In this interview ICNC speaks with Nadine Bloch, a trainer and practitioner of nonviolent direct action. Nadine has worked with several activist groups and has been involved in several campaigns for the environment, social justice, and civil rights. Bloch expands on "traditional" conceptions of nonviolent direct action by stressing the importance of creativity, art, and culture in making these actions powerful and effective in ways that resonate with activists and help build the capacity of movements.

Interview:

Nadine Bloch (NB): I have been involved in nonviolent direct action campaigns civil resistance, creative actions of all kinds since about 1980. I started in the environmental movement and particularly in the anti nuclear weapons area and that transitioned really quickly into looking at why someone would spend or why governments would spend so much money on weapons of mass destruction rather than on people and people’s needs. So that translated very quickly into complete social justice perspective and that’s still what I do.

I like to think about creative resistance, artistic resistance in the broadest possible spectrum. So it’s not just what you identify immediately oh as a beautiful painting or a perfect theater piece but also and how you do your direct action work, how make your phone calls, how you do fake news reports. There’s this huge piece and that makes this medium incredibly subversive and incredibly powerful.

It’s not that authorities have not recognized this you know. Even in Shakespeare time, prior to Shakespeare, England outlawed theater for about several hundred years because it’s so subversive and it can be used to tell a story that the authorities in power do not want to have out there.

You see repetition of this in many cultures throughout history that different kinds of artistic expression have been censored significantly because like humor it evokes emotional truth that people can no longer ignore and it moves people in action in a way that’s particularly empowering and builds a community of support within that expressiveness.

That’s also a critical piece of my resistance training, resistance work and I work right now with some very small children, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders, 8, 9 10 years old and they understand very elementally that you can’t do it alone and that you can learn new skills, particularly if your in group and doing mass art projects whether it is street theater protest or mass demonstration or mural or singing in a coral group, actually builds their ability to work as a team and to function in a support network which is critical for long term and sustainable campaigns.

What are some examples of how creative resistance has been used throughout history?

NB: So of course you can think about the singing revolution which is a mass cultural response to soviet occupation and Estonia, you can start with that kind of that example. You can also start with a small example with Ghandi incorporating cultural resistance and reclaiming of traditional cloth making or salt making within the larger campaign for independence. We can look at Tiananmen Square actually, and we can look at the students there who while they were in Tiananmen Square actually erected what they consider a replica of our statue of liberty. It wasn’t exactly the same statue they call her the goddess of democracy but it was a very similar structure that they built there to encapsulate their vision and their view for a future that included something they would know as democracy.

You know the medieval days in Europe there were performing troops of clowns and “comediearte” there were gestures making fun of existing conditions this is a very basic human response to injustice and inequality and they were used all over the world. There’s all kinds of theater in different parts of Asia, and Southeast Asia that also incorporate these themes that cannot be talked about openly in the society but can be portrayed in the theater work and the puppetry that’s done.

What are some effective tactics that you have used to train people in creative resistance?

NB: So you know, lots of people talk about direct action or creative resistance or resistance in general and some people will recognize that it’s both and art and a science and I consider the spectrum of direct action and campaigning to be broader than the traditional Sharpien definitions of protest, non cooperation, intervention and that there’s other categories. And just over this weekend I’ve always had four categories the fourth one being a constructive category where you’re actually putting in place the future you want you’re building the wind mills and the alternative governance institutions and there’s actually a really important fifth category that James Lawson helped me identify this weekend which is the work of building a movement and that too requires creative input.

So whether you’re training or weather you’re actually on the street trying to portray the message. What you want to do is involve people’s experience and rather using the old style educational framework of banking your knowledge where one person stands in the front of the room and deposits their knowledge into the people who are watching you.  Use the popular education methodologies or, Agusta Boal, who worked in this realm, the theater of the oppressed methodology, where there are no spectators there are just spect-actors where everyone is contributing to the outcome.  And this part of the work is the art of the work so incorporating what you can from everybody’s experiences.

So in the tainings that I do like in the configurations of the actions you’re doing role plays you’re doing creative work, maybe it’s improvisational themes, you’re trying out different techniques so you can incorporate more experiences and come up with a more inclusive solution.

What are some effective way that movements have mobilized people to join their cause?

NB: So in the bigger sense the fifth category is, building the movement so it’s not just mobilizing people but it’s building capacity, giving people the tools that they need. And it starts off very mundanely perhaps.

My early experiences were on the Hudson River with Pete Seeger with an organization called the Clear Water and where he started, which was brilliant really, was that here was this river that was polluted, and a beautiful river. He knew that if people came down to the river and has a celebratory event there they’d want to clean it up. So they started holding festivals on the river actually it was dinners; potlucks with music and food. And so this brought in cultural aspects and celebratory aspects and really sparked the interest in cleaning the river up and doing advocacy and education to support that.

That’s a core principal of organizing I believe, to validate people’s experiences provide things that are fun and interesting and good food and ask people to participate where they’re comfortable. So people could come by bringing a covered dish, or a small offering, and by themselves they might not actually care if they clean the river they might not want to stick their head out but they could still come down and bring some potatoes, and that’s really an easy way to enter the conversation about how do we work together, and how do we build a group and change our future, and reclaim what’s ours.

So on that level, that’s a very small aspect about how to think about organizing and in this day and age with the internet we do have this crisis where we rely on non personal forms of communication and I think it’s hurting our movement and in a lot of conversations I have with fellow compatriot organizers we have to go back to the phone calls and the actual human contact that will enable people to commit and turn out.