sidney pulled me out of theater. I had been a theater person—a student and producer of monologists. Sidney said that America needs a new kind of preacher who is post-religious, but who understands that even secular Americans derive meaning from Bible stories. Sidney kept saying, “It’s basic to Americans that we run our meaning on simple moral tales,” and he said, “Artists get this, artists who have Americans in their audience get this.” So he took me on a ride and hired me away from my own theater. I went to conventions and gatherings studying the historic Jesus and the non-biblical or extra-biblical Jesus. Finally I found myself on Forty-Second Street in New York City, in front of the Disney Store with Reverend Sidney Lanier instructing me that our new devil was Mickey Mouse. Disney was our devil (with products made in sweatshops, and union busters)—it is very much a company that invades the dream life of children, very much a religious system. I led discussions out on that sidewalk about consumerism with German tourists and Japanese tourists. . . . I probably was out in front of the Disney Store for a year and a half before the group that was with me on the sidewalk went into the store, and we continued our town hall meeting inside.
SAVITRI D. What is so interesting is how this coincides with the antiglobalization movement. At that time, there was a growing group of people who were also in front of the Disney Store in what was an increasingly unified social movement, a global one, and Billy happened to be there, and they recognized that he was a bullhorn. He was a bullhorn for them, and those activists claimed Reverend Billy as part of their culture. Appropriating this character Reverend Billy—this white Christian guy from the Midwest—turned out to be useful and political and dynamic, and had so much traction in a political context: the activists saw that and saw Reverend Billy as a tool. To me that is as much a part of the creation story of Reverend Billy as the mentoring he went through with Sidney. And at the time, Billy was open enough to recognize that this was a better way to go, better than trying to make this art or theater, so he said yes. It’s like that ultimate theatrical rule: say yes. There are people in front of him saying yes, so say yes. And I think that’s really how he got swept into what we now look at as creative resistance or culture jamming.
MARILYN DELAURE. Tell me about what happened once you went inside the Disney Store.
BILL TALEN. We have one action called the Cell Phone Opera, where twelve or fifteen of us would go into the Disney Store and situate ourselves near other customers. (We would have practiced this off-site before we came in play-acting.) So you’re buying a gift for your niece, and you’re not quite sure of the gift, so you need to ask about whether it’s okay to purchase a Pocahontas doll that has a little wasp waist. So you pretend to “call” the mother and start a discussion, and then start having an argument with her. Maybe the mother says, “Oh yeah, that’s okay.” And you say, “You know what? I don’t have that thin of a waist myself,” and you start arguing with your sister-in-law or whoever it is. The audience—other shoppers—can overhear you without feeling like they are invading. But these “calls” are happening all over the store, as our choir members are staging arguments with friends or families on their cell phones. Gradually, the volume of these arguments increases, and they get more intense, and before you know it, the other shoppers are backing off and seeing that in each aisle, there is a cell phone person who is having a conversation with a relative about the gift they were supposed to buy, an errand that has become controversial. Then you look around and you realize that the entire place . . . of course, the manager of the store makes this same discovery, and what would happen at this point as our volume rose, sometimes the manager of the store would turn up Elton John or Julie Andrews or whoever is on the soundtrack at that moment. So you have all these people shouting into the cell phones, and then they start singing into their cellphones, but at that point you’ll have “Chim chiminee, chim cheroo!”—the soundtrack from the store cranked way up and it becomes really chaotic! Then you get a signal from the action captain to start handing out the information about the sweatshops.
MARILYN DELAURE. And eventually you’re ushered out of the store by someone . . .
BILL TALEN. Or to jail. I’ve definitely gone from that situation to jail.
MARILYN DELAURE. How do shoppers in the store react?
BILL TALEN. Now in the Disney Store in particular—but also at Starbucks or Chase Bank—once you were seen to have repurposed the space away from the general design of the corporate retailer, people jump in different directions. Some people start shaking, some people giggle, some start clapping; we’ve even had some people join the choir at that point. People are suddenly released from their own relationship (which they didn’t realize was so strict) to that overall macro-retail design. And it’s interesting to watch people go all over the place.
SAVITRI D. To see how mad people get—
BILL TALEN. Some people cover up their children’s heads, and to some parents, it’s just awful that the basic script has been violated, and they cover their kid’s head and rush out the door. They think it’s violent.
SAVITRI D. Or rude, rude. [They say,] “Stop being rude!”
BILL TALEN. Yeah—
SAVITRI D. And you know, well, I think a sweatshop is kind of rude.
