THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE

Zoe Beloff is an artist and Professor at Queens College. She works across a
range of media including film, projection performance, installation and drawing.
Her projects aim to reconnect the present with the past, illuminate the future
in new ways, and explore utopian ideas of social progress. She has presented A STREET PRODUCTION OF THE PLAY BY BERT BRECHT (1949)
internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Site Santa Fe,
the M HKA museum in Antwerp, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at Cardboard is the Language of Protest
the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs the Center for Zoe Beloff and Jonathan Kahana in conversation
Documentary Arts and Research. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The
Politics of American Documentary (2008), and the editor of The Documentary
Film Reader. His is working on a book called Going Through the Motions:
Talking Pictures, Reenactment, and the Work of the Past, which focuses on the
artistic, cultural, scientific, and political uses of historical performance.

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 Jonathan Kahana: When you first conceived of this project, what was the state who, undeterred by lack of finances or professional training, decided to explore
of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and elsewhere? their inner life and in doing so attempted to free the psyche from the constraints
of cultural and sexual mores of their time. I think of the Coney Island Amateur
Zoe Beloff: In November of 2011 I was reading a biography of Brecht, where I Psychoanalytic Society as something that might have existed and might yet
discovered that he had written a play, The Days of the Commune. I knew right exist, a potential for people to start their own such societies.
away, even before I read it, that I must stage it. I knew exactly where this must The Coney Island project set me thinking seriously about the idea of
take place, in the streets, starting in Zuccotti Park, which had been cleared of utopian societies, and I wanted to do more work on the subject. I think of the
the entrenched protesters by the police only days earlier. I had already been Communards, in spirit, as the grandparents or the great-grandparents of the
thinking about the Paris Commune; the reason I was reading a biography of Coney Island Society. They were not were not professional politicians. They
Brecht was that I thought that he had a lot to say about what was going on were journalists, engineers, artists, and tradesmen. They came from a wide vari-
today. I was overwhelmed. Elated because the idea felt completely right, and at ety of backgrounds. They decided they needed a new form of government and
the same time terrified by the enormity of the task in front of me. then set about organizing it themselves.

So, at that time, you were identified in what way with Occupy Wall Street? As One of the things about this project that’s particularly fascinating is that it’s quite
someone who lives in Manhattan, who positions herself on the left, and who is difficult to say where it’s a rehearsal and where it’s a performance.
also underpaid for her professional and intellectual labor, I can imagine that you
were well-placed to identify with the movement? Of course I wonder a lot about what Brecht would have thought of us, the rag-
tag Commune. He considered a minimum of six-month rehearsals essential for
Interesting question: am I underpaid? Depends what I am being paid for. As an his productions. He wanted his actors be well trained. For me, rehearsing is
artist, I work for nothing. I’m outside of the “professional” – that is, commer- about doing something again and again; each time the group struggles to work
cial – world of art. So I have a day job and I feel very lucky to have one that is together better. I wanted to show the learning process.
I hope, useful. I teach at CUNY Queens College. I teach practical skills, how to Indeed, I believe that politics itself is not about teaching but learning.
make short films and audio works, how to draw pictures. Right now, as a pro- Brecht wrote learning plays, Lehrstücke, not teaching plays. The Days of the
fessor, I consider myself to be well paid. But then again, I spent fourteen years Commune was a structure to think with and through. At the end, as the working
as an adjunct teacher living hand-to-mouth in an illegal sublet, so I know what people are dying on the barricades, Geneviève Gericault says that they have
it’s like to live on little more than minimum wage. When I joined in the protest, it made mistakes, but they are learning, to which Jean Cabet says, what is the
was to speak up for friends who can’t afford school, who are mired in debt, for use when you will soon be six feet under? And Gericault responds, “there is
everyone who is unemployed. more to the world than just us.” And that is how I feel: we carry their struggle
When the movement began in September 2011, I was so excited. I into the future.
had been asking for a long time: where is the radical left when we need it? And Though the Paris Commune grew out of historical circumstance very
at last, here it was. I started going down to the encampment, not far from my different from our own and only lasted three months, I do not think it was a fail-
apartment. Both its idea and execution were remarkable. A town square where ure. Those working people of Paris lead us by their example, precisely because
total strangers could strike up conversation and discuss ways to change the they did something for themselves that seemed impossible. They were not
world. I had never seen anything like that before. afraid. They created a potential. Writing about revolution, Žižek quotes Samuel
People came to Zuccotti Park for a reason. They had something to Beckett, “‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’”4 Only half-joking, I say that this
say. It was a truly diverse assembly: unemployed factory workers, trade union could have been our motto as we all struggled to work together to create bet-
organizers, political science students, homeless people, radical librarians, ter performances. There is no line between rehearsing and performing. It is all a
anarchist street kids, African Americans and Native Americans crammed into rehearsal, a work in progress.
this small space. It was truly festive. I mean this in a serious way. I don’t think
this is something that we should consider just in the past tense. The grotesque
inequalities of our country were illuminated. And this illumination rippled out-
wards across the country in the way things are talked about and conceptual- 4. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 210.
ized, even now. Not the big changes we would like to see. But one must start
somewhere with whatever is possible in the moment.

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 abrupt and forceful eruption of the past into the present. I don’t believe in an I don’t think it could have happened without the indignados in Spain
unmediated access to the past as though the history was a fixed entity, like a or the protesters of the Arab Spring. I think the economic imbalances all
movie with a single storyline. In fact, I wanted to show just the opposite, that over the world will not be resolved without real change. One could say, what
we invent the past as we speak of it. The past is just a picture that we our- good was the Paris Commune? It did not achieve its objectives, it was utterly
selves create, and this picture it is as much about us as it is about those long destroyed; but I think the ideas it planted are still in the air and we are listen-
dead. The little paintings, like the costumes and the performances themselves ing to them. One of the things that impressed me about OWS was the idea of
inscribe a gap between narration and image, what is said and what is shown. leading by example, as did the Communards. Instead of just complaining about
Our performance is no more than a storyboard waiting to come to life. Not a inequality, here were people sharing books, food, and experiences.
replica of something that once was, but a sketch waiting to be fleshed out, a Was I part of Occupy? I’d call myself a fellow traveler, I didn’t do any
new Commune waiting to be realized. organizing. I did not camp out. Initially, my participation consisted of bringing
People asked me again and again, what were we doing, a piece of a sketchbook and beginning some documentary drawings. I had never done
street theater or a film or what? My feeling is, why chose? Why is that a ques- this before, but I was teaching a class where I asked the students to draw their
tion? I’d say, all of the above. Today everything needs to be visible in the real daily lives, so I thought I should practice this too. It was a challenge. I called it
world and in the virtual one, local and international. Actually one of the most “Drawings of Modern Life,” a first inkling that I was thinking about Paris in the
productive ways of getting our ideas out, was simply to hand out broadsheets, 19th century and the radical painters of modern life.
a publicity technique much used by journalists during the Commune. We hand-
ed out a couple of thousand. I find your paintings and drawings of the encampment, and also of the Days of
the Commune production – perhaps because they lack the precision and banal-
Thinking also of your work on the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic ity (or ubiquity) of video – particularly evocative, and very moving. (One can, of
Society3, I was wondering how the amateur figures in your thinking about uto- course, produce impressionistic effects in digital video: Jem Cohen’s beautiful
pia. And the Communards: are they also amateurs? series of “Gravity Hill Newsreels” about Occupy are one example.) Many artists
have given themselves a reportorial or documentary role in similar encounters,
As I have said, I don’t make my living doing art, so I count myself as an ama- so your instinct to reach for the pencil or the paintbrush, and for paper, rather
teur. And to answer your question, I feel strongly about championing the ama- than a small piece of digital technology, is curious and fascinating. What was
teur. My installation “Dreamland: the ‘Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic it about these media that had such appropriateness and urgency to you as a
Society’ and its Circle, 1926 – 1927” was all about the idea that ordinary people response to these events?
can take on difficult intellectual concepts and use them to change their world.
It began a few years ago when I was invited by the Coney Island Museum to When you draw, you become part of something, perhaps because you can’t
create an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Freud’s trip to the amuse- draw everything in front of you. Like writing, rather than recording, you effect a
ment park in 1909. Instead, I decided to focus on his legacy, the unconscious transformation that does not say “this is what happened,” but rather “this is my
of the people who lived, worked, and played at Coney Island after his visit. The experience at this particular moment.” Drawing directly from life, actually being
Amateur Psychoanalytic Society was my framework. My exhibition included a there, is a very odd idea in the 21st century. It is hard to do. I think my hand
wide range of media, drawings, lecture notes, objects, and even “dream films” does most of it. I just feel my fingers tracing over the lines and contours of
made by members who re-enacted their dreams on film. It was an imaginary people’s faces.It was also a way to quietly observe, look and listen closely over
archive, yet it grew out of an enormous amount of research. I call it a serious time in a very different way than people with their iPhone cameras or DSLRs.
history, just not a literal one. Time is very important in drawing: most particularly where you are drawing a
In the early part of the twentieth century Coney Island was a hotbed living, breathing, moving world around you. The drawing contains time within it.
of socialism. I proposed that the society saw psychoanalysis in the same uto- Perhaps because I come from film, I think about this a lot. I would draw through
pian spirit, as a way to change their world. Just as socialism would free people long General Assembly meetings in almost total darkness when I could barely
from oppressive conditions of labor, so psychoanalysis would inaugurate an make out what I was doing. I just tried to transcribe my experience. Only later in
intimate politics of desire. I think of the members of the society as visionaries, the light of subway I would discover what I had done.
For me, digital images of the world around us do not say too much.
3. Zoe Beloff, ed., The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle (New They have a kind of anonymity. Perhaps they scoop up the world too effortless-
York: Christine Burgin Gallery, 2009). ly, like turning on a microphone without really listening. This is not a problem of

