Earth-a-lulia! Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping Sets Up Permanent Home in Loisaida

Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping has established a permanent creative home at 36 Avenue C (Loisaida Ave., corner of E. 3rd Street), where the troupe will evolve new works and perform weekly on Sundays at 3:00 PM. The location, renamed Earthchxrch, is a former bank branch (first North Fork, then Capital One). 

This is ironic since the troupe has made headlines since 2007 by getting arrested while singing and preaching among the desks of bankers whose institutions in New York, California, England and Germany are pillars of financing for fossil fuel projects.

 

The company has been performing on an interim basis in the Lower East Side location and signed a long term lease for the joint last month.  The venue's stage name, "Earthchxrch," is in keeping with the troupe's unique genre of performance art, which might be called "Preaching Performance" or "Ministering Performance."  Each performance, directed by Savitri D, features a spirited sermon by Bill Talen as the energetic, charismatic revivalist preacher Reverend Billy plus songs by the thirty-member Stop Shopping Choir.  Each show is motivated by a profound imperative: to strengthen individual connection to the Earth, to develop pathways to social change and to hold financial institutions and policy makers accountable for their role in the Climate Crisis.

 

The company's list of awards and honors includes an Obie Award, the Alpert Award in Theater, the Edwin Booth Award in Theater, the Ethical Humanist Award, and The Impact Award from the Center for Constitutional Rights among others.

 

The next performance at Earthchxrch will be Sunday, November 19 at 3:00 as a warmup to the company's run at Joe's Pub November 26, December 10 and December 17, all at 6:00 PM.  Tickets for the Joe's Pub run are $15 plus two drinks or one food item minimum per person. Joe's Pub is located in The Public Theater at 425 Lafayette Street (Astor Place). The box office is https://publictheater.org. For more info, call (212) 967-7555.

 

The troupe will return to Earthchxrch in mid-January and will perform weekly there on Sundays at 3:00 PM.  Admission is free; donations are accepted when the hat is passed. This event is family-friendly.

 

Performances of Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir (https://revbilly.com) combine activism and highly responsive entertainment. They are constantly changing and include songs, rituals, audience testimonials, and a 15-minute comic-then-serious sermon by Bill Talen as the energetic, charismatic revivalist preacher Reverend Billy. Each show is different but all are motivated by a profound imperative: to strengthen individual connection to the Earth, to develop pathways to social change and to hold financial institutions and policy makers accountable for their role in the Climate Crisis. 

 

The company's list of awards and honors includes an Obie Award, the Alpert Award in Theater and the Edwin Booth Award in Theater (among others).

 

Performances are distinguished by their musical score, which has been dubbed "radical devotional music for the Age of Extinction."  A vast original repertoire has been developed collaboratively over two decades.   Current compositions draw on multiple musical traditions, creating a unique harmonic landscape. Gospel and folk influences can be heard in their complex contemporary riffing and polyphony.

 

The 30-member ensemble is known for its creative and sometimes disruptive acts of resistance. They have exorcised cash registers in shopping malls, performed street theater outside of corporate headquarters, and engaged in various forms of civil disobedience, for which they are sometimes arrested. They have been closely involved with numerous activist movements (Fight for $15, Amazon Labor Union, BLM, Occupy Wall Street)  and are widely known as pioneers of Art as Social Practice.

 

William “Rev Billy” Talen and Savitri D co-founded the Church of Stop Shopping in 2002.  At the time, Savitri D had been manager of The Culture Project for two years. The parody televangelist character that Talen had created was becoming a familiar sight in street protests and Talen had begun adding singers to his Times Square preacher act. Savitri D's feeling for public space performance begat a concept for "secular church shows," where 30 singers would risk arrest together, fight consumerism and climate crime and reference the drama of it all in song. Soon, Rev. Billy's sermons morphed from comedy routines to dramatic pleas for human and earth justice. Musical leadership of the choir was bestowed on individuals who had their own careers and spelled one another as they become available. Leila Adu, who hails from Ghana and New Zealand, Ali Dineen, a popular singer-songwriter in New York cabaret scene, and Gregory Corbino, an orchestra leader of Bread and Puppet Theater, became rotating maestros.  

 

What Talen and Savitri D created is a unique genre of performance art which might be called "Preaching Performance" or "Ministering Performance." Made of oratory infused with music and singing, each show is partly a concert, partly a Happening (in the Allan Kaprow sense) and partly a flashback to the ancient Greek Agora--the center of athletic, artistic, business, social, spiritual, and political life in the city, where citizens held forth rhetorically on issues of the day. (Agoraphobic is the term coined for people who fear to engage in the discourse of democracy.)

 

The 30-person Stop Shopping Choir is a radical performance community of singing New Yorkers who stage creative actions around the world. Over the years, they have performed in the lobbies of countless banks, The United States Congress, The Christmas Parade at Disneyland, and Monsanto's corporate HQ as well as many popular theater, music and festival spaces.  The singers are scientists, artists, dog walkers, builders, teachers, lawyers and students (to name a few). They move fluidly between protest and art, and have performed with punk squatters, in museums and on stage with Neil Young.  They are the subject of multiple documentaries including Morgan Spurlock's "What Would Jesus Buy?"  The ensemble's most recent album, "change with us," is accessible on the company's website, www.revbilly.com.