Cointelshow: A Patriot Act
Photo Credit: Shannon Rose Riley
Photo Credit: Manuel Molina Martagon
Join Special Agent Christian White on a cheerfully creepy tour of the FBI’s notorious Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The federal documents are heavily censored in the name of the Freedom of Information Act. But when Chris takes you beneath the redaction marks, into the haunted underworld that lies beneath, things go horribly, fabulously wrong.
This is an ever-evolving script that uses surprise, neo-Borscht Belt schtick and grim comedy to draw audiences in and keep them alert and ready to engage with the history, and present, of government sabotage and infiltration of social movements, and countermeasures against these tactics. COINTELSHOW explores chilling government COINTELPRO documents about surveillance and domestic repression by shifting into high-tech ghost stories and engaging the audience’s cell phones and other forms of surveillance. This piece has been in praxis-development internationally for 24 years. It focuses on the examples of Chairman Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party and Dr. Martin Luther King, but explores many other targets of COINTELPRO as well.
I have performed this piece in many places including several venues (and on the radio) in New York, an abandoned cannery in Davis, CA, a beautiful theatre in Mexico City, and elsewhere. It can be performed as a low-tech one person show in a living room, or as a high-tech surveillance nightmare in a fully-equipped theatre. It is currently in production with the great Mondo Bizarro in New Orleans.
Foreword for Cointelshow: A Patriot Act
I have been collecting a surveillance file of my own on L.M. Bogad and his suspicious “performance work” since I first saw him present this piece at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco’s Mission many years ago. A packed house of Chicanx poets and performance artists simply couldn’t understand why Gómez-Peña would invite an intelligence agent to the most venerable Latinx art space in the city.
After a deliberately awkward self-introduction in gringoñol, Bogad, as Special Agent Christian White, proceeded to arm us with knowledge about the state’s ruthless techniques to confuse, delude, and destroy. He tiptoed back and forth over the border between paranoid security-fantasy and radical history, between revealing and concealing, between ironic persona and sincere self.
¿Que weird, no? There is humor of the darkest kind in these pages, but sorrow and fear as well. Bogad toys with official documents and ideologies with bizarre neo–Borscht Belt sensibility. But then he dives under the censor’s black marks to mourn the erasure of history, the enforced social amnesia, the lost lives and struggles to be found and reclaimed in that redacted darkness.
This piece is astute and troubling. It is definitely a new type of political performance that embodies the enemy with ambiguity as op- posed to rendering him a cartoon or a monster. I invite you to read one of the most original performance art pieces I’ve ever come across. Read it out loud to your peers! Perform it! Before it is censored and we face total [CENSORED] [REDACTED].
—Guillermo Gómez-Peña
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