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 technology, but of people who think it will do their work for them. Perhaps when them appropriately. We discovered remarkable connections between the 1870s
it was harder to take photographs or to film things, people had to think more and the 1970s, like macramé shawls. Berets from Catholic school children were
carefully about what they were doing. When the Communards posed in the turned into the sailor hats for the tough Communard women.
Place Vendôme on the occasion of the toppling of the Vendôme column, they Each performer decided how to wear his or her own costume.
collaborated with the photographer. They wanted to speak together to celebrate Sometimes, I had to stop myself from commenting because strange things did
this important moment, the toppling of a monument to militarism and imperial- happen. A working-class woman dying on the barricades wore fetching eye
ism. And that thoughtfulness is conveyed to us today. shadow and a velvet choker. Sometimes new interpretations of the characters
At the time, I felt conflicted. I had never done this kind of documen- erupted: I asked Michael Paul Britto to wear black to play the procurator of the
tary drawing before, precisely because I studied at an art school where the archbishop of Paris in conference with the governor of the bank of France, and
curriculum hadn’t changed since the 19th century. So I always believed that he arrived in a black hoodie and jeans. Along with the fact he wore a large gold
sketching was the pastime of Victorian girls – an idea that put me off drawing cardboard cross on a thick gold chain he got from a hardware store turned him
for decades! And the more I got into my drawings of the Occupy encampment, into a hip-hop priest.
the more I thought back to Manet, Daumier, and Courbet. And it was actually My idea for creating all the props and scenery out of corrugated
studying Manet’s drawings of the people dying on the barricades that initially cardboard came from observing the Occupy encampment and, of course, from
led me to start thinking about connections between the Paris Commune of going on marches. Cardboard is the medium of protest. I was also thinking of
1871 and Occupy. Since then I have been thinking, is it still possible to be a one of my favorite contemporary artists, Thomas Hirschhorn, who makes all
progressive artist in the 21st century and draw the world around us, or has the his installations out of cheap materials like cardboard, packing tape, and all the
form been consigned to the dustbin of history? detritus of modern life. I really admire his amazing combination of philosophi-
cal and political astuteness, playfulness and visual inventiveness. It was also
I was reminded of a number of contemporary artists who’ve used drawing to an enormous task making all the props. Having never done this before, I had to
render urgent, critical events: Sue Coe’s sketches of the early days of the AIDS find a new visual vocabulary. How to paint a cardboard cannon or a dead rat?
crisis, for instance, or comix artists like Joe Sacco, who has also drawn Occupy. How big should they be to read clearly for an audience?
And among children, of course, drawing hasn’t disappeared as a form for mak- The most difficult objects to deal with were the rifles. They are very
ing a spontaneous and permanent impression of the world. important in the story: Phillipe and his brother Francois Faure have an armed
standoff; the National Guardsmen carry rifles. I made some out of cardboard
Children will always draw so long as there are crayons. But is drawing the and I realized that from a distance, they look quite realistic. In New York is it ille-
world around us a form of serious cultural expression? A couple of years ago I gal to carry fake firearms, even if they look like toys. We had enough problems
listened to a colleague in the art department telling a graduate student that her at Zuccotti Park without getting arrested for fake guns. Then suddenly the day
drawings of her Bed-Stuy neighborhood were irrelevant to contemporary art. He before we were to do the performance, I had an idea. I would bolt the guns to
likened her work to “the sentimental social realism of Ben Shahn.” Afterwards blue backing cardboard so that they would be pictures of guns not fake guns.
I felt terrible because I did not confront him. So it stayed with me, and these And the police bought this semiotic distinction. You can see them checking us
drawings are a start, a way of practically executing what I didn’t say at the time. out in scene three but they didn’t say anything and the actors just kept going.
I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s watercolors of a boy and his Once I started with cardboard, I had to keep going. The film begins
father going to a demonstration, which Rivera did while visiting Moscow in the with small paintings of OWS and the Siege of Paris (1870-1871). I could have
1920s. They are like a storyboard, a little film on notepaper. I was thinking of used documentary video and historical photographs, but I chose not to. To use
them when I made the small paintings in the final version of the Commune film. documentary images, apart from the fact that it is a cliché, implies that we have
It begins as a picture story and sometimes a scene reverts from live action to some kind of unmediated access to history, that these images impart truth to
a colorful storyboard where the actors are now something like comic book fig- the text.
ures. Of course I want the answer to be yes, it is still valid to draw modern life. I
feel close to popular art forms. I think that comic books and graphic novels can Or perhaps it implies the inverse: that the play is just (a) play? Which is not nec-
lead the way forward. Although I read philosophy, I do not want to work only essarily to say, of course, that it has no documentary function.
for those in the world of high art, but to speak to everyone in a language that is
accessible and entertaining. As an artist, I think of myself as a showman. This demarcation of the limits of historical memory is, for me, a way to create
not a nostalgic turning back, like conventional costume drama but rather an

