Writing
Photo Credit: Manuel Molina Martagon
New Release
Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia
Performing Truth answers the most pressing questions facing any theatre makers who are wrestling with how to present historical, political or socioeconomic information in an engaging, entertaining and galvanising way. How to make data compelling and documents mobilizing? How to keep an audience interested in what might be dry, dire or depressing? How to surprise an audience and keep them alert?
Collecting together the performance texts of international performance artist and activist L.M. Bogad, this book accompanies each script with essays that further explore that work's performance strategies. It also equips readers with specific resources and pedagogical tools to help those wishing to stage these pieces or create their own work to engage with similar topics. Bogad also provides 'takeaways' for each piece, illustrating the challenges of its particular subject matter and how to overcome those challenges with innovations unique to performance art.
This is a key guidebook for artists and theatremakers facing the challenges of engaging with information in an era of fake news, propaganda bots, and the polarization of ideological spheres, as well as students and teachers taking on that challenge in theatre studies, performance studies and performing arts classrooms.
More Books
Tactical Performance: The Practice and Theory of Serious Play
An inspiring practical and theoretical guide, Tactical Performance is essential reading for anyone interested in creative pranksterism, subvertisement, cultural sabotage, and the global justice movement.
Electoral Guerrilla Theatre: Radical Ridicule and Social Movements
Electoral Guerilla Theatre explores the recent phenomenon of the satirical election campaign. Drawing on extensive archival and ethnographic research, Larry Bogad examines satirical campaigns around the world, placing his analysis in national, cultural, political and legal contexts.
Cointelshow: A Patriot Act, Second Edition
Learn fun techniques for the infiltration of activist groups, how to earn benefits and a pension as an agent provocateur, and how to, in the words of J. Edgar Hoover, “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize” your neighbors!
Essays, Articles, & Chapters
Published Journal/Magazine Articles
"Irresistible Images." An interview/dialogue with Shane Boyle, in Contemporary Theatre Review online
“Antiauthoritarian Clowning: A Tactical Review,” for Howlround, Fall 2020.
“Playing in the Key of Clown: Reflections on the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army,” In Fifth Estate, Winter 2017. Cover Image, and pages 2-4.
“Bechtel: A Play.” In “Scores For A City,” a performative game project by Headlands Art Center. Published as part of public art event, June 2016. Pamphlet: 3.
"Crisis in Califorlornia: Creative Protest at the University of California," in Theatre Survey, 52:1 (May 2011): 125-138.
“Carnivals Against Capital: Radical Clowning and the Global Justice Movement,” in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, Vol 16, No. 4 (Summer 2010): 537-557. Reprinted in monograph, Carnival Art, Culture, Politics: Performing Life, ed. M. Crichlow. London: Routledge. 2012.
“Dick Tuck,” Short curatorial essay for Tucson Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective exhibit on political prankster Dick Tuck.
Review of Ben Shepard’s Queer Political Performance and Protest: Play, Pleasure, and Social Movement.
“Kabouters,” in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Ness, Immanuel (Ed.). Blackwell Publishing, 2009. Blackwell Reference Online.
Shepard, B.; Bogad, L.M.; Duncombe, S. “Performing vs. the Insurmountable: Theatrics, Activism, and Social Movements,” in Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 4(3). 2009.
“The Colbert Rapport,” in The Nation on-line, November 7, 2007.
“Satire, Surveillance, and the State: A Classified Primer,” in the special Drama for Citizenship and Human Rights Issue of Research In Drama Education, Vol. 12, No. 3 (November 2007): 381-390.
“Radical Simulacrum, Regulation By Prank: The Oil Enforcement Agency,” in Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 17, Number 2 (May 2007): 261-264.
“Upstaging the Establishment,” in UC Davis Alumni Magazine (Spring 2007): 26-27.
“Monumental Dialectics: Staging Haymarket Confrontation,” in Fifth Estate Issue 372 (Spring 2006): 9-11, 16.
