Dedicated to clever and innovative trends of art and design in activism.

Odds are, your community suffers from oppression, monoculture, apathy, or boredom (or maybe all of the above.) If so, an infringement festival could provide inspiration and amusement - and help raise awareness for positive social change and global justice.

The infringement is a democratically run, non-hierarchical interdisciplinary arts festival open to all critical artists - theatre, music, film, street performance, visual arts, and more. It began in Montreal in 2004 as a protest against the co-option of experimental and DIY theatre by the Canadian Association of Fringe Festivals, and has since spread to Ottawa, Toronto, Buffalo, Regina, New York City and Bordeaux, France, with new communities joining regularly. They don’t charge a registration fee, and have guidelines to keep the festival independent.

Interested in hosting an infringment in your community? Click here for a PDF guide to starting one!

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Roll up, roll up - ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, friends and foes - welcome to the unparalleled, the unexpected, the perfectly paradoxical, the grotesquely beautiful, the new-fangled world of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army (CIRCA).

This self-described “obscene body of deviant soldiers” has an inspiring manifesto, the essence of which is launching an absurd war on absurd war - because what else can a person be in a foolish world, other than a clown, and how better to undermine authority than by mocking it?

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The Social Justice Committee of Montreal has a new effort to promote their theatre project, “The Dictatorship of Debt.”  You’ll find info at the freshly designed SocialJusticeTheatre.com (warning, it’s Flash only) - I personally love the menu option “Find Justice Here.”

Their next performances take place at Theatre St Catherines on April 1, 2, 3, 5 (note, no performance on the 4th) at 8:00PM, and also at 2:00PM on the 5th.  Tickets are available at Lola Rosa and Cheap Thrills for $5.

Disclosure: I have worked with the SJC, writing for their publication, the Upstream Journal, and folks I know and like have worked directly on this theatre project.

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For those of you in New England you may want to consider going to this year’s Creative UpRising(s) conference in Amherst, MA. It will be held during the weekend of April 4th at the Umass campus. This year’s theme takes a global look at art and activism, emerging aesthetics, and the role of performance in cultural organizing.

Intersection is New WORLD Theater’s biennial conference and festival examining new work practices by artists of color and showcasing multidisciplinary theater pieces on the cutting edge of new aesthetics. Begun in 1998, the conference is a diverse national gathering of artists, educators, organizers, activists, scholars, theater professionals and presenters. As an organization that bridges the worlds of creativity and scholarship, community activism and professional performance, NWT is committed to furthering national conversations on cultural equity, emerging aesthetics and activism through the arts.

www.newworldtheater.org

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The Center for the Theatre of the Oppressed and Applied Theatre Arts, Los Angeles offers free, monthly workshops on Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) techniques, and applications of liberatory theatre. In their six years, they have worked with local community organizations to bring such issues to the fore as:

art and activism, liberation art and community engagement, work on issues as diverse as racism and juvenile justice, awareness of the threat of war and the plight of immigrant residents facing new post-9/11 laws in the United States.

They work through a variety of lenses, and have worked closely with Augusto Boal.  See their calendar of events for CTOATALA happenings.

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