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 And along these lines, some of the actors’ timing is particularly eccentric. I But to come back to your question, as I spent time at the Occupy
began, while watching the performances, to understand this awkwardness as encampment, I asked myself: what was the right role for the artist in Occupy?
a kind of collective gestus, a question that the production was raising about its Since childhood, I can’t join anything. I am no good at being a party member.
own historical timing, vis-à-vis the Brecht play, or Brecht and Eisler’s use of the It is one of the many reasons that Walter Benjamin endears himself to me: he
Commune and the 19th century as a point of reference, or even about the timing couldn’t join anything either. But that shouldn’t get in the way of solidarity. On
of the production itself – staged on the weekend, after all – relative to the work a number of occasions I have been asked, was The Days of the Commune an
week, during which, I assume, many of the actors were preoccupied with what “official” Occupy project? I find this question strange, since OWS is not a politi-
we call “day jobs.” (The presence of scripts, from which many in the cast were cal party. The simple answer is no. I did not ask for money from the Occupy
reading their lines, started to look to me like a reminder of this larger problem of funds. I just went down to a meeting of the Arts and Culture group and pro-
the time or rhythm of artistic production, and it was interesting to see the scripts posed my project. I felt that if I wanted to be “in solidarity” with Occupy Wall
occasionally or gradually disappear from the actors’ hands.) Street, I should discuss the project with activists. And they said that since I
wasn’t asking for money, I could do whatever I liked; and by the way, what was
Your question reminds me of the work of Walter Ruttmann, his audio work the Paris Commune?
Weekend, or, indeed, his film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which are very
much about the rhythms of the workday. And of course these rhythms have Let’s talk a little more about the other significant sources for this project: the
only accelerated in New York in the 21st century, where everyone is desperately Brecht play, and the locations and process of the performances. What was
trying to make ends meet and has an insanely busy schedule. Our stock mem- it about the Occupy movement that appealed for a theatrical response? And
ber of the bourgeoisie, Tony Lewis, never seemed to take a day off. He would how did you come to choose The Days of the Commune as the lens or mirror
show up for performances well dressed in an elegant suit to play the Corpulent through which to view the days and months of the Occupy Wall Street “period”?
Gentleman and was all set to rush back to work as a heath-care administra- It’s probably the least well-known and least often performed of Brecht’s plays.
tor after our shows. All he had to do was take off the top hat. I wish more of
the cast and crew had listed their day jobs in their biographies on the website In my thinking, OWS was itself a theatrical response to what was going on. The
– waitress, car park attendant, office manager – because that dual existence is encampments weren’t simply a place where people lived. The activists choose
the reality today if you want to be an artist. the most visible locations to live in public and enact together a new egalitarian
community. Rather than simply protest, they did something much more power-
Of course, the viewer is also invited to enact this kind of temporal disjunction ful, they attempted to show quite concretely that another world was possible.
in noticing that many of the actors have only half a costume: a blouse or jacket They improvised on the spot a participatory democracy where people shared
appropriate to the play’s historical setting, say, paired with jeans and sneakers. their resources.It was never meant to be a real city over the long term. It was a
Was there much discussion of this aspect of the historical effect? proposal for a city yet to be.
The General Assembly meetings functioned in the same way. The
As I said, I thought of the play as a pageant. So costumes were important to activists and everyone who decided to take part each night were trying to
attract attention and lend a festive air to the performances. From the start I do two things at once, to run a city in miniature on one square block, and to
didn’t want to create perfect replicas of 19th century clothes even if I could change the world. The People’s Mic, where the speaker’s voice was amplified
have afforded to. This was the past erupting into the present. Every character by the audience repeating what they said, was brilliant. Though it was initiated
was both a contemporary New Yorker and at the same time a 19th century out of necessity – microphones were not allowed – it was nonetheless amazing
Parisian and the costumes like everything else should reflect that. I started by theater. Here the audience themselves were included in the speaker’s words.
studying photographs of the Communards. It was actually an incredibly well- They were no long simply passive listeners, but participants. And you had to
documented event. They were well aware of the historical importance of their listen and pay attention in order to repeat. The primary form of utterance at the
actions. General Assemblies was “we,” not “I.” Perhaps most radical of all, for the first
So having studied the historical costumes, I did a series of small time we could hear speeches where the vocal performance no longer took pre-
paintings of the principal characters to define a look. I was lucky to have a cedence. Few people at those meetings could actually hear the speaker, only
very experienced costume person, Erika Munro, who did amazing things with the content, as the words rippled outwards. There could be no demagogues, at
$2,000. She made some of them from scratch, like the women’s striped skirts. OWS. I would come home from these events elated. I know it sounds crazy, but
The rest she found in a giant thrift warehouse in New Jersey and then altered I felt like if I wasn’t there in Petrograd in October 1917, at least I was here now.

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 So OWS inspired me to do street theater for the first time. In fact, I of performance. (That some of them play more than one role, without caring or
might say that the street was essentially my project. The concept of the “street” being able to inflect the roles in ways that distinguish the performance of one
as a site for social change is both historical and completely contemporary. We from the next, makes it even harder for the audience to ignore these material
have only to think of Tahir Square, or the indignados in the Plaza del Sol. constraints on mimetic representation.) But they seem remarkably patient with
each other, and – as I saw on the East Village community garden “set” – you
But why then did a text, even one by Brecht, seem so central to the project? with them. What was it like to spend several months working with each other?

As I mentioned, it was while drawing the Manhattan encampment of OWS that It was amazing and totally nerve-wracking as well. I felt very responsible for
I began to see parallels between our occupation and the Paris Commune. But making sure that everyone had a good working experience. Two of our original
even before that, I had been thinking about Brecht. My comic book Adventures cast quit. One performer left early on because he said we did not engage in
of a Dreamer has an episode called “A Brechtian Dreamer” that was partly enough discussion or spend enough time interfacing with OWS. To boot, he
inspired by his play Saint Joan of the Stockyards. The play explains how quoted one of Brecht’s learning-plays that he felt justified changing one’s mind.
CEOs of corporations practice class warfare from above, just like they do now. I felt terrible. But given that we had only had three hours together each day, my
Reading the play in 2010, I thought it was just as relevant to our recession as it thought was that we would simply never get through the play with lengthy dis-
was to the Depression when Brecht wrote it. I was studying his work in the fall cussions, and the other performers agreed.
of 2011. It was the way in which he constructed a work based on the historical The good thing was that this defection set off another round of
circumstances but used it to ask questions that are relevant today that lifted the casting. Everyone was great about contacting friends and fellow actors. Jay
Paris Commune out of history and made it contemporary. Dobkin from the Living Theater and his daughter Miranda joined us. Many of
Brecht shows us both the point of view of the working people of Paris the performers were incredibly dedicated. Ahuva Willner came all the way from
who decided to occupy their city and the perspective of the men in power, Baltimore to play a variety of roles every weekend. She was the only person
Adolphe Thiers and Otto von Bismarck. He asks us to think about how political who had camped out at an Occupy site. The cast grew as we went along.
and economic forces shape lived experience and to imagine what would hap- Experienced actors knew from the start that they would be working with non-
pen if a new kind of people’s democracy took over a city right now. How could professionals. But everyone was improvising as they went. In the scene that
it survive against the forces of global capital? How should it respond to armed you saw, Jay only discovered the day before he was to play Coco because our
attack? These questions address both to the Arab Spring and the Occupy usual Coco couldn’t make it.
movement. Brecht doesn’t provide answers. Instead, he invites each of us to As a director, I have always worked to shape performances with my
think for ourselves. One of the most important scenes in the play, for example, actors. Here, again taking my cue from the Occupy meetings, I saw my role
is a short one between Geneviève, the young teacher, now delegate in charge more as instigator and facilitator. I felt it important to respect what the perform-
of education who has always stood for peace, and Pierre Langevin, a worker ers could bring to the work – if not as actors, then as New Yorkers. As director,
delegate to the Commune. The end is very close now. They are working late at my role was organizational: I decided how much of the play we could work
City Hall. They can hear the enemy’s guns. They look at the banner proclaiming through in a session, decided on a location, prepared some very basic blocking
the principles of the Commune. In 1871 these freedoms were radical; now we so people would know where to stand and move. I sketched this out ahead of
take them for granted. But then Brecht has Langevin ask some hard questions: time and went over it with the cinematographer. But I told the performers from
the start, “Occupy your characters,” and they did. Occasionally I would inter-
Freedom of the Individual: Does that include the freedom to make vene to explain something in the text or to tell people to speak up. But I did not
business deals against the public interest; to live off the people; to correct them if they came out with a horribly mangled French word. After all, we
conspire against the people and to deal with their enemies? were not in France. In our Commune, people were free to pronounce things any
way they wanted.
Freedom of Conscience: But what exactly is dictated to them by their I also knew there would be a collage of styles and embraced them
consciences? I’ll tell you. Whatever their rulers want to be dictated. all, everything from broad theatricality to bare line reading. Papa as played by
From the moment a child can walk. Michael Britto on Saturdays was a very sweet man, while Papa as played by
Pietro Gonzalez on Sundays was a tough guy. They embodied two sides to the
The Right of Assembly: Does this mean that the financial wolves, the character. It was a whole new way of thinking about performance. Joy Kelly
parasites of the press, the military hyenas and all the lesser blood- studied the Black Panthers for her role as Varlin.

