Let’s talk about the Devil. Corporate Commercialism has sped up to a roar, virtually unopposed. Consumerism is normalized in the mind of the average person, sometimes we even refer to ourselves as consumers forgetting that we are also citizens, humans, men, women, animals. We forget that we share many resources, public spaces, libraries, information, history, sidewalks, streets, schools that we created laws and covenants and govenerments to protect us,, to support us, to help us… The subjugation of these resources and these laws to the forces of the market demands a response.

We are a post religious church, a radical performance community. We hold “services” wherever we can, in concert halls, theaters, churches, community centers, forests, fields, parking lots, mall atriums, and perhaps most importantly, inside stores, as close to the cash register as we can get, within spitting distance of the point of purchase.

We identify particularly egregious corporate practices: Starbuck’s blocking Ethiopian coffee farmers from adding value to their coffees by trademarking their ancient coffee names, Victoria’s Secret clear cutting virgin forest to send out a million catalogs a day for a 2% return, Disney and its sweatshop labour, the rock star Bono and his project RED, Wal-Mart and its union busting. We study their ad campaigns, their marketing strategies, and we invent and shape a counter story, a fresh narrative. Then we go into the retail environment armed with this new message, The Anti-Ad. The Truth.

We sing, we dance, we preach, sometimes we perform small “interventions”, invisible plays, acts of ritual resistance. We exorcise cash registers and remythologize the retail environment, we illuminate the Devil. We make media and send it out around the world. We get hassled by security guards and sometimes get arrested.

Above all we try to complexify the moment of purchase, to snap people out their hypnosis and back into the mystery of being human. We remind people that things come from somewhere, that products have a resource past, a labor past. Someone made It, and It is made of something, we trace the route a product took to get on the shelf, the life it might have when we throw it away. We animate the objects that surround us and in so doing we re-animate ourselves. We become citizens again.

Liberation is a radiant process, it spreads. We think freedom from consumerism is virulent, contagious. Tell your neighbor you stopped shopping and it gives her permission to do the same. One day we can all live in richly varied and hilarious neighborhoods, with people who seem to have invented themselves, and so are endlessly fascinating, something beyond entertainment. Yes there IS a Life After Shopping!

Naturally people wonder how this all works. Do we live in the bushes? Do we forage for food? Spin our own wool? Have we stopped our shopping? Where did I get my underwear? We are organized like a not for profit theater company and we support this work by teaching, lecturing, and performing, with generous donations and grants and most of all through volunteerism and skill sharing. We try to spread whatever resources we have as far out in our community as we can. Among us there are scientists, filmmakers, teachers, musicians, dog walkers, hairdressers, executives, painters and bakers. We are all ages and many races and we are definitely not Puritans, so sometimes we do shop, but carefully and locally if at all possible. This is not a Utopian vision, or maybe it is and our Utopia just looks less like the biosphere and more like a healthy neighborhood. We know the health of the planet is depending on us and the degree to which we can create healthy neighborhoods. Everywhere. My healthy neighborhood depends on your healthy neighborhood, and your healthy neighborhood depends on the health of a neighborhood in rural Peru or Calcutta. What we need now are more people in more neighborhoods spreading that radiant freedom, teaching other people to turn their backs on the billboards and back away from the product. Please join us, somehow someway. There are all kinds of resources at our website revbilly.com, conversations to join, plays to perform, songs to learn, campaigns to replicate.

Above all we invite you to start your own church. Start with what you have. We build performances and rituals with songs and prayers and dancing and an updated kind of preaching because thats what we know how to do. If what you know how to do is bake than we suggest you start a cake brigade. People who join us “bring forth” what they have in the way skill, talent and chutzpah. That is the beginning of the independence that corporations know we have, but hope we never discover. The corporations can just keep holding their breath. We have work to do.

Savitri D / Director, Brooklyn, 2/20/10