“Billionaires for Bush: A Postmortemist Accounting,” in Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol. 15, Number 1 (February 2005): 164-168.
“Breath in Dark Times: The Kowalchuk/Walker Project, Ten Brecht Poems,” in Communications of the International Brecht Society, Vol. 33 (Summer 2004): 11-13.
“The Clown Army Crosses the Thames,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest on-line, August 2004.
“CIRCA: The Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army,” in Red Pepper Magazine, # 115 (January 2004): 11.
Facial Insufficiency: Political Street Performance In New York City and the Selective Enforcement of the 1845 Mask Law,” in TDR: The Drama Review, 47: 4 (Winter 2003): 75-84.
“Radical Ridicule: Political Satire post-9/11,” in Radical Society: Review of Culture and Politics. New York: The Center for Social Research and Education, London: Routledge, 29: 3 (October 2002): 10-12.
“Electoral Guerrilla Theatre in Australia: Pauline Pantsdown vs. Pauline Hanson,” in TDR: The Drama Review, 45: 2 (Summer 2001): 70-93.
"Religious Practice in Activist Performance with the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless," in the Association for Theatre in Higher Education Religion Focus Group’s Journal, (Summer 1999): 23-29.
Chapters in Edited Collections
“Arresting Images: Avoiding Arrest During Your Beautiful Public Performance Intervention…Or Making the Most of Your Beautiful Arrest,” in Pocha Nostra’s A Handbook for the Rebel Artist in a Post-Democratic Society, Routledge Press, 2021.
“The Great Collective Cough-In,” cartoon with commentary, in Sustainable Activist Practices, Sustainable Tools for Precarious Times: Performance Actions in the Americas (Palgrave Macmillan): 2019: 66-67. This collection won the 2020 Association for Theatre in Higher Education Award for Excellence in Editing.
“Tactical Carnival and the Global Justice Movement: The Clown Army and Clownfrontational Protest,” in Protest, Popular Culture and Tradition in Modern and Contemporary Western Europe. Eds. Ilaria Favretto and Xabier Itcaina. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. 209-227.
“Exit 11.” Emergency Index, 2016: 120-121.
“Brecht: Verfremdungseffekt” and “Electoral Guerrilla Theatre,” In Beautiful Trouble: A Toolkit for Revolution. Ed. Andrew Boyd. New York: O/R Books, 2012. “Electoral Guerrilla Theatre” entry republished in the Pocket Edition of this book, 2013.
“Patriot Acts: All-American Tactical Performance In the Age of Permawar,” in Political and Protest Theatre after 9/11: Patriotic Dissent. Ed. Jenny Spencer. New York: Routledge Press, 2011: 191-207.
“Billy Versus Bloomy: Electoral Guerrilla Theatre In New York City.” In ByProduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices. Ed. Marisa Jahn. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2010: 152-158.
“We Begin in the Imperial Belly,” Introductory essay, co-authored with Marisa Jahn. In ByProduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices. Ed. Marisa Jahn. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2010: 8-18.
“The Baked Apple: On the New York Post Special Edition,” Interview of myself and other Yes Men. In ByProduct: On the Excess of Embedded Art Practices. Ed. Marisa Jahn. Toronto: YYZ Books, 2010:
“Tactical Carnival: Social Movements, Public Space and Dialogical Performance,” in A Boal Companion, eds. Cohen-Cruz, Jan and Mady Schutzman. London: Routledge Press, 2006: 46-58.
“A Place for Protest: The Billionaires for Bush Interrupt the Hegemonologue,” in Performance and Place, eds. Hill, Leslie and Helen Paris. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006: 170-179.
“The Revolt of the Senses: Hallucination, Revelation and Resistance in Antonio Buero-Vallejo’s The Foundation,” in Images of Mental Illness Through Text and Performance, ed. Sarah Randolph. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press, 2005: 63-71.