Matthew Hart: Mattyboy

by Bruce Schimmel

Matthew Hart, aka Mattyboy, is a veteran street performer and social activist, but he admits he's tired of talking about the unplanned political performance which made his name nationally.

Hart, 31, doesn't care to talk about the infamous raid on his street theater company before the Republican Convention in the summer of 2000.

Authorities purportedly had gotten wind that Hart's group, Spiral Q, was going to stage a demonstration. And so they locked up his shop, with all the paraphernalia of protest sequestered inside. But Hart is happy to talk about another run-in with Philadelphia's finest in which he received his street name, Mattyboy.

This was in 1994, when the first George Bush came to town. During a demonstration on Broad Street, Hart says he found himself being "stomped" by police, trapped under a barrage of boots.

Suddenly another demonstrator, a woman named Hex, called out a name she apparently made up on the spot: "Mattyboy," she screamed, and in an eye blink, Hart says he was standing upright and free.

It was inexplicable, magic, says Mattyboy, who says he believes in the power of performance to liberate mean streets from fear and oppression. He's seen it in his own life.

As a young gay man growing up in Montgomery County, Hart says he was beaten up several times. He feared the streets and so learned street theater as a way "to challenge myself to feel safe."

After studying urban studies and cultural anthropology at Temple, Hart founded Spiral Q in 1995. The Mantua-based company works with community groups to create street pageants, whose purpose is to reclaim neighborhoods threatened by crime and impoverished by apathy.

"I make imperfect theater for an imperfect world," says Hart. Spiral Q makes theater that is above all accessible, created by participants for their particular time and place.

"The parades we build are not for the spectators, [they're] for the participants," says Hart.

A parade challenges the way people see the everyday architecture of their neighborhoods, he says, recalling one recent performance in Tioga.

To celebrate the return of blue herons to the area, the group built giant heron puppets. Hart recounts seeing the look of awe in the eyes of a 9-year-old.

"It was a look that said, ŒWow, this is my parade, my neighborhood, my art, my block.'"

Such a street performance, he says, is "a form of urban arts democracy that can transform neighborhoods, that can name a future that is owned together."

Download an extended interview with Matthew Hart at www.schimmel.com/hart_matthew.mp3.