Creative Resistance
What's yours?
According to the recent 50501 resistance email:
Twenty-Two Dancers. Twenty-Three Officers.
Creative resistance is becoming harder to dismiss which is why it’s being shut down more often.
There is a moment in movements when protest stops being as reactive and starts becoming something that touches us emotionally. Something that doesn’t just express anger but communicates it with a precision that forces people to pay attention. We are in that moment.
On President’s Day, a group called First Amendment Troop staged a choreographed performance on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The dancers, twenty-two of them, drawn from the casts of Hamilton, MJ: The Musical, Wicked, and former Kennedy Center performers, moved through a piece that dramatized the final moments of Renée Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, two people killed by ICE agents in Minneapolis. Twenty-two dancers for the twenty-two days between their deaths. The piece was directed by Bryan Buckley, a two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker, and choreographed by Matthew Steffens, whose credits include multiple Tony Award-nominated productions. (Playbill) The performance was set to music that included songs by Rhiannon Giddens, one of many artists who have cancelled their engagements at the Kennedy Center after significant leadership changes reshaped its board and programming direction.
The Lincoln Memorial performance was peaceful, and it played in full….
Then the dancers moved to the Kennedy Center. They made it partway into the routine before twenty-three officers stopped them, one more officer than dancer, saying they were not allowed on federal property.
The White House Communications Director, Steven Cheung, responded on social media by calling the memorial for two killed Americans “weak, corny, and lame” and describing it as “total loser and simp behavior.”
The Kennedy Center, which President Trump announced in February 2026 will close for approximately two years beginning July 4, 2026, for major renovations (PBS/AP) after a wave of artist cancellations and declining ticket sales, became the backdrop to an image the administration did not want: federal officers outnumbering dancers at a memorial for people killed by federal agents.
That’s what effective creative resistance does. It created an image that could not be unseen and a contrast that could not be explained away. Creative resistance works.
What Do You Do, and Can You Amplify It?
I write. Hence, this Substack.
I’m a lousy singer, but I love music, so I’m going to a Resistance Singing training here in NYC. I hear these groups are popping up everywhere. You can find one.
If you’re an artist, what art can you make, and then make it BIG—so it is seen by large groups of people? If you have a front lawn, display it for passersby.
If you’re a business person, who do you know? Can you organize others in your business into some kind of lobbying movement affecting big organizations that lay people don’t even know about?
Are you a knitter? Attorney and political commentator Joyce Vance, who spends a lot of time in airports and knits, says there is a movement of knitters working on red hats—emulating an anti-Nazi wearing of red hats in Norway—for protestors. Produce them with your knitting friends and distribute them at protests.
If you’re a teacher, a scientist, a medical professional, you are probably a member of huge organizations—unions, professional groups, conference circuits. Is there something you can do with them to affect political change?
Are you part of any kind of community that does something. Can you do it larger and more publicly?
For creative resistance, we need to first think creatively. And then do it as BIG AS IT CAN BE.
And listen to Michael Popok/Legal AF’s interview with four attorneys general to get a boost. If nothing else, listen to the last 2.5 minutes of this wonderful panel:
Betsy Robinson is an editor, fiction writer, journalist, and playwright (also a former actor). She has written about books for Publishers Weekly, Lithub, Oh Reader, and many other publications. Her novels Cats on a Pole and The Spectators were published by Kano Press in 2024. She writes funny stories about flawed people and examines our herd culture. www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com.
Yes, to this. Great post.