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Protest Theater at Chicago's 1968 Democratic National Convention

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Theater in the late 1960s used group participation as a dramatic and popular form of socio-political collective action. Protests against established power in the United States grew between the years 1967 and 1968 because dramatic aspects of political and cultural rebellion manifested in theatrical methods. One prominent example was the Festival of Life by the Yippie Movement outside the Chicago Democratic National Convention in 1968. During this intense period of domestic conflict, these activists embraced radical theater as a visible form of protest. 

The Yippies, the police, and Chicago city administration used theater to express their conflicting messages. Yippies knew that their outlandish protest tactics would be unlikely to change the results of the Chicago convention, and thus represented Americans who were alienated from the political system. Police actions and the behavior of city leadership also indicate the alarming scale of conflict that developed in Chicago over the course of the weeklong convention. Radical theater reached its culmination in the turbulent struggle between the city and its demonstrators, and the Yippies would continue to use it in their future demonstrations for a changed America during the 1970s.

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