The Women's Street Theater: This Is a Cranky...or Rather, It CAN Be a Cranky

San Francisco: People's Press, 1970. Tabloid format printed in color on newsprint, folds out to eight 22" x 16" pages. Closed tear at horizontal fold line; otherwise, very good. An extraordinary performance publication designed to be disassembled and transformed into a moving image work.

The cranky is "a paper movie or cartoon sequence inside a simple wooden frame. The moving paper roll unwinds (is cranked) onto a take-up real, enabling you to tell a story with a minimum number of words and maximum number of strong images." This work tells the story of women's oppression from pre-history to the imprisonment of Angela Davis. An effective and engaging form of street theater, suggested participants include a narrator, a cranker, and two to six noisemakers as a chorus or orchestra. Illustrations and instructions are included for the cranking process, as well as 54 suggested sound cues.

The cranky was developed by the San Francisco Women's Street Theater; other women's street theater groups such as the It's All Right to be Woman Theatre adapted the work for consciousness raising performances in the years following (Flannery, Feminist Literacies, 155).

Since the publication was produced to be disassembled, intact copies remain rare. A remarkable document of feminist performance history.