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 movement takes time and work. The project makes this visible. In a certain suckers are free to reassemble the Versailles and use the freedom of
sense, it is a document of a certain time in New York in the year 2012. Freedom of Speech to publicize opinions of all kinds against us? Is
there a guaranteed freedom to spread lies?
How was your company of actors assembled?
In the end Langevin decides that the people are not yet ready for all these
Just as the Occupy encampments could be thought of as a rehearsal for a freedoms. They should stick with only one, the right to live. He believes that in
new more democratic society, where the actors are ordinary people, so it times of danger it is only universal freedom that can be permitted. In America
was essential for me that the cast of The Days of the Commune represent we are taught that we live in a free1 country. But what does that really mean?
all New Yorkers. I put out a call for a band of performers of all ages, gender Brecht shows us that this should lead us to ask some difficult questions.
orientations, ethnicities, accents, shapes, and sizes on Occupy Wall Street’s There are other reasons that the play seemed perfect. Just as Occupy
Performance Guild listserv, and on bulletin boards at downtown theaters. The characterizes itself as a leaderless revolution, the play presents a panorama of
only requirements were enthusiasm and a loud voice. Actors, activists, and life in Commune. There are no larger-than-life heroes or sentimental heroines.
enthusiasts answered my call. At the beginning there were thirteen performers. Instead, it brings to life a small group of working-class neighbors in the Rue
But, like any movement, it grew and changed. I was constantly rounding up Pigalle, Papa and Coco, Babette and Genevia panorama of life in Commune.
new people. Some people joined us for a weekend or two, others for the whole Tan. Together they struggle to make ends meet and learn how to re-imagine life
three-month period. Every performer played multiple roles: one character was in a truly democratic society. It is a world we can recognize and identify with.
often played by several actors, since not everyone was available at the same Although I admire Peter Watkin’s film La Commune, and the fact that
time. For example, Papa was played on Saturdays by Michael Paul Britto and he worked with his cast to improvise the dialog, in the end I think it lacks the
on Sundays by Pietro Gonzales. This was one reason performers wore the poetic clarity of Brecht’s play. The language is not naturalistic, everyday speech;
name of their character around their neck. Actors who played actual historical but neither is it difficult or ornate. It has a beauty that, even when performed by
figures wore pictures of them drawn on cardboard and tied to their heads; this inexperienced actors, stays with you.
was also a gesture toward the signs worn by Occupy protesters.
Scheduling was a nightmare. On Friday, someone always got sick. So And the production had other intellectual sources as well?
actors were thrown into parts in the very last moment. There are scenes with
tough French working-class women played by CUNY professors who had no Conceptually, I was inspired by filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
acting experience but were very brave, and threw themselves into it. Huillet, and by philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The Straub-Huillet film History Lessons
I told performers to familiarize themselves with their lines. I felt that was a model. It’s based on Brecht’s story “The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius
asking them to learn lines by heart was too much to expect, but gradually some Caesar.” The actors wear togas, but they are situated in contemporary Rome,
actors started to do this anyway, and the others were impressed. They watched with cars driving past. Žižek explores history in a similar way. In In Defense of
the scenes online and were inspired to memorize their scripts and improve their Lost Causes, he explains (via Heidegger) that the new can only emerge through
performances. I made it clear at the auditions that there is no room for prima repetition. The past is not simply what happened. Rather, one must grasp the
donnas in the Commune. Everyone was going to have to play parts small and radical “‘openness’ of the past itself” – which he says “contains hidden, non-
large and take turns holding the props and banners. And that’s what they did. realized potentials.”2 It is this idea that is at the heart of my work as an artist.
Brecht said that even a donkey should be able to understand his
plays, and he kept a little wooden donkey by his desk to remind him. I always It might not be clear to viewers of the video that the performances are staged all
think that my work should, on some basic level, be enjoyed by children. I want- over the city. What’s the significance of the various locations?
ed The Days of the Commune to be a great colorful pageant, so the costumes
and the props were very important. And let’s not forget that it is a musical. One While I wanted to begin performances in Zuccotti Park in solidarity with OWS,
of my first ideas was that we would begin each session with a song, because I always planned to move on to other parts of the city. The Commune encom-
songs bring people together and attract attention. Even the police guarding passed all of the Paris, and I wanted us to share our ideas with New Yorkers in
Zuccotti Park enjoyed Hanns Eisler’s songs and music. many different places.

It’s clear that your actors come from a range of backgrounds, professionally- 1. Bertold Brecht, The Days of the Commune (Eyre Methuen: London, 1978), 80.
speaking: some of them have trouble with their lines and the physical aspects 2. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Brooklyn and London: Verso, 2008), 141.

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 In the past I had always decided on locations in advance and made opera at Lincoln Center, outside the Met, where a Wagner series was in prog-
sure I had permissions. In this project we winged it. Partly this was force of ress. I knew this was going to be a guerilla action. And indeed, the moment
circumstance: I just didn’t have the money for million-dollar liability insurance. we showed up with Greg Merhten as Bismarck in his trademark spiked helmet,
But I also felt in the spirit of the Commune and of OWS that public space the guards converged on us and threw us off the Lincoln Center plaza. But we
should be free and open to all. I read the guidelines for Zuccotti Park, the ones just went down to the bottom of the steps, which still afforded us a fine view.
posted outside the park, and they did not explicitly forbid cameras or theatrical It is one of my favorite scenes, a moment of comedy, albeit one in which in
rehearsals. But everyone knew that the security service down there could make which the leaders of the “free world” discuss the imminent slaughter of the
up rules on the spot. There was really no way to know ahead of time, if we Communards “mit fire und brimstone,” while the opera blared from a boom box.
could perform there at all or if we would get kicked out on day one. My position In the final scene, the bourgeoisie watch the destruction of the
was that if we were thrown out, we would just decamp to a nearby space and Commune from the ramparts of Versailles. The boardroom of the JPMorgan
keep going. As a matter of principle, we wouldn’t let the authorities stop us. Chase bank would have topped my list of locations, but unfortunately I didn’t
It was important that the locations resonate with the scenes in the have access. So I decided on Governors Island, which is right off the tip of
play. One of the performers, Joanie Zozike, suggested the community garden at Manhattan, with a great view of the city. It also has an old fort that with can-
East 6th Street and Avenue B. This became the location for the working people nons dating back to the Civil War. When we all went out on the ferry, there
of the Rue Pigalle. Community gardens or allotments are an important part of weren’t just twenty-two Communards in full costume, but also a whole crowd
working-class life, where people who can’t afford fancy homes can have their of Civil War re-enactors. I had to tell everyone not to get mixed up and end up
own green space. They are very much in the spirit of the Commune. It was in the wrong conflict. You can hear shots from the re-enactors’ rifles on our
great for an audience. At one point, I had to run over to an apartment with a soundtrack while helicopters circled overheard. It was perfect.
stack of broadsheets because one of the garden groups really wanted to hand
them out at the annual Witches and Wiccans bike ride. Witches and Wiccans In the case of Zuccotti Park, where most of the performances are staged and
meet the cardboard Communards! filmed, one could say that the space itself has a very different significance for
I always wanted to stage the big meetings of the delegates to the the protest movement by the time you start working there in the spring of 2012.
Commune outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, on 42nd For two months in the fall of 2011, the park is an encampment for protesters;
Street, in front of the great Beaux-Arts building with the stone lions. There were Mayor Bloomberg “clears and restores” the park in November, and a judge
also chairs and tables that made it inviting for an audience. The Commune upholds the city’s claim that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the protest-
believed that education should be free and open to all, and I believe that the ers’ camp. The protesters are then forced to take a different sort of ritual dispo-
library embodies this idea. But I never thought we would get away with it. sition to the park, leaving and returning daily. Was the regular but intermittent
The space is owned by the Bryant Park Corporation, which prohibits photog- nature of your own time in the park with your cast a way to match this rhythm?
raphy without a permit. My initial plan was to stage one short scene guerilla Or did you think of it, rather, as a way to memorialize the two-month occupation,
style and see if we could get through it before anyone stopped us. I mean, we and the sense, in the fall of 2011, that the occupation might go on indefinitely?
were hardly inconspicuous: fifteen people wearing red sashes with pictures of
Communards tied to their heads all singing “The Internationale” at the tops of I wanted to start in Zuccotti Park to align ourselves with OWS but I didn’t think
their voices. Jokingly we decided that if security asked what we were doing, specifically about matching their rhythms. From the start, for example, I realized
Mitch Abidor, who can do an amazing impression of a Frenchman speaking that we could only work on weekends, as too many of the cast had day jobs.
pidgin English, would inform them that the group was actually the “Association Given our lack of resources, rehearsal studios, money, time … this was the only
des Amis de la Commune 1871,” here from Paris for a research trip. But no way the project would have worked. But I also believe it was the right way to
one said anything. We went back weekend after weekend. On one wing of the work, so as to include as may people as possible.
library there was a group practicing fly-fishing techniques. And on the other, the I had the idea for the project in late November 2011, but it took time
delegates to the Commune held their meetings. to prepare and assemble the cast and crew. It came to me that we should do
Sometimes I made a direct connection between the location in the the play on weekends from March through May: the same brief period that the
play and the equivalent location in New York. For example, there is a scene Commune existed. We would map our time over their time. I think it is important
outside the Department of Education. We staged it outside New York City’s that this is a work over time. You see the seasons change: at first, everyone is
Department of Education, at the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street. I blue with cold; and at the end, it is summer. We all learned on the job and the
decided to present the scene where Bismarck and Jules Favre meet at the performances at the end are a far cry from those first days. Building a social