MARILYN DELAURE. Savitri, in your essay “Missed Cues, Stolen Script” (2011) you write: “We make it our mission to open up seams on the edges of things, break open space. . . . Retail environments, with their lack of feedback and human connection, are incubators of isolation, alienation, and crisis. And that’s what happens when public space gets dismantled, when the First Amendment is abandoned, when the primacy of openness gives way to the primacy of profit.” Tell me about that process, how you break open space.
SAVITRI D. To begin with, most retail space resembles other retail spaces. . . . Those spaces are not that different from each other. The entrance might be at a different angle, the cash register might be in a different position, but essentially those are replicated rooms. They are all just like the other ones. So over time you begin quite easily to imagine what might happen and how you will be physically in that space. But we do approach it choreographically: we will look and see where the best view is, who is going to see it, who is the audience. You ask all those basic blocking questions, and then I think you have to just throw all that to the wind, and just let the performance take over, and that’s where having performance chops really helps.
What you quickly realize is that there are only about three or four things going on in those spaces. You reach into the pocket, reach out from the body, above the waist interaction with people around you, low eye-contact, maybe smiling but not too much smiling, the volume is always at a certain level: it’s a very contained and proscribed environment. And so if you start doing something even the slightest bit off—I mean if I went on and I was just wobbling like this [wobbles upper torso and head] and just doing all the things I’d normally do as a shopper, people might be thinking, “Oh she’s a freak,” but then I start saying, “Well you know, gosh! I always heard that fair trade coffee was a lot easier on your body, but I was drinking it all day and ugh, maybe I should switch back to the non-fair trade coffee?!” I mean, I can have a whole normal conversation with you and one little thing is adjusted in that space and it becomes crazy, you know?
BILL TALEN. One time Savitri was in a Starbucks, and she started saying the word “Starbucks” repeatedly. “Starbucks, Starbucks.”
SAVITRI D. Not even very loud—just slightly above normal conversational volume.
BILL TALEN. And a security person asked you to leave.
SAVITRI D. No, they called the cops, and I was practically arrested.
MARILYN DELAURE. You’ve recently expanded your ministry from “Stop Shopping” to address climate change with the “Revolt of the Golden Toad” campaign, where you and the Stop Shopping Choir members don beautiful golden toad masks and invade branch offices of the big banks, like Chase. What are your aims with this campaign?
BILL TALEN. We are hoping to suggest that species and ecosystems have been impacted in a deadly way by the investments of those institutions. Especially at the time that Hurricane Sandy seemed to be aimed at Wall Street, we noticed that there’s an absence of any causality suggested between Wall Street and climate change. But our research indicates that Chase, Citibank, B of A, UVS, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank—these banks are actively, on a daily basis, moving billions of dollars into coal-fired power which is responsible for 40 percent of global CO2 emissions. So that collective censorship that we all participate in, just not publicly asking the question, “Where does the CO2 come from?”—we noticed that, and we just thought, well, let’s step into that gap, into that silence with a species that most scientists agree has been killed by climate change, the golden toad from Central America. So it’s about getting the information out there: people see a bunch of orange-looking frogs in a bank lobby. They need something else as well. They need some text, they need some verbiage, which comes from the preaching and the singing, and then from the handouts, and then with the handouts you can go all the way to the websites, to Facebook, and then you can point people directly to Rainforest Action Network and to BankTrack.org and then Benevolence, which is actively researching the investments of the individual banks.
SAVITRI D. But let’s divorce ourselves right away from any kind of self-satisfaction—because this might be great what we’re doing, but it’s not working. We are trying as hard as we can every day, but eventually it’s time for all activists and all artists to be realistic about how much impact we’re having. There are not many people at this point who don’t know about climate change. This is not an educational campaign. So either we are going to end capitalism and turn consumers back into citizens and become citizens of the Earth again (or for the first time for some of us)—or not. I don’t think any of us should kid ourselves about effectiveness at this point. I mean we are doing what we can, and we are going to try everything we can until we just keel over, and Billy doesn’t like it when I talk like this because he is a more cheerful person than I am.
Yes, we have had successes in our campaigns; we have changed corporate practice on a large-scale . . . but it’s not nearly enough. The Limited Brands can start using recycled paper, and that’s a big deal. They use so much paper for Victoria Secret catalogues that they have to repurpose other paper mills so there’s enough recycled pulp. I mean you can affect things at a pretty large scale and still not affect anything at all. It’s a really tough time to make work and keep making work.
