Rev. Billy

From his beginnings as a sidewalk preacher protesting the corporate redevelopment of Times Square in New York City to his trenchant anti-war, anti-empire actions today, Reverend Billy (pseudonym of artist-activist Bill Talen) has taken his theatrical activism to a range of sites which he calls "contested spaces": those urban sites that have been recently commodified, commercialized, gentrified or placed under state or police surveillance. In this vein, he has staged numerous "Shopping Interventions" in which he, along with prime collaborator Savitri D and the artists in "the Stop Shopping Choir," often perform in transnational corporate spaces themselves—from the Disney Store to Starbucks—in an effort to intervene in the seamless corporate architecture and choreography of shopping, or to "re-narrate" them with alternate forms of sociality and with the memories of the lives they displace.