8 9

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 In the past I had always decided on locations in advance and made opera at Lincoln Center, outside the Met, where a Wagner series was in prog-
sure I had permissions. In this project we winged it. Partly this was force of ress. I knew this was going to be a guerilla action. And indeed, the moment
circumstance: I just didn’t have the money for million-dollar liability insurance. we showed up with Greg Merhten as Bismarck in his trademark spiked helmet,
But I also felt in the spirit of the Commune and of OWS that public space the guards converged on us and threw us off the Lincoln Center plaza. But we
should be free and open to all. I read the guidelines for Zuccotti Park, the ones just went down to the bottom of the steps, which still afforded us a fine view.
posted outside the park, and they did not explicitly forbid cameras or theatrical It is one of my favorite scenes, a moment of comedy, albeit one in which in
rehearsals. But everyone knew that the security service down there could make which the leaders of the “free world” discuss the imminent slaughter of the
up rules on the spot. There was really no way to know ahead of time, if we Communards “mit fire und brimstone,” while the opera blared from a boom box.
could perform there at all or if we would get kicked out on day one. My position In the final scene, the bourgeoisie watch the destruction of the
was that if we were thrown out, we would just decamp to a nearby space and Commune from the ramparts of Versailles. The boardroom of the JPMorgan
keep going. As a matter of principle, we wouldn’t let the authorities stop us. Chase bank would have topped my list of locations, but unfortunately I didn’t
It was important that the locations resonate with the scenes in the have access. So I decided on Governors Island, which is right off the tip of
play. One of the performers, Joanie Zozike, suggested the community garden at Manhattan, with a great view of the city. It also has an old fort that with can-
East 6th Street and Avenue B. This became the location for the working people nons dating back to the Civil War. When we all went out on the ferry, there
of the Rue Pigalle. Community gardens or allotments are an important part of weren’t just twenty-two Communards in full costume, but also a whole crowd
working-class life, where people who can’t afford fancy homes can have their of Civil War re-enactors. I had to tell everyone not to get mixed up and end up
own green space. They are very much in the spirit of the Commune. It was in the wrong conflict. You can hear shots from the re-enactors’ rifles on our
great for an audience. At one point, I had to run over to an apartment with a soundtrack while helicopters circled overheard. It was perfect.
stack of broadsheets because one of the garden groups really wanted to hand
them out at the annual Witches and Wiccans bike ride. Witches and Wiccans In the case of Zuccotti Park, where most of the performances are staged and
meet the cardboard Communards! filmed, one could say that the space itself has a very different significance for
I always wanted to stage the big meetings of the delegates to the the protest movement by the time you start working there in the spring of 2012.
Commune outside the main branch of the New York Public Library, on 42nd For two months in the fall of 2011, the park is an encampment for protesters;
Street, in front of the great Beaux-Arts building with the stone lions. There were Mayor Bloomberg “clears and restores” the park in November, and a judge
also chairs and tables that made it inviting for an audience. The Commune upholds the city’s claim that the First Amendment doesn’t protect the protest-
believed that education should be free and open to all, and I believe that the ers’ camp. The protesters are then forced to take a different sort of ritual dispo-
library embodies this idea. But I never thought we would get away with it. sition to the park, leaving and returning daily. Was the regular but intermittent
The space is owned by the Bryant Park Corporation, which prohibits photog- nature of your own time in the park with your cast a way to match this rhythm?
raphy without a permit. My initial plan was to stage one short scene guerilla Or did you think of it, rather, as a way to memorialize the two-month occupation,
style and see if we could get through it before anyone stopped us. I mean, we and the sense, in the fall of 2011, that the occupation might go on indefinitely?
were hardly inconspicuous: fifteen people wearing red sashes with pictures of
Communards tied to their heads all singing “The Internationale” at the tops of I wanted to start in Zuccotti Park to align ourselves with OWS but I didn’t think
their voices. Jokingly we decided that if security asked what we were doing, specifically about matching their rhythms. From the start, for example, I realized
Mitch Abidor, who can do an amazing impression of a Frenchman speaking that we could only work on weekends, as too many of the cast had day jobs.
pidgin English, would inform them that the group was actually the “Association Given our lack of resources, rehearsal studios, money, time … this was the only
des Amis de la Commune 1871,” here from Paris for a research trip. But no way the project would have worked. But I also believe it was the right way to
one said anything. We went back weekend after weekend. On one wing of the work, so as to include as may people as possible.
library there was a group practicing fly-fishing techniques. And on the other, the I had the idea for the project in late November 2011, but it took time
delegates to the Commune held their meetings. to prepare and assemble the cast and crew. It came to me that we should do
Sometimes I made a direct connection between the location in the the play on weekends from March through May: the same brief period that the
play and the equivalent location in New York. For example, there is a scene Commune existed. We would map our time over their time. I think it is important
outside the Department of Education. We staged it outside New York City’s that this is a work over time. You see the seasons change: at first, everyone is
Department of Education, at the Tweed Courthouse on Chambers Street. I blue with cold; and at the end, it is summer. We all learned on the job and the
decided to present the scene where Bismarck and Jules Favre meet at the performances at the end are a far cry from those first days. Building a social

8 9

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 movement takes time and work. The project makes this visible. In a certain suckers are free to reassemble the Versailles and use the freedom of
sense, it is a document of a certain time in New York in the year 2012. Freedom of Speech to publicize opinions of all kinds against us? Is
there a guaranteed freedom to spread lies?
How was your company of actors assembled?
In the end Langevin decides that the people are not yet ready for all these
Just as the Occupy encampments could be thought of as a rehearsal for a freedoms. They should stick with only one, the right to live. He believes that in
new more democratic society, where the actors are ordinary people, so it times of danger it is only universal freedom that can be permitted. In America
was essential for me that the cast of The Days of the Commune represent we are taught that we live in a free1 country. But what does that really mean?
all New Yorkers. I put out a call for a band of performers of all ages, gender Brecht shows us that this should lead us to ask some difficult questions.
orientations, ethnicities, accents, shapes, and sizes on Occupy Wall Street’s There are other reasons that the play seemed perfect. Just as Occupy
Performance Guild listserv, and on bulletin boards at downtown theaters. The characterizes itself as a leaderless revolution, the play presents a panorama of
only requirements were enthusiasm and a loud voice. Actors, activists, and life in Commune. There are no larger-than-life heroes or sentimental heroines.
enthusiasts answered my call. At the beginning there were thirteen performers. Instead, it brings to life a small group of working-class neighbors in the Rue
But, like any movement, it grew and changed. I was constantly rounding up Pigalle, Papa and Coco, Babette and Genevia panorama of life in Commune.
new people. Some people joined us for a weekend or two, others for the whole Tan. Together they struggle to make ends meet and learn how to re-imagine life
three-month period. Every performer played multiple roles: one character was in a truly democratic society. It is a world we can recognize and identify with.
often played by several actors, since not everyone was available at the same Although I admire Peter Watkin’s film La Commune, and the fact that
time. For example, Papa was played on Saturdays by Michael Paul Britto and he worked with his cast to improvise the dialog, in the end I think it lacks the
on Sundays by Pietro Gonzales. This was one reason performers wore the poetic clarity of Brecht’s play. The language is not naturalistic, everyday speech;
name of their character around their neck. Actors who played actual historical but neither is it difficult or ornate. It has a beauty that, even when performed by
figures wore pictures of them drawn on cardboard and tied to their heads; this inexperienced actors, stays with you.
was also a gesture toward the signs worn by Occupy protesters.
Scheduling was a nightmare. On Friday, someone always got sick. So And the production had other intellectual sources as well?
actors were thrown into parts in the very last moment. There are scenes with
tough French working-class women played by CUNY professors who had no Conceptually, I was inspired by filmmakers Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle
acting experience but were very brave, and threw themselves into it. Huillet, and by philosopher Slavoj Žižek. The Straub-Huillet film History Lessons
I told performers to familiarize themselves with their lines. I felt that was a model. It’s based on Brecht’s story “The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius
asking them to learn lines by heart was too much to expect, but gradually some Caesar.” The actors wear togas, but they are situated in contemporary Rome,
actors started to do this anyway, and the others were impressed. They watched with cars driving past. Žižek explores history in a similar way. In In Defense of
the scenes online and were inspired to memorize their scripts and improve their Lost Causes, he explains (via Heidegger) that the new can only emerge through
performances. I made it clear at the auditions that there is no room for prima repetition. The past is not simply what happened. Rather, one must grasp the
donnas in the Commune. Everyone was going to have to play parts small and radical “‘openness’ of the past itself” – which he says “contains hidden, non-
large and take turns holding the props and banners. And that’s what they did. realized potentials.”2 It is this idea that is at the heart of my work as an artist.
Brecht said that even a donkey should be able to understand his
plays, and he kept a little wooden donkey by his desk to remind him. I always It might not be clear to viewers of the video that the performances are staged all
think that my work should, on some basic level, be enjoyed by children. I want- over the city. What’s the significance of the various locations?
ed The Days of the Commune to be a great colorful pageant, so the costumes
and the props were very important. And let’s not forget that it is a musical. One While I wanted to begin performances in Zuccotti Park in solidarity with OWS,
of my first ideas was that we would begin each session with a song, because I always planned to move on to other parts of the city. The Commune encom-
songs bring people together and attract attention. Even the police guarding passed all of the Paris, and I wanted us to share our ideas with New Yorkers in
Zuccotti Park enjoyed Hanns Eisler’s songs and music. many different places.

