(for the Lights Camera Action Committee)
“Since the earliest days of his campaign, people have compared the U.S. president’s frequent rallies to the button-pushing act of an insult comic. He mocks people, imitates them, and calls them nasty names. But unlike an insult comic—he doesn’t aim this mockery at people in the room, or even at people who exist. Instead, he invokes absent people (“Some people say…,” his comments often begin) or even creates them out of whole cloth, tailor-made to be mocked!
“Trump may take it extremes, but this tactic is typical: the drama of giving offense has always been founded on a fiction. The offended party may exist, but in the moment of performance—during a Trump rally, or at a performance of Handke’s play—the literal existence of this offended person is immaterial.”
(in Performance Research)
The weird co-existence of violence and silliness in the Capitol Riots led commentators to declare them “surreal,” or else to posit the simple theory that the rioters’ playfulness was “camouflage” or “cover” for their true intentions: to commit acts of white supremacist violence. A close performance-minded reading of video footage from the riots tells a different, more complicated story. To lay the foundations for telling such a story, this article re-reads canonical play theories (Geertz’s “deep play,” Schechner’s “dark play”) and builds new theories of political play on the ideas and practices of the contemporary Trumpist right.