Guerilla Theatre is a nuts-and-bolts approach to the kind of interactive environmental theatre found only at Faires, and is a superb handbook for both the beginner and advanced street/improvisational actor.
Written by J. Paul Moore, a forty-year Renaissance Faire performance veteran and a master of improvisational theatre, the book guides the reader through the crafting and performing of a wide variety of ways to entertain Faire-goers, singly and in groups. The book is edited by Phyllis Patterson, the creator of the original Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura, California.
Different than any other kind of theatre, the streets of the Faire are the actor's stage, and the flowing ever-changing crowd their audience. In Guerilla Theatre, Mr. Moore supplies a how-to guide for mastering the required skills for playing to this audience, along with exercises, illustrations, a generous number of gambits that worked for him, and a goodly helping of war stories.
What is Guerrilla Theatre?
Guerrilla Theatre for Faires is an interactive style of improvisational performance allowing audiences to become actual players in the show. The experience is by turns aggressive, passive, intimate, distant, obvious and covert. There are as many approaches as there are people to approach it. It is a broad, colorful, and captivating way of approaching the Faire canvas.
Although a passion and/or talent for improvisation will prove invaluable in Guerrilla Theatre, the technique of creating distant visuals and hatching covert operations require little or no such calling. In fact, one can oft times recruit players from the audience to join your merry band on the spot - some more willingly than others. As a lone wolf or member of a group, one can create an exhilarating and compelling under-current of village life in Shakespeare's England.
About the Author
A Theatre Arts major at Los Angeles City College, Mr. Moore began a forty year affiliation with the Southern (California) Renaissance Pleasure Faire in 1967. Over his tenure, Mr. Moore has taught pre-faire workshops in Elizabethan Language, Swashbuckling 101, and Guerrilla Theatre. In addition to writing and directing many stage shows he has portrayed major theme characters, including Robin Hood, Sir Francis Drake, the Lord Mayor, Captain and Sir Tristan Hawkins. A co-founder of several theatrical and environmental groups, Mr. Moore has also directed a covert band of theatre guerrillas, The Lord Mayor's Players, and much of the material detailed in the Compendium of Bits chapter evolved from the talents of these troupes.
A magician as well as an actor and author, Mr. Moore has appeared on numerous occasions at The Magic Castle in Hollywood, as well as in many films. In addition to Guerrilla Theatre, he has also written Busking as a Mercenary Art and Swash-Buckling 101.
His colleague at the Southern Faire, the highly regarded David Springhorn, has this to say about Mr. Moore and his new book: "What we have here is a battle manual made by a Captain in the trenches, and I highly suggest you follow it. J. Paul Moore taught me more than "gorilla" theater: he gave me the gift of communicating Magic to an audience; how to alter their reality and my own; how to destroy the thin membrane between actor and spectator; how to put myself on the line so I could draw the audience into the Faire's communal soul. Think I am laying it on too thick? Well, pal, if you're not having this same intense personal experience with the crowd, you ain't doin' it right!"
