Human Rights (and Their Appearances) in Performing Arts Festivals

Abstract

This article opens by examining Super Night Shot, a performance devised by the Berlin-Nottingham group Gob Squad that was produced at three arts festivals across Canada in 2014. It looks specifically at Super Night Shot’s performance in the PuSh Festival’s tenth-anniversary gala and examines the appeal that Gob Squad’s comic brand of art activism holds for festivals. In recent years the political dissent expressed on fringe and festival stages in Canada has often met with backdoor censorship through the defunding of grants by the Department of Canadian Heritage. The Montreal-based group ATSA has experienced this first-hand through Canadian Heritage’s defunding of their “manifestival,” État d’Urgence. (The decision to withdraw funding happened on the eve of ATSA’s 2010 festival.) The article compares the art-activist tactics used in both Super Night Shot and État d’Urgence and proposes that in a climate of silencing by disinvestment it may be safer to program the appearance of dissent rather than a concrete manifestation of it. It concludes by examining a small-scale version of État d’Urgence staged in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, The Pigeon’s Club (2011), and argues for the importance of face-to-face encounters in the public square that challenge citizens to take social and political responsibility for one another.