“A brilliant spark that will fly through the air and set the vapors of our insurrectionary imaginations alight.”
John Jordan, founder of Reclaim the Streets
The Orange Alternative was a 1980s-era underground protest movement in Poland. It used street happenings and absurdist provocations to ridicule the Communist regime and promote independent thinking. Their actions, enormously popular with students who often found Solidarity marches stiff and boring, included graffiti, distributing toilet paper (a consumer product in short supply at the time), and singing Stalinist hymns while holding hands around the orangutan cage at the Warsaw Zoo. Most memorably, they organized a march of 10,000 people in orange dwarf hats. “How can you treat a police officer seriously,” notes founder Waldemar Fydrych, “when he is asking you the question: ‘Why did you participate in an illegal meeting of dwarfs?’”