Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping is a radical performance community based in New York City. The Stop Shopping Choir is accompanied by a comic preacher, Reverend Billy, portrayed by performer William (Billy) Talen. The philosophy of the Church of Stop Shopping surrounds the imminent "Shopocalypse", which assumes the end of humanity will come about through manic consumerism.
The Stop Shopping Choir accompanies Reverend Billy and stages guerrilla theater style actions, singing on the property of the Disney stores, Monsanto facilities, and Trump Tower, among others. They are often considered part of the Culture Jamming movement.
Origins of Reverend Billy
Reverend Billy attempting to exorcise bad loans and toxic assets from the Bank of America ATM in Union Square, New York City, 2009
The character of Reverend Billy was developed in the early 1990s by actor and playwright, William Talen. His family was Dutch Calvinist, from the Christian Reformed Church, a conservative sect concentrated in Holland and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The precepts of this kind of Christianity were the basis for Dutch Afrikaners system of Apartheid in South Africa.
Talen grew up in small towns throughout Minnesota, South Dakota and Wisconsin. He left home at 16, moving east with Charles and Patricia Gaines, a writer and painter who encouraged him as an artist. Talen began to perform his poems and stories, hitch-hiking from Philadelphia to New York to San Francisco.
Talen's chief collaborator in developing the Reverend Billy character was the Reverend Sidney Lanier, a cousin of Tennessee Williams. Lanier was vicar of The St. Clement's in the 1960s, an Episcopal Church in Hell's Kitchen in Manhattan. In an effort to increase attendance at St. Clement's, Lanier had torn out the altar and pews, inviting actors to perform scenes from plays by Tennessee Williams and Terrence McNally, and founding founding the American Place Theater. Lanier described Talen as "more of a preacher with a gift for social prophecy than an actor.'' In the early 1990s Talen moved with Lanier to New York City from the San Francisco Bay Area, branding his act as a "new kind of American preacher"
The Reverend Billy character debuted on the sidewalk at Times Square in 1998, outside the Disney Store, where he proclaimed Mickey Mouse to be the anti-Christ. He was arrested multiple times outside the Disney Store, where he duct-tapped Mickey Mouse to a cross. Reverend Billy's sermons decried the evils of consumerism and the racism of sweatshop labor, and what Talen saw as the loss of neighborhood spirit in Rudolph Giuliani's New York.
The Reverend Billy character isn't so much a parody of a preacher, as a preacher motif used to blur the lines between performance and religious experience. "It's definitely a church service," Talen explained to Altnernet, but, he added, it's "a political rally, it's theater, it's all three, it's none of them." Alisa Solomon, the theater critic at the Village Voice, said of Reverend Billy's persona, "The collar is fake, the calling is real." Along with the Church of Stop Shopping, they have been referred to by academics as "performance activism," "carnivalesque protest," and "commercial disobedience."
Savitri D (née Durkee) is the co-founder and director of the Church of Stop Shopping, as well as Talen's partner. She was born in Taos, New Mexico in 1972. She was raised at The Lama Foundation, one of the earliest and longest lasting intentional spiritual communities in the US, founded by her parents, Steven and Barbara Durkee.
Savitri D began dancing and performing at the University of Montana, studied at the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and co-founded a dance collective called The Zen Monkey Project. After moving to New York City in 1997, she staged her play SKY/NO SKY at 57 Walker Street.
In 2000, she was a producer at The Culture Project, a theater in the East Village, where Talen was staging early Reverend Billy performances. She took over direction of The Church of Stop Shopping performances from the dramatist Tony Torn in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks in 2001, and married Talen the next year.
The Stop Shopping Choir
The Stop Shopping Choir is a 35-member ensemble that performs an array of original gospel songs in theater performances and alongside Reverend Billy in public spaces during campaigns. The choir began accompanying Talen's sermons at concert shows shortly after the September 11 attacks, adding a musical influence to Reverend Billy performances. Led by musical director Nehemiah Luckett, the choir members are volunteers who rehearse weekly at the Lower Eastside Girl's Club in the East Village.
The Choir often write songs that draw attention to the environmental and consumerist campaigns championed by the Church of Stop Shopping. They have accompanied Talen into the lobbies of multinational banks such as JP Morgan Chase or research facilities belonging to Monsanto, dressed as golden toads and honeybees, singing songs in support of the day's sermon. One of their best-known songs is The First Amendment, an incantation of the 1st Amendment of the United States Constitution, sung rapturously by soprano Laura Newman.
Direct Action Campaigns
In addition to protest performances throughout a given year, Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping have organized various campaigns focused on consumerist or environmental issues, often highlighting a particular company they feel best symbolizes the issue. The group stage actions in public spaces near the targets of their actions, or in the lobbies, halls, and plazas of the building owned by the companies they protest. Their sermons and songs routinely draw the attention of police and security forces assigned to those spaces, leading to arrests and significant media coverage. Talen and Savitri D have been arrested more than 50 times during their actions, though their charges are almost always reduced or dropped.