It’s clear that your actors come from a range of backgrounds, professionally- 1. Bertold Brecht, The Days of the Commune (Eyre Methuen: London, 1978), 80.
speaking: some of them have trouble with their lines and the physical aspects 2. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (Brooklyn and London: Verso, 2008), 141.

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 So OWS inspired me to do street theater for the first time. In fact, I of performance. (That some of them play more than one role, without caring or
might say that the street was essentially my project. The concept of the “street” being able to inflect the roles in ways that distinguish the performance of one
as a site for social change is both historical and completely contemporary. We from the next, makes it even harder for the audience to ignore these material
have only to think of Tahir Square, or the indignados in the Plaza del Sol. constraints on mimetic representation.) But they seem remarkably patient with
each other, and – as I saw on the East Village community garden “set” – you
But why then did a text, even one by Brecht, seem so central to the project? with them. What was it like to spend several months working with each other?

As I mentioned, it was while drawing the Manhattan encampment of OWS that It was amazing and totally nerve-wracking as well. I felt very responsible for
I began to see parallels between our occupation and the Paris Commune. But making sure that everyone had a good working experience. Two of our original
even before that, I had been thinking about Brecht. My comic book Adventures cast quit. One performer left early on because he said we did not engage in
of a Dreamer has an episode called “A Brechtian Dreamer” that was partly enough discussion or spend enough time interfacing with OWS. To boot, he
inspired by his play Saint Joan of the Stockyards. The play explains how quoted one of Brecht’s learning-plays that he felt justified changing one’s mind.
CEOs of corporations practice class warfare from above, just like they do now. I felt terrible. But given that we had only had three hours together each day, my
Reading the play in 2010, I thought it was just as relevant to our recession as it thought was that we would simply never get through the play with lengthy dis-
was to the Depression when Brecht wrote it. I was studying his work in the fall cussions, and the other performers agreed.
of 2011. It was the way in which he constructed a work based on the historical The good thing was that this defection set off another round of
circumstances but used it to ask questions that are relevant today that lifted the casting. Everyone was great about contacting friends and fellow actors. Jay
Paris Commune out of history and made it contemporary. Dobkin from the Living Theater and his daughter Miranda joined us. Many of
Brecht shows us both the point of view of the working people of Paris the performers were incredibly dedicated. Ahuva Willner came all the way from
who decided to occupy their city and the perspective of the men in power, Baltimore to play a variety of roles every weekend. She was the only person
Adolphe Thiers and Otto von Bismarck. He asks us to think about how political who had camped out at an Occupy site. The cast grew as we went along.
and economic forces shape lived experience and to imagine what would hap- Experienced actors knew from the start that they would be working with non-
pen if a new kind of people’s democracy took over a city right now. How could professionals. But everyone was improvising as they went. In the scene that
it survive against the forces of global capital? How should it respond to armed you saw, Jay only discovered the day before he was to play Coco because our
attack? These questions address both to the Arab Spring and the Occupy usual Coco couldn’t make it.
movement. Brecht doesn’t provide answers. Instead, he invites each of us to As a director, I have always worked to shape performances with my
think for ourselves. One of the most important scenes in the play, for example, actors. Here, again taking my cue from the Occupy meetings, I saw my role
is a short one between Geneviève, the young teacher, now delegate in charge more as instigator and facilitator. I felt it important to respect what the perform-
of education who has always stood for peace, and Pierre Langevin, a worker ers could bring to the work – if not as actors, then as New Yorkers. As director,
delegate to the Commune. The end is very close now. They are working late at my role was organizational: I decided how much of the play we could work
City Hall. They can hear the enemy’s guns. They look at the banner proclaiming through in a session, decided on a location, prepared some very basic blocking
the principles of the Commune. In 1871 these freedoms were radical; now we so people would know where to stand and move. I sketched this out ahead of
take them for granted. But then Brecht has Langevin ask some hard questions: time and went over it with the cinematographer. But I told the performers from
the start, “Occupy your characters,” and they did. Occasionally I would inter-
Freedom of the Individual: Does that include the freedom to make vene to explain something in the text or to tell people to speak up. But I did not
business deals against the public interest; to live off the people; to correct them if they came out with a horribly mangled French word. After all, we
conspire against the people and to deal with their enemies? were not in France. In our Commune, people were free to pronounce things any
way they wanted.
Freedom of Conscience: But what exactly is dictated to them by their I also knew there would be a collage of styles and embraced them
consciences? I’ll tell you. Whatever their rulers want to be dictated. all, everything from broad theatricality to bare line reading. Papa as played by
From the moment a child can walk. Michael Britto on Saturdays was a very sweet man, while Papa as played by
Pietro Gonzalez on Sundays was a tough guy. They embodied two sides to the
The Right of Assembly: Does this mean that the financial wolves, the character. It was a whole new way of thinking about performance. Joy Kelly
parasites of the press, the military hyenas and all the lesser blood- studied the Black Panthers for her role as Varlin.

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 And along these lines, some of the actors’ timing is particularly eccentric. I But to come back to your question, as I spent time at the Occupy
began, while watching the performances, to understand this awkwardness as encampment, I asked myself: what was the right role for the artist in Occupy?
a kind of collective gestus, a question that the production was raising about its Since childhood, I can’t join anything. I am no good at being a party member.
own historical timing, vis-à-vis the Brecht play, or Brecht and Eisler’s use of the It is one of the many reasons that Walter Benjamin endears himself to me: he
Commune and the 19th century as a point of reference, or even about the timing couldn’t join anything either. But that shouldn’t get in the way of solidarity. On
of the production itself – staged on the weekend, after all – relative to the work a number of occasions I have been asked, was The Days of the Commune an
week, during which, I assume, many of the actors were preoccupied with what “official” Occupy project? I find this question strange, since OWS is not a politi-
we call “day jobs.” (The presence of scripts, from which many in the cast were cal party. The simple answer is no. I did not ask for money from the Occupy
reading their lines, started to look to me like a reminder of this larger problem of funds. I just went down to a meeting of the Arts and Culture group and pro-
the time or rhythm of artistic production, and it was interesting to see the scripts posed my project. I felt that if I wanted to be “in solidarity” with Occupy Wall
occasionally or gradually disappear from the actors’ hands.) Street, I should discuss the project with activists. And they said that since I
wasn’t asking for money, I could do whatever I liked; and by the way, what was
Your question reminds me of the work of Walter Ruttmann, his audio work the Paris Commune?
Weekend, or, indeed, his film Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, which are very
much about the rhythms of the workday. And of course these rhythms have Let’s talk a little more about the other significant sources for this project: the
only accelerated in New York in the 21st century, where everyone is desperately Brecht play, and the locations and process of the performances. What was
trying to make ends meet and has an insanely busy schedule. Our stock mem- it about the Occupy movement that appealed for a theatrical response? And
ber of the bourgeoisie, Tony Lewis, never seemed to take a day off. He would how did you come to choose The Days of the Commune as the lens or mirror
show up for performances well dressed in an elegant suit to play the Corpulent through which to view the days and months of the Occupy Wall Street “period”?
Gentleman and was all set to rush back to work as a heath-care administra- It’s probably the least well-known and least often performed of Brecht’s plays.
tor after our shows. All he had to do was take off the top hat. I wish more of
the cast and crew had listed their day jobs in their biographies on the website In my thinking, OWS was itself a theatrical response to what was going on. The
– waitress, car park attendant, office manager – because that dual existence is encampments weren’t simply a place where people lived. The activists choose
the reality today if you want to be an artist. the most visible locations to live in public and enact together a new egalitarian
community. Rather than simply protest, they did something much more power-
Of course, the viewer is also invited to enact this kind of temporal disjunction ful, they attempted to show quite concretely that another world was possible.
in noticing that many of the actors have only half a costume: a blouse or jacket They improvised on the spot a participatory democracy where people shared
appropriate to the play’s historical setting, say, paired with jeans and sneakers. their resources.It was never meant to be a real city over the long term. It was a
Was there much discussion of this aspect of the historical effect? proposal for a city yet to be.
The General Assembly meetings functioned in the same way. The
As I said, I thought of the play as a pageant. So costumes were important to activists and everyone who decided to take part each night were trying to
attract attention and lend a festive air to the performances. From the start I do two things at once, to run a city in miniature on one square block, and to
didn’t want to create perfect replicas of 19th century clothes even if I could change the world. The People’s Mic, where the speaker’s voice was amplified
have afforded to. This was the past erupting into the present. Every character by the audience repeating what they said, was brilliant. Though it was initiated
was both a contemporary New Yorker and at the same time a 19th century out of necessity – microphones were not allowed – it was nonetheless amazing
Parisian and the costumes like everything else should reflect that. I started by theater. Here the audience themselves were included in the speaker’s words.
studying photographs of the Communards. It was actually an incredibly well- They were no long simply passive listeners, but participants. And you had to
documented event. They were well aware of the historical importance of their listen and pay attention in order to repeat. The primary form of utterance at the
actions. General Assemblies was “we,” not “I.” Perhaps most radical of all, for the first
So having studied the historical costumes, I did a series of small time we could hear speeches where the vocal performance no longer took pre-
paintings of the principal characters to define a look. I was lucky to have a cedence. Few people at those meetings could actually hear the speaker, only
very experienced costume person, Erika Munro, who did amazing things with the content, as the words rippled outwards. There could be no demagogues, at
$2,000. She made some of them from scratch, like the women’s striped skirts. OWS. I would come home from these events elated. I know it sounds crazy, but
The rest she found in a giant thrift warehouse in New Jersey and then altered I felt like if I wasn’t there in Petrograd in October 1917, at least I was here now.

