 |
|||||
 |
|||||
|
Reverend Billy, Director Savitri D and The Stop Shopping Gospel Choir Retail Intervention Workshop Workshops are ideal with smaller groups, although we’ve worked with up to 30 students. Nine to 20 are ideal. The setting for the workshops should not be a lecture hall with fixed seats. We need space for practicing the rituals, dance, or improvisational plays that we take into privatized space. We re-imagine lobbies, parks, sidewalks – as “charged space,” or stages. The laws of Retail Intervention in our memory are most clearly seen in the theatrical aspects of the Civil Rights Movement, where private property’s segregation was challenged when African American activists exercised the gestures of customers. (Many of our interventions are posted in the “campaigns” chapter of this website.) Our workshops pursue the practical results that we can expect in the locale of our host city or town – so we will ask for the dimensions of malls, the surveillance and policing and propaganda by transnationals – to custom-build our improvisations. Some of our hosts institutions insist on actions themselves out in contested space and we go straight to a chain store from the museum or college or community center. But in some cases this is not workable, that’s fine too. Parades and Actions There is a new kind of celebration, and the Stop Shopping Gospel Church - we love a parade. The coalitions that come together from the resistance to transnational big boxes and chain stores – that may find Republican 3rd generation hardware store owners with traditional lefty activists arm-in-arm, are increasingly able to create a new community-identity ritual. This can take the form of a parade which has a polka band next to a gothic band on wheels. These new groupings need the complex yet simple life of a parade - the cementing of publicly exposed ritual, with music and marching, smiling and waving. We have helped create such events, setting down a pulpit at store entrances along the way and watching independent store owners preach. We have been able to develop for some community defense groups new press, oxygenate the cause, and leave everyone humming a tune that’s an economic critique. Preaching or “The Fabulous Worship” Reverend Billy rarely travels to preach alone, usually he is in the company of Savitri D, the director of the play, or the monologue-with-singing that is the Rev giving a sermon. Often also the church pianist accompanies, which heightens the impact. Then, by steps, the resources or inclinations of the host can design a show involving more singers and musicians, up to 35 or 40 singers and a band with brass and drums, lights and sound and fury. But such great numbers usually keep us in the northeast, where transportation expenses are not prohibitive. Then again, Burning Man got 40 singers out to the Man. The choir has also traveled to London to perform at Conway Hall. Most often, we are asked to bring a representative group of singers, who are paid, fed, and put up in the homes of admirers. We develop our particular custom shamanism from there. This preaching and singing, if we can proceed without modesty, is not Steve Martin and his gospel divas in the movies, this isn’t even Robert Duvall (that Republican) and his motley crew in The Apostle – here the acting stopped long ago. There isn’t room for acting and the spirit – the spirit wins. We all win if finally the thing happening cannot be named, or in that heightened instant, our intellectual shopping stops. Revival Service Reverend Billy and the Choir ( in a number of configurations) deliver songs and sermons, great gospel and hot preaching. The Church of Stop Shopping is a post religious, post ironic, highly interactive political performance.
| |||||