ABSTRACT
IN HIS MUCH LONGER ORIGINAL essay, Schechner uses the lens of the carnivalesque to examine six events: the Chinese pro-democ- racy movement centered in Tiananmen Square; the fall of the Berlin Wall; an anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Washington, D.C.; the Mardi Gras of New Orleans and the Gasparilla celebration of Tampa; and Ramlila of Ramnagar in northern India. I include this excerpt on Tiananmen Square in response to numerous colleagues who, perusing earlier drafts of this anthology, felt it was incomplete without an essay on that event.
… old authority and truth pretend to be absolute, to have an extra- temporal importance. Therefore, their representatives … are gloomily serious. They cannot and do not wish to laugh; they strut majestically, consider their foes the enemies of eternal truth, and threaten them with eternal punishment. They do not see themselves in the mirror of time, do not perceive their own origin, limitations, and end; they do not recognize their own ridiculous faces or the comic nature of their pretensions to eternity and immutability. And thus these personages come to the end of their role still serious, although their spectators have been laughing for a long time … time has transformed old truth and authority into a Mardi Gras dummy, a comic monster that the laughing crowd rends to pieces in the marketplace.
Mikhail Bakhtin (1984: 212-13)The role of the revolutionary is to create theatre which creates a revolutionary frame of reference. The power to define is the power to control… . The goal of theatre is to get as many people as possible to overcome fear by taking action. We create reality wherever we go by living our fantasies.
Jerry Rubin (1970: 142-3)