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 technology, but of people who think it will do their work for them. Perhaps when them appropriately. We discovered remarkable connections between the 1870s
it was harder to take photographs or to film things, people had to think more and the 1970s, like macramé shawls. Berets from Catholic school children were
carefully about what they were doing. When the Communards posed in the turned into the sailor hats for the tough Communard women.
Place Vendôme on the occasion of the toppling of the Vendôme column, they Each performer decided how to wear his or her own costume.
collaborated with the photographer. They wanted to speak together to celebrate Sometimes, I had to stop myself from commenting because strange things did
this important moment, the toppling of a monument to militarism and imperial- happen. A working-class woman dying on the barricades wore fetching eye
ism. And that thoughtfulness is conveyed to us today. shadow and a velvet choker. Sometimes new interpretations of the characters
At the time, I felt conflicted. I had never done this kind of documen- erupted: I asked Michael Paul Britto to wear black to play the procurator of the
tary drawing before, precisely because I studied at an art school where the archbishop of Paris in conference with the governor of the bank of France, and
curriculum hadn’t changed since the 19th century. So I always believed that he arrived in a black hoodie and jeans. Along with the fact he wore a large gold
sketching was the pastime of Victorian girls – an idea that put me off drawing cardboard cross on a thick gold chain he got from a hardware store turned him
for decades! And the more I got into my drawings of the Occupy encampment, into a hip-hop priest.
the more I thought back to Manet, Daumier, and Courbet. And it was actually My idea for creating all the props and scenery out of corrugated
studying Manet’s drawings of the people dying on the barricades that initially cardboard came from observing the Occupy encampment and, of course, from
led me to start thinking about connections between the Paris Commune of going on marches. Cardboard is the medium of protest. I was also thinking of
1871 and Occupy. Since then I have been thinking, is it still possible to be a one of my favorite contemporary artists, Thomas Hirschhorn, who makes all
progressive artist in the 21st century and draw the world around us, or has the his installations out of cheap materials like cardboard, packing tape, and all the
form been consigned to the dustbin of history? detritus of modern life. I really admire his amazing combination of philosophi-
cal and political astuteness, playfulness and visual inventiveness. It was also
I was reminded of a number of contemporary artists who’ve used drawing to an enormous task making all the props. Having never done this before, I had to
render urgent, critical events: Sue Coe’s sketches of the early days of the AIDS find a new visual vocabulary. How to paint a cardboard cannon or a dead rat?
crisis, for instance, or comix artists like Joe Sacco, who has also drawn Occupy. How big should they be to read clearly for an audience?
And among children, of course, drawing hasn’t disappeared as a form for mak- The most difficult objects to deal with were the rifles. They are very
ing a spontaneous and permanent impression of the world. important in the story: Phillipe and his brother Francois Faure have an armed
standoff; the National Guardsmen carry rifles. I made some out of cardboard
Children will always draw so long as there are crayons. But is drawing the and I realized that from a distance, they look quite realistic. In New York is it ille-
world around us a form of serious cultural expression? A couple of years ago I gal to carry fake firearms, even if they look like toys. We had enough problems
listened to a colleague in the art department telling a graduate student that her at Zuccotti Park without getting arrested for fake guns. Then suddenly the day
drawings of her Bed-Stuy neighborhood were irrelevant to contemporary art. He before we were to do the performance, I had an idea. I would bolt the guns to
likened her work to “the sentimental social realism of Ben Shahn.” Afterwards blue backing cardboard so that they would be pictures of guns not fake guns.
I felt terrible because I did not confront him. So it stayed with me, and these And the police bought this semiotic distinction. You can see them checking us
drawings are a start, a way of practically executing what I didn’t say at the time. out in scene three but they didn’t say anything and the actors just kept going.
I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s watercolors of a boy and his Once I started with cardboard, I had to keep going. The film begins
father going to a demonstration, which Rivera did while visiting Moscow in the with small paintings of OWS and the Siege of Paris (1870-1871). I could have
1920s. They are like a storyboard, a little film on notepaper. I was thinking of used documentary video and historical photographs, but I chose not to. To use
them when I made the small paintings in the final version of the Commune film. documentary images, apart from the fact that it is a cliché, implies that we have
It begins as a picture story and sometimes a scene reverts from live action to some kind of unmediated access to history, that these images impart truth to
a colorful storyboard where the actors are now something like comic book fig- the text.
ures. Of course I want the answer to be yes, it is still valid to draw modern life. I
feel close to popular art forms. I think that comic books and graphic novels can Or perhaps it implies the inverse: that the play is just (a) play? Which is not nec-
lead the way forward. Although I read philosophy, I do not want to work only essarily to say, of course, that it has no documentary function.
for those in the world of high art, but to speak to everyone in a language that is
accessible and entertaining. As an artist, I think of myself as a showman. This demarcation of the limits of historical memory is, for me, a way to create
not a nostalgic turning back, like conventional costume drama but rather an

