The Radical Utopian Power of Documentary Performance and Convivencia

Abstract

What do a devised community-based performance piece, Every Girl’s a Hero; a scripted documentary play, The People’s Temple; and a series of YouTube videos, including Pussy Riot’s protest performance in Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, their “Punk Prayer” music video, and the #Freepussyriot México music video, have in common? Documentary performance. Given current movements such as community-based or community-engaged arts projects, devised theatre, and performance as research methodologies (e.g., PaR/ PARIP/ PBR), I propose documentary performance as a frame for this growing corpus of work. Each is a live and/or recorded performance that utilizes documentary materials as their foundation—the words and lived experiences of those participating in the piece. Each is particularly moving because it celebrates and brings into focus the testimonies, sometimes through song, of everyday people. The potency and poetry of these works come from their genuine and quotidian nature, yet the statements they are making are anything but commonplace. Through thick description, borderlands performance studies, participant observations, and autoethnography, and by employing the theories of utopian performatives and critical pedagogy, I investigate the work these pieces do to create, even for a moment, utopia in the here and now. In the tradition of theorist José Esteban Muñoz, and activist Zapatista Subcomandante Marcos I queer and radicalize the term utopia to open up the possibility of multiple versions of a better world. Rather than offering one highly regulated vision of utopia, through documentary performance each case queers the term, which not only reclaims the concept from historically fascistic uses, but also provides distinct examples of utopia. While each documentary performance piece is born of a traumatic event or situation (homelessness, mass murder/suicide, colonialism, and authoritarianism), they all offer moments of joy, kinship, hope, and a plurality of utopias. They each express the Latina feminist notion of convivencia, the conviction that being together to make and witness art is a political act that can lead to change