-Caveat Lector-
As seen at my wonderful and informative website
http://leviathan.weblogs.com
Could this be a CIA psy-op or something?
http://www.jonestownreenactment.org/
http://www.sunday-times.co.uk/news/pages/sti/2000/05/14/stinwenws02036.html
Arts group to replay massacre in park
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
THE Institute of Contemporary Arts is to stage a re-enactment in a London park this
summer of the 1978 Jonestown massacre in which more than 900 followers of the Rev Jim
Jones committed suicide.
Vivienne Gaskin, the ICA's director of live arts, said the aim was "to counter the
popular misconception that Jones was simply demonic, evil and without humanity".
She said: "He's remembered mainly for the mass suicide in Guyana, but we really want
to look at what happened before."
The plan has infuriated survivors as well as cult experts and local residents. "I
think on principle it is distasteful and disturbing to do something that glamorises or
sanitises the image of someone who caused the deaths of so many," said Ayman Akshar,
the director of Triumph Over London Cults.
"People do get attracted to join cults after seeing such images in films or public
displays. They feel, 'Let's give it a try.' It is a sense of adventure and danger."
Still life: the ICA courted controversy before with this exhibit featuring Sophie Dahl
On May 26, Graeme Edler, who has appeared in The Bill and Brookside, will play Jones
at the ICA and read some of his political and religious sermons from the mid-1970s,
when thousands of followers flocked to his People's Temple in San Francisco. It will
include one of the sham "miracle healings" he often performed.
At the end of July, however, the ICA is taking its art outside. In a re-enactment of
the final days in Guyana, several hundred people will play the followers who committed
suicide after drinking Kool-Aid laced with potassium cyanide. The ICA is negotiating
to use Coin Street, on the South Bank, or Meanwhile Gardens, in Westbourne Grove.
"Why on earth are they doing it?" asked Tom Bower, 52, who lives near Meanwhile
Gardens.
One of the Jonestown survivors, Deborah Layton, who followed Jones to Guyana in her
twenties, wrote an account of her experiences, Seductive Poison, which was published
last year. Layton left Guyana six months before the November 1978 mass suicide, which,
in a sworn affidavit in America, she correctly predicted.
"I don't think that Jim Jones was evil at the beginning but he clearly became utterly
psychotic when they went to Guyana," she said.
The ICA's re-enactment will largely omit the fact that Jones was a womaniser who
forced some of his female followers into sex.
"I accept absolutely that Jones abused women," said Gaskin. "But this is not really
what our re-enactment is about."
The ICA, which has a history of provoking controversy with plays about the Moors
murders and art installations including soiled nappies, as well as a cosmetics display
featuring Sophie Dahl, is seeking a £7,000 grant from the London Arts Board for the
re-enactment. Almost a third of the ICA's £3m budget comes from public funds.
The insititute, based in the Mall near Admiralty Arch, initially sought funds from
Benetton, the clothes firm known for its confrontational adverts, but was turned down.
Trevor Phillips, former chairman of the London Arts Board and now chairman of the
London assembly, was born and raised in Guyana. "The ICA often comes up with weird,
whacky, what seem bizarre and bonkers ideas," he said. "Who knows about this one? But
sometimes some of these bizarre and bonkers things turn out to be good and interesting
performance art."
Charles Krause, a journalist then with the Washington Post who was first on the scene
after the mass suicide, said: "I would support their right to artistic expression, but
I would want to ask some tough questions about their purpose in doing it."
Rod Dickinson, the artist who is creating the Jonestown events for the ICA, argues
that his re-enactments "explore the paradoxes of Jones: he was not deranged but was
clearly very manipulative".
He has recruited about 200 people to play the followers of Jones by advertising on the
internet and in Fortean Times. "I see our re-creation of the Guyana death scene as
being like the CND die-ins in the early 1980s," he said, when anti-nuclear protesters
sometimes staged "fake" deaths by lying down in the streets.
Dickinson admitted there was no particular reason for re-enacting Jonestown now except
that "it was such an iconic event", which had been followed by similar mass deaths at
Waco, Texas, and recently in Uganda.
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