Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir to Return to Joe's Pub with GATHER!

GATHER! ...after the year of living hate. Reverend Billy and The Stop Shopping Choir return for 5 holiday shows at Joe's Pub at the Public, every Sunday, November 20 - Dec 18 at 2 PM. Joe's Pub at The Public Theater is located at 425 Lafayette. Tickets ($12-15, discounts available) at Joespub.com.

Every kind of American has endured the wearying bitterness of this election season. From labor organizers to natural scientists, 1st Amendment lawyers to anti pipeline activists, we are exhausted, defeated and afraid of the rifts opening in the culture. Reverend Billy and the singers and musicians of The Stop Shopping Choir invite activists to come together and ask basic questions, "What now? Who with? Where? When?" The challenge of starting over again, of finding healing in our activism ... is the gift we hope to give each other this holiday season but first, we have to Gather!

Reverend Billy has won the OBIE, (for Reviving Activism), the Alpert Award, and The Historic Districts Council's Preservation Award (for leading demonstrations to save Manhattan's Poe House). He's been jailed more than 50 times. He was a central figure of Occupy Wall Street and toured 25 OWS tent communities from Zurich to Oakland, CA. He ran for New York City mayor on the Green Party ticket. With the Stop Shopping Choir he has released four CDs and participated three documentary films, one of which "Preacher with an Unknown God" won "best short film" at Sundance. The latest of his five books is "The Earth Wants YOU" from City Light Publishers. Savitri D and the Reverend are frequent guests of media, with recent coverage in The New Yorker (for their musical invasion of DARPA's "Robobee lab" at Harvard), The Guardian and the Wall Street Journal. Savitri and Rev host a weekly radio show on WBAI also called The Earth Wants YOU. Learn more at www.revbilly.com.

The Stop Shopping Choir is an all-ages, 40-member singing group, under the direction of Savitri D, with musical director Nehemiah Luckett. The choir resembles a crowd in a New York subway train with the many economic, ethnic, religious, and cultural backgrounds. The choir has members from every continent except Antarctica, which they're working on. Among the singers are scientists, teachers, artists, therapists, welders, cyclists, builders, developers, hairdressers, dog walkers, actors, truck drivers, tech geeks, scholars and executives. The Choir has toured in Europe, Africa, South America and throughout North America. They are the subject of Morgan Spurlock's second feature film, What Would Jesus Buy?

The Church of Stop Shopping is a New York City based radical performance community, with 40 performing members and a congregation in the thousands. They are wild anti-consumerist gospel shouters and earth loving urban activists who have worked with communities on four continents defending land, life and imagination from reckless development and the extractive imperatives of global capital. They "sing all the right songs in all the wrong places," including the lobbies of banks that finance climate change, cash register exorcisms, and interruptions of scientists in Monsanto labs. The performance is alternately a political rally, a theatrical comedy and a theatrical comedy about a televangelist. The performances are staged throughout the US and Europe. Over the years of church service-like shows Reverend Billy has inducted into "Fabulous Sainthood" hundreds of local activists, voted on the audiences in towns and cities along the tours. Better known saints include Joan Baez, Kurt Vonnegut, Justin VivIan Bond, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Tim DeChristopher, the Yes Men, Dr. Benjamin Barber and Jennifer Miller the Bearded Lady of Circus Amok.

Joe's Pub at The Public is one of New York City's most celebrated venues for emerging and established performance artists. Named for Public Theater founder Joe Papp, Joe's Pub debuted in 1998 and plays a vital role in The Public's mission of supporting young artists while providing established artists with an intimate space to perform and develop new work. Joe's Pub presents talent from all over the world as part of The Public's programming downtown at its Astor Place home, hosting approximately 800 shows and serving over 100,000 audience members annually. The diverse roster of programming featured at Joe's Pub includes top performers from Broadway, cabaret, dance, world, jazz, country, and indie genres, as well as New York Voices, its commissioning initiative. Joe's Pub also collaborates with other Public Theater programs to present events such as the Under the Radar Incoming series and the Public Forum lecture and debate series. The New York Times has praised Joe's Pub as at the "nexus" of "a downtown axis of clubs whose performers gleefully fuzz the boundaries between old and new, and between pop, rock, jazz, rhythm-and-blues, swing, country, world music and performance art."

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