MARILYN DELAURE. Yes, this is a crucial question with culture jamming or with any form of activism: Is it making a difference?
SAVITRI D. Well, it is making more of a difference than if we weren’t doing it at all. . . . I can be sure of that. Is it making enough of a difference? We have people every day contacting us, writing us, and talking to us and telling us what’s happening in their world, and this is coming into them in a real way . . . and then you know I can say yes to those things, it’s just . . . the picture is not getting rosier out there.
MARILYN DELAURE. Savitri, in your essay “Coney Island: The Mermaid in the Window” (2011), you write, “Maybe reinvigorating our imaginations, our sense of play, is the way, at least a way, back to our politics. We start with fairy tales and pretty soon we are marching out to sea. Crack open the imagination, inspire naiveté, stir up dreams and memories, and find the seed of another imagining: You mean we might be able to wrest a beloved place from an unscrupulous developer? Or a corrupt government? We might actually save Coney Island?” Tell me about how your work brings imagination and play into activism.
SAVITRI D. Well, I’m just always still amazed that I still have an imagination! I’m amazed that in the midst of the American monoculture, that I can have one, and believe me, days go by where I don’t have one. I do know that the way out of the monoculture has always been, for me personally and culturally—I mean I grew up in the 1980s, and the only way out of the 1980s was imagination—it was music and it was books. But now, I feel like you have to fight against culture to get your imagination.
BILL TALEN. And it’s not just the corporate marketing—there are so many entities, so many objects, so much language and imagery representing itself as our imagination that comes from the outside . . .
SAVITRI D. I mean you could go up to the most imaginative person you know and say, “Yeah, okay, here, this is a thought experiment for you. What about if there was no more capitalism?” And you will be amazed, 99.9 percent of people will have no thought. They’ll just say, “What? What?” And you’ll say, “No, no, just dream for a second and dream of the fairyland with moss and tiny little creatures. . . . I mean the place where instead of money we rub heads together and make our scalps glow,” or whatever the imaginative response might be. I mean you can’t even do that at a cocktail party, so how are we actually supposed to conceive of a world that’s different from this one if we can’t even in a playful way imagine anything else?
I just think if we could give ourselves those tools, those tactics—and maybe that’s where culture jamming is actually the most effective—you can just pretend for a minute, you can pretend something else. I grew up in the woods. For me there was always a place where I could go and find my creative self, because if you’re in an actual integrated environment like a forest . . . anytime you look at the bark of tree, suddenly you realize, oh I didn’t know there were ten colors of brown in that one square inch. But in the monoculture that’s much harder. That complexity doesn’t talk back to you. What talks back to you? Nothing. You just get depressed, and then your brain shuts down, and you don’t have any ideas.
MARILYN DELAURE. It strikes me that there are different types of attention: you’re paying attention in a quiet and focused and deep way to the ten colors of brown in the square inch of bark, whereas if you’re immersed in the screen devices in your hand or on your desk, with everything that you’re watching, there’s so much coming at you. And even the way television has changed since we were kids: there used to be just one person talking and maybe a logo in the corner. Now you watch CNN and there are eight different things going on simultaneously, including that ticker across the bottom. . . . So we are constantly in this state of hyper-distraction, and are unable to pay deep attention to anything.
BILL TALEN. That’s right, that’s right.
MARILYN DELAURE. That’s the root of a lot of these problems.
SAVITRI D. I definitely think it is. One thing we can do is give each other permission to disengage from that mainstream culture. That’s definitely a purpose that the Church of Stop Shopping serves . . . because there are all these people who are in the commercial space of the Internet and/or that kind of quasi- . . . what is it? What is going on? Am I working, am I surfing? And then they encounter this thing that sort of gives them permission to . . .
BILL TALEN. Stop shopping!
1 In 1963, Sidney Lanier gutted St. Clement’s Episcopal Church in Manhattan, transforming it into the experimental and influential American Place Theater. Lanier, who was a cousin of playwright Tennessee Williams, passed away in October 2013, not long after this interview was conducted.
Savitri D. 2011. “Coney Island: The Mermaid in the Window.” In The Reverend Billy Project, by Bill Talen and Savitri D, edited and with an Introduction by Alisa Solomon, 63–80. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Savitri D. 2011. “Missed Cues, Stolen Script.” In The Reverend Billy Project, by Bill Talen and Savitri D, edited and with an Introduction by Alisa Solomon, 84–94. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.