Friend and filmmaker Travis Wilkerson new multi-media performance piece, “Soapbox Agitation #1: Proving Ground” debuted at the Sundance Festival in January.
From the Village Voice review
If a single screen can’t hold the world’s countless horrors, documentary rabble-rouser Travis Wilkerson (An Injury to One) did well to employ five, plus a folk-rock band, for his latest work, Soapbox Agitation #1: Proving Ground, a multimedia rumination on Lenin, Brecht, imperialism, anti-capitalism, and war that invigorated tiny crowds at the fest’s New Frontier sidebar. Bracingly resistant to the festival’s marketing/distribution model, Wilkerson (“Slave labor and theft are the foundations of American power!”) says he may never again perform the show, a sadly suitable outcome for one of the only Sundance products that wasn’t for sale.
Wilkerson wants to bring the agitation and rabble-rousing skills of the legendary Wobblies to the current day.
The immediate goal of “Proving Ground” is the recovery of radical agitation as an art form. To bring art that much closer to politics, in order that someday politics might look more like art. The long-term ambition is existentially complex. For truly effective agitation always renders itself obsolete.
[tags]Travis Wilkerson[/tags]