The three entries I decided to explore were:
“Bring the issue home” (Rae Abileah and Jodie Evans), “Invisible Theater” (Tracey Mitchell), and “Expressive and instrumental actions” (Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Joshua Kahn Russell, and Zack Malitz).
In my opinion, I believe that the principle of “Bring the issue home”, is a very strong way for artists to, as Abileah and Evans say, “make an otherwise abstract, far-away issue relevant by making it personal, visceral and local.” I feel like this particular principle, in a way, motivates to actually get people to take action instead of just fluffing it off to the side because it doesn’t affect them directly. Abileah and Evans point out that “People care, but usually not enough to act on that concern, at least until they understand viscerally what’s at stake.” Some ways to bring the issue home are by showing the human cost, which is followed by an example of when Nancy Kricorian had stood outside of her senator’s office and set up “a row of shoes of all sizes tagged with the names of Iraqi civilians who had been killed, and asked passersby to ‘walk in their shoes.’” She did this to open the eyes of the public because many Americans were not personally affected by the war, and Kricorian wanted “to bring the human cost of war home”. Another time where action was taken was when it the issue that was brought home became personal. The Occidental Petroleum were going to start drilling in the Peruvian Amazon jungle, and even people trying to stop them from doing so didn’t work out. However, “when a delegation of native Achuar people (who would have been displaced by the drilling, their ancestral lands ravaged) traveled to the U.S. to share their story”, the problem then became about protecting the homes of these people and no longer just a problem of trying to stop this company from their oil project. The Occidental Petroleum company had to then call-off their project. In addition, another way to bring the issue home is by putting a price tag on it. In other words, “If people don’t connect to the human cost of an issue, reaching their pocketbooks is another route”. Back in Salinas California of 2005, the Steinbeck Library was at possible risk to be shut down due to major budget cuts. So, “farm workers and peace advocates joined forces and held a twenty-four-hour read-in to keep the library open, drawing attention to the money spent on waging wars rather than other priorities...twenty-four hours later, the entire community understood how the high price of occupation affected them.” As informed by Abileah and Evans, it is “when the local consequences of global policies are highlighted, people’s circle of concern often widens.”
After reading the tactic of “Invisible theater” by Tracey Mitchell, I personally thought at first that it would be a fantastic and incredible way to bring up the difficult topics of everyday life in order to get a conversation going in the real world on topics like poverty, racism, and homophobia. I also liked the idea of how the actors were required to stay in character even if the situation went in a completely different direction because invisible theater should have the audience believing that what they are witnessing is actually happening in real life. As Tracey Mitchell describes, “Invisible theater is theater that seeks never to be recognized as theater, performed in a public place. The goal is to make the intervention as realistic as possible so that it provokes spontaneous responses.” I believe that in a perfect world, this tactic should be used and practiced with all over. However, this tactic in our world today, in my opinion, is not the safest way to open up these difficult conversations. You never know who may go up to an actor who is portraying whatever role they are and end up physically attacking, threatening, etc. and physically hurting an actor that is just doing their job to spark up a conversation. Mitchell states that “actors should rehearse a range of observer reactions, including aggression and abuse, and should be prepared to roll with the punches (sometimes literally!).” She also recommends to have “an escape plan or distress signal” and to discuss “ahead of time if or when to break character”.
I found Jonathan Matthew Smucker, Joshua Kahn Russell, and Zack Malitz’s theory of “Expressive and instrumental actions” rather informative and useful. They point out that political action is usually taken off of either of the two different kinds of motivation, “expressing an identity, and winning concrete change. It’s important to know the difference, and to strike a balance between the two.” They say that expressive actions come from peoples hearts and guts, “whether or not our ‘heads’ calculate the specific outcome.” The instrumental value of an action is described to be the conversations, questions, etc. about how a specific action is going to help make the change in the long run. The instrumental value of an action involves the questioning of “ ‘what is this action actually achieving for our issue, cause, movement, campaign?’ ” Something I found very interesting was the mention that if a group of people don’t focus enough on what it is their action is actually accomplishing for their cause, but instead focus more on the expressive action itself, it can end up becoming insignificant because they weren’t fully aware about how their action affects those outside of the action. Instrumental actions are usually based on an “ ‘external’ outcome”, but they can also have an “ ‘internal’ focus”. Instrumental actions can be broken down as communicative actions and concrete actions, which are both different ways to measure an instrumental outcome. “Communicative actions are designed to sway opinion, express an idea, or contribute to public discourse”. Concrete actions “are designed to have a tangible impact on a target.” I learned and took away from this entry that although self-expression is important in terms of wanting to take action to make a change, it is also important to ask what the action is achieving for the cause of it. As Smucker, Russell, and Malitz say, “If we really want to change the world, we must know the difference between ― and artfully balance our instrumental goals with our desire for self-expression.”
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