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 abrupt and forceful eruption of the past into the present. I don’t believe in an I don’t think it could have happened without the indignados in Spain
unmediated access to the past as though the history was a fixed entity, like a or the protesters of the Arab Spring. I think the economic imbalances all
movie with a single storyline. In fact, I wanted to show just the opposite, that over the world will not be resolved without real change. One could say, what
we invent the past as we speak of it. The past is just a picture that we our- good was the Paris Commune? It did not achieve its objectives, it was utterly
selves create, and this picture it is as much about us as it is about those long destroyed; but I think the ideas it planted are still in the air and we are listen-
dead. The little paintings, like the costumes and the performances themselves ing to them. One of the things that impressed me about OWS was the idea of
inscribe a gap between narration and image, what is said and what is shown. leading by example, as did the Communards. Instead of just complaining about
Our performance is no more than a storyboard waiting to come to life. Not a inequality, here were people sharing books, food, and experiences.
replica of something that once was, but a sketch waiting to be fleshed out, a Was I part of Occupy? I’d call myself a fellow traveler, I didn’t do any
new Commune waiting to be realized. organizing. I did not camp out. Initially, my participation consisted of bringing
People asked me again and again, what were we doing, a piece of a sketchbook and beginning some documentary drawings. I had never done
street theater or a film or what? My feeling is, why chose? Why is that a ques- this before, but I was teaching a class where I asked the students to draw their
tion? I’d say, all of the above. Today everything needs to be visible in the real daily lives, so I thought I should practice this too. It was a challenge. I called it
world and in the virtual one, local and international. Actually one of the most “Drawings of Modern Life,” a first inkling that I was thinking about Paris in the
productive ways of getting our ideas out, was simply to hand out broadsheets, 19th century and the radical painters of modern life.
a publicity technique much used by journalists during the Commune. We hand-
ed out a couple of thousand. I find your paintings and drawings of the encampment, and also of the Days of
the Commune production – perhaps because they lack the precision and banal-
Thinking also of your work on the Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic ity (or ubiquity) of video – particularly evocative, and very moving. (One can, of
Society3, I was wondering how the amateur figures in your thinking about uto- course, produce impressionistic effects in digital video: Jem Cohen’s beautiful
pia. And the Communards: are they also amateurs? series of “Gravity Hill Newsreels” about Occupy are one example.) Many artists
have given themselves a reportorial or documentary role in similar encounters,
As I have said, I don’t make my living doing art, so I count myself as an ama- so your instinct to reach for the pencil or the paintbrush, and for paper, rather
teur. And to answer your question, I feel strongly about championing the ama- than a small piece of digital technology, is curious and fascinating. What was
teur. My installation “Dreamland: the ‘Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic it about these media that had such appropriateness and urgency to you as a
Society’ and its Circle, 1926 – 1927” was all about the idea that ordinary people response to these events?
can take on difficult intellectual concepts and use them to change their world.
It began a few years ago when I was invited by the Coney Island Museum to When you draw, you become part of something, perhaps because you can’t
create an exhibition to celebrate the centennial of Freud’s trip to the amuse- draw everything in front of you. Like writing, rather than recording, you effect a
ment park in 1909. Instead, I decided to focus on his legacy, the unconscious transformation that does not say “this is what happened,” but rather “this is my
of the people who lived, worked, and played at Coney Island after his visit. The experience at this particular moment.” Drawing directly from life, actually being
Amateur Psychoanalytic Society was my framework. My exhibition included a there, is a very odd idea in the 21st century. It is hard to do. I think my hand
wide range of media, drawings, lecture notes, objects, and even “dream films” does most of it. I just feel my fingers tracing over the lines and contours of
made by members who re-enacted their dreams on film. It was an imaginary people’s faces.It was also a way to quietly observe, look and listen closely over
archive, yet it grew out of an enormous amount of research. I call it a serious time in a very different way than people with their iPhone cameras or DSLRs.
history, just not a literal one. Time is very important in drawing: most particularly where you are drawing a
In the early part of the twentieth century Coney Island was a hotbed living, breathing, moving world around you. The drawing contains time within it.
of socialism. I proposed that the society saw psychoanalysis in the same uto- Perhaps because I come from film, I think about this a lot. I would draw through
pian spirit, as a way to change their world. Just as socialism would free people long General Assembly meetings in almost total darkness when I could barely
from oppressive conditions of labor, so psychoanalysis would inaugurate an make out what I was doing. I just tried to transcribe my experience. Only later in
intimate politics of desire. I think of the members of the society as visionaries, the light of subway I would discover what I had done.
For me, digital images of the world around us do not say too much.
3. Zoe Beloff, ed., The Coney Island Amateur Psychoanalytic Society and its Circle (New They have a kind of anonymity. Perhaps they scoop up the world too effortless-
York: Christine Burgin Gallery, 2009). ly, like turning on a microphone without really listening. This is not a problem of

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 Jonathan Kahana: When you first conceived of this project, what was the state who, undeterred by lack of finances or professional training, decided to explore
of the Occupy Wall Street movement in New York City and elsewhere? their inner life and in doing so attempted to free the psyche from the constraints
of cultural and sexual mores of their time. I think of the Coney Island Amateur
Zoe Beloff: In November of 2011 I was reading a biography of Brecht, where I Psychoanalytic Society as something that might have existed and might yet
discovered that he had written a play, The Days of the Commune. I knew right exist, a potential for people to start their own such societies.
away, even before I read it, that I must stage it. I knew exactly where this must The Coney Island project set me thinking seriously about the idea of
take place, in the streets, starting in Zuccotti Park, which had been cleared of utopian societies, and I wanted to do more work on the subject. I think of the
the entrenched protesters by the police only days earlier. I had already been Communards, in spirit, as the grandparents or the great-grandparents of the
thinking about the Paris Commune; the reason I was reading a biography of Coney Island Society. They were not were not professional politicians. They
Brecht was that I thought that he had a lot to say about what was going on were journalists, engineers, artists, and tradesmen. They came from a wide vari-
today. I was overwhelmed. Elated because the idea felt completely right, and at ety of backgrounds. They decided they needed a new form of government and
the same time terrified by the enormity of the task in front of me. then set about organizing it themselves.

So, at that time, you were identified in what way with Occupy Wall Street? As One of the things about this project that’s particularly fascinating is that it’s quite
someone who lives in Manhattan, who positions herself on the left, and who is difficult to say where it’s a rehearsal and where it’s a performance.
also underpaid for her professional and intellectual labor, I can imagine that you
were well-placed to identify with the movement? Of course I wonder a lot about what Brecht would have thought of us, the rag-
tag Commune. He considered a minimum of six-month rehearsals essential for
Interesting question: am I underpaid? Depends what I am being paid for. As an his productions. He wanted his actors be well trained. For me, rehearsing is
artist, I work for nothing. I’m outside of the “professional” – that is, commer- about doing something again and again; each time the group struggles to work
cial – world of art. So I have a day job and I feel very lucky to have one that is together better. I wanted to show the learning process.
I hope, useful. I teach at CUNY Queens College. I teach practical skills, how to Indeed, I believe that politics itself is not about teaching but learning.
make short films and audio works, how to draw pictures. Right now, as a pro- Brecht wrote learning plays, Lehrstücke, not teaching plays. The Days of the
fessor, I consider myself to be well paid. But then again, I spent fourteen years Commune was a structure to think with and through. At the end, as the working
as an adjunct teacher living hand-to-mouth in an illegal sublet, so I know what people are dying on the barricades, Geneviève Gericault says that they have
it’s like to live on little more than minimum wage. When I joined in the protest, it made mistakes, but they are learning, to which Jean Cabet says, what is the
was to speak up for friends who can’t afford school, who are mired in debt, for use when you will soon be six feet under? And Gericault responds, “there is
everyone who is unemployed. more to the world than just us.” And that is how I feel: we carry their struggle
When the movement began in September 2011, I was so excited. I into the future.
had been asking for a long time: where is the radical left when we need it? And Though the Paris Commune grew out of historical circumstance very
at last, here it was. I started going down to the encampment, not far from my different from our own and only lasted three months, I do not think it was a fail-
apartment. Both its idea and execution were remarkable. A town square where ure. Those working people of Paris lead us by their example, precisely because
total strangers could strike up conversation and discuss ways to change the they did something for themselves that seemed impossible. They were not
world. I had never seen anything like that before. afraid. They created a potential. Writing about revolution, Žižek quotes Samuel
People came to Zuccotti Park for a reason. They had something to Beckett, “‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’”4 Only half-joking, I say that this
say. It was a truly diverse assembly: unemployed factory workers, trade union could have been our motto as we all struggled to work together to create bet-
organizers, political science students, homeless people, radical librarians, ter performances. There is no line between rehearsing and performing. It is all a
anarchist street kids, African Americans and Native Americans crammed into rehearsal, a work in progress.
this small space. It was truly festive. I mean this in a serious way. I don’t think
this is something that we should consider just in the past tense. The grotesque
inequalities of our country were illuminated. And this illumination rippled out-
wards across the country in the way things are talked about and conceptual- 4. Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, 210.
ized, even now. Not the big changes we would like to see. But one must start
somewhere with whatever is possible in the moment.

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 THE DAYS OF THE COMMUNE
Zoe Beloff is an artist and Professor at Queens College. She works across a
range of media including film, projection performance, installation and drawing.
Her projects aim to reconnect the present with the past, illuminate the future
in new ways, and explore utopian ideas of social progress. She has presented A STREET PRODUCTION OF THE PLAY BY BERT BRECHT (1949)
internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Site Santa Fe,
the M HKA museum in Antwerp, and the Pompidou Center in Paris.

Jonathan Kahana is Associate Professor of Film and Digital Media at Cardboard is the Language of Protest
the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he directs the Center for Zoe Beloff and Jonathan Kahana in conversation
Documentary Arts and Research. He is the author of Intelligence Work: The
Politics of American Documentary (2008), and the editor of The Documentary
Film Reader. His is working on a book called Going Through the Motions:
Talking Pictures, Reenactment, and the Work of the Past, which focuses on the
artistic, cultural, scientific, and political uses of historical performance.

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