ABSTRACT

Revisiting and reexamining many of the protest movements from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s affords an opportunity to glean tactics, commitment, ideas, and achievements from those who have gone before. The anti-war, women’s, civil rights, Indigenous rights, and LGBTQ movements have helped enact a progressive vision, and have employed theatre and performance as central components of their successes. Revisiting these earlier movements – as theatre and performance movements – is particularly useful in rethinking and reframing opposition to rising neoliberalist and populist waves. These earlier protest movements, long framed as political endeavours with an incidental performance component, can now be re-framed as performance movements – highlighting performance’s centrality to politics. This chapter calls for using the tools of performance studies to re-examine previous activist movements, and this reconnoitering connects us to the past, inspiring continued progressive action in the face of new challenges.