On Dec. 17, 2008, over 100 students barricaded themselves in a New School cafeteria in protest. Their goals: the resignation of unpopular President Bob Kerrey and other head administrators, more student participation in university decisions and more student space, among other reforms.
Following the New School example, student occupations spread to California, the United Kingdom and even Greece, wrote Mark Tribe, assistant professor of modern culture and media, in an e-mail to The Herald.
On Saturday at 5 p.m., students from Brown and the Rhode Island School of Design, along with alums and graduate students, stormed into Faunce House in the fashion of New School students two years ago.
These students were participants in a performance piece by Tribe, who is also an artist and curator, and Ariel Hudes '11, a performance studies concentrator. The two decided to reenact the occupation this weekend in the Kasper Multipurpose Room in the Stephen Robert '62 Campus Center.
The project, titled "Re: Occupation," is a two-part piece that includes a participatory performance event and a video installation based on the New School occupation, according to Tribe. The performance will be recorded and presented as a multi-screen video at the Aronson Gallery across from the New School in New York City this fall. The video will also be shown at the MK Gallery in Zagreb, Croatia, next summer.
Tribe created the piece for the Aronson Gallery, which commissioned him to contribute to the "Shape of Change" exhibition Oct. 30–Nov. 9, Hudes said.
Hudes proposed the idea of reenactment after she watched unreleased video footage Tribe found of the event. She wrote in an e-mail to The Herald that she "honed in on the idea of ‘performance of protest' " and became interested in "separating the words/people/space of the original occupation."
Tribe was more interested in thinking about the occupation as an instance of radicalization and even a performance, he wrote. "To some extent, occupations are performances; reenacting an occupation has the potential to make that performativity explicit, to open it up to a different kind of exploration."
Tribe and Hudes decided to reenact the occupation at Brown because of the University's long history of student activism, according to Tribe. "The eruptions of 1968 culminated in Brown's adoption of a progressive new curriculum drafted by students and, in 1985, students erected shanties and staged hunger strikes to protest the University's investments in companies doing business in South Africa," he wrote.
Tribe has worked on a number of performance-video projects and has staged a series of six public reenactments of historical protest speeches from the Vietnam War era's New Left movements.
This reenactment consisted of a group of actors who played activists from the original occupation and many extras to flesh out the project. Hudes created the scenario based on the unreleased footage and ethnography written by some of the occupiers.
"We hope to complicate the boundaries between art and politics, artifice and everyday life, mediated representation and immediate experience," Tribe wrote. "I see this reenactment as a way (to) raise questions about occupation both as a political tactic that is aimed at getting demands met, and as a utopian strategy for creating spaces of temporary freedom."
Only part of the performance was scripted. The rest of the 21 hours were supposed to be filled with improvisation "shaped by the performers," exploring "how they discuss (or don't discuss) the subject matter of the scripted scenes, how they live in the space, to what level they're willing to conflate their ‘roles' and their ‘selves,'" Hudes wrote.
But during Sunday's early hours, the occupants decided to move from the multipurpose room, a space reserved for the performance, to Petteruti Lounge, where they stayed for the rest of the 21-hour reenactment.
"The occupiers had been in discussion from 11:30 to 3:30," said Hudes, who, with Tribe, had left the room at the time. "They decided to take their own initiative and abandon the script."
"Following the script for the first couple of hours seemed kind of fake, to be honest," said Julian Park '12, a participant in the performance. "Part of it had to do with the fact that this was a place that had been requested for us."
To truly understand the original occupation, the performers decided to move into a space that had not been reserved.
"Between the 20 or so of us, we really created a community out of this event," Park said. "It really was an amazing thing."
Hudes expressed her approval of the deviation from the script. She said, "The event was very successful in ways Mark and I had hoped. Everyone walked out of the occupation at 2 p.m. today feeling like they had either learned something or had an experience that would stick with them in an impactful way for a long time to come."
