Jason C. McLean

Other players affect any actor’s performance. When some of the players are playing by a different script, things get interesting. When their script can change at any moment, the outcome of the scene is anyone’s guess. On the morning we were set to culture-jam American Apparel, we didn’t have any clue how things would turn out.

Starring the real Maurice Charney as Maurice Charney (left) and yours truly as Dov

Our group does our bit to oppose oppressive structures in our society by perfoming guerilla theatre scenes in stores, outlets or offices of corporations or supposed institutions whose policies hurt some or many of us but whose marketing strategy distracts most of us to what they are actually all about.

Since 2002, we’ve performed on Buy Nothing Day, joining the global rejection of consumer culture. We had already played McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Starbucks and this year we decided to jam American Apparel, a company whose ethical posturing might have snagged them some activist clientele but hasn’t stopped them from sexist advertising or union-busting or stopped owner Dov Charney from harassing employees on the job.

Our scene mocked the whole softcore-porn approach the company had to its print ads and set in motion how we imagined a typical American Apparel video shoot might go.

First, our models enter the store (in this case, the one on St-Laurent), select their costumes from the items on display, enter the changing rooms and wait.

The next character to enter the scene is our Executive Producer, who tells the store employees that a shoot is about to happen for “the website” tries to get them to sign a “waiver form” and waits for our Director and Crew.

When they arrive, things get crazy. As they start setting up their lights, ask the staff to move things around and try to clear an area for the shoot the models emerge and the shoot begins.

The Director keeps trying to turn up the sleaze and eventually our Dov Charney shows up and decides to get in the shoot himself. He slaps one of the models on the bum, she slaps his face, then we freeze.

We break the tension with a slow clap, explain to confused shoppers who we are and why we just performed the scene we did, then leave.

As we met that morning for final planning, we were joined by new players, as we normally are, who had heard about us through the Adbusters listserv. It turned out that some of them worked for American Apparel and helped store security kick us out when we arrived.

Playing Dov, I was the last to join the scene, and by the time I entered, we were already on the street, the store had called in the cops and I was playing opposite Maurice Charney, Dov’s actual father and the President of American Apparel Canada.

While he acknowledged that it was theatre, Mr. Charney rejected our performance. He offered no response to our charges of sexism, sexual harassment or union-busting, unless “You’re a bunch of liars” and “No we didn’t bust them good, you weren’t there, buddy” count.

By infiltrating a theatre troupe rather than deal with the issues and by sending a big PR gun like Mr. Charney who gave a subpar performance, American Apparel showed us, and our cameras their true colors and provided us with a better scene than we could have hoped for.

We first learned of American Apparel’s wrongdoings when preparing for the infringement Festival, an annual interdisciplinary arts event that began in Montreal and has since spread to Ottawa, Buffalo and New York City.

By encouraging a mix of traditional art forms like theatre music and film and radically new forms like culture-jamming and street performance, we hope to create a unique celebration of critical art and resistance. To avoid hypocrisy, we limit our sponshoship to ethical companies that pose no conflict of interest.

Last year someone suggested American Apparel as a potential sponsor and all seemed well at first. We dug a bit and found out that even though the company doesn’t use sweatshop labour (something that should be a given, not a sellpoint) there were many unethical things they were getting away with. They needed to be exposed for what they really were all about.

Fortunately, our jam was able to show just that and have a positive impact. Couple that with the rush a performer gets from surviving such an unpredictable script and you’re left with a truly rewarding experience and a desire to do it all again.