Café DaPoPo: the next endeavour. Creating a tailor-made menu for Mayworks 2010 Halifax, preparing our favourite political performance scripts, poems, songs, rants and shtick about workers and workers' rights. I recall the Justice Camp Café in the Ward Room at Kings last summer, that was interrupted by a fire drill, and our collection of poverty-themed material. Theatrical performance and social issues, always married, are always vying for singular attention. As Boal puts it, 'all theatre is political.' Often the actual political content is invisible, in camouflage. Our job for Mayworks is to unpack that content, reveal it.
Romain Roland suggests "joy, energy and intelligence" as necessary ingredients for a true People's Theatre. DaPoPo's interest, in Café especially, has been to pursue these qualities in our work. Or, as W. B. Yeats describes his work towards a Popular Theatre: it is "the making articulate of all the dumb classes each with its own knowledge of the world, its own dignity… with the objectivity of the office and the workshop, of the newspaper and the street, or mechanism and politics."
While patrons eat and drink, our theatre-baristas serve songs, sonnets, monologues, rants, lectures, bed-times stories, striptease, happenings, improv, Big Ensemble numbers and pretty much anything else we can think of. For special events, we spice up our menu with queer, local and political material. We continually vary our flavour with an ever-changing cast, and special guests.
