bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Reflections on the Chilean Theatre
Authors: Diaz Jorge
Published: April 2006

Generally, the person least equipped to talk about any Latin American cultural activity is a Latin American. Each of our countries is an isolated island arrogantly disparaging every other country. We are not a continent. We are an archipelago: nineteen cases of nationalism and of an astute reactionary politics which divides and exalts the small differences that separate us. Any Chilean or Argentine writer is perfectly familiar with the roster of productions in New York, Paris, and London. But he hasn't the slightest idea what has been written or staged in the last twenty years in Peru or Mexico. Any Latin American theatrical director receives publications in three languages, but if he wants to read a book on Colombian or Uruguayan theatre, it is likely that he can find it only in the library of a romance language department or theatre department of a university—in the U.S.
LeRoi Jones’ Slave Ship
Authors: Brecht Stefan
Published: April 2006

Some time ago, some Europeans, libertarian individualists in the post-Medieval manner, robbed this continent from the natives. In the system of robbery they then set up, 80 percent or more of their children are now the daily victims, laboring for subsistence wages which in dollars are sometimes quite magnificent. Symbol-permutators & machine-operators, servicing, in a tight network of functions, a scientific machine which generates war materials & status symbols but in the main just its own growth, they crazily fancy themselves rough & ready free enterprisers out for themselves & their little families. They are employees. They eat shit. Their lives mean nothing. The machine binds them in enmity to themselves, one another, & nature.

A civil war which a century ago sealed these Euro-Americans into their present slavery also initiated the dispersal among them of an Afro-American population, the descendants of savages imported as chattel-slaves. At the bottom of the heap, they have maintained their primitive (communitarian & naturalist) life-stance to this day.
Orland Furioso
Authors: Quadri Franco
Published: April 2006

Orlando Furioso is an environmental spectacle developed by director Luca Ronconi and writer Edoardo Sanguineti, based on the poem by Lodovico Ariosto. It was first performed last summer in Milan and toured throughout Italy and the continent. It most recently appeared at the Odin Teatret's spring seminar in Denmark. Performances in New York and a U.S. tour are tentatively scheduled for the fall. The photos which accompany this article are from a performance in Milan.
Guerrilla Theatre: May 1970
Authors: Schechner Richard
Published: April 2006

What was most striking (from the New York perspective) about the Maydays of 1970 was that students were organizing themselves to use facilities and resources, not to destroy them. The nihilism so powerfully present in the Columbia uprising of 1968, and always prominent in “revolutionary” rhetoric within the student movement, was transformed into something more fundamentally revolutionary. “Burn it down,” “trash it,” “shut it down” were not heard so often as “take it,” “use it,” “open it up,” “liberate it.” In either case the work is somewhat symbolic—that is, burnt buildings can be and usually are rebuilt and liberated buildings can be and usually are reoccupied. The establishment is not so weak that it will yield everything at once. But it is not so strong that it will last out the decade.
The Theatre of Sartre
Authors: Goldmann Lucien
Published: April 2006

Lucien Goldmann was one of the most important independent Marxist intellectuals in Western Europe during the past two decades. His interests and works—in philosophy, sociology, history, and aesthetics—were classically broad, insisting as he did on the indivisibility of social experience. He was probably the most prominent of the pupils of Georg Lukács and in turn helped form a whole generation of French and German humanist Marxists. The course he taught at the Ecole Practique des Hautes Etudes was a mecca for European and Third World students. His major work The Hidden God, on Pascal and Racine, remains a classic in the sociology and epistemology of literature; The Theory of the Novel is currently being translated by Random House. The study below continues the socio/structural line of inquiry followed in his work on Genet (T38) and Gombrowicz (T47).
The Chhau Dancers of Purulia
Authors: Arden John
Published: April 2006

Purulia is a barren and hilly district of West Bengal lying towards the west at the border of Bihar. It is covered at places by dense forests leaving small pockets here and there for agriculture. Rainfall is inadequate and life is extremely difficult. The people who live there are mostly aboriginals and semiaboriginals: they speak a western dialect of Bengali, generally known as Kurmali: as the people are known as Kurmis. Among this people there is prevalent a form of dance known as the Chhau dance … ritualistic in character, and performed ceremonially during the last days of the Bengali year on the occasion of the annual worship of the popular Sun-God…. Every performance starts with the invocation of Ganesha…

From an informatory leaflet published by the West Bengal Research Institute of Folk-Culture.
From an Indian Journal
Authors: Rainer Yvonne
Published: April 2006

Saw a folk opera last night. The form is called Chavittu Natakam, and this particular one is about St. George and the dragon. They give absolutely no attention to production,finesse. They miss cues, they look around “out of character,” the curtain keeps sticking, the two light men run up from the pit where they have been operating the spotlights seemingly at random and carry a banner across the stage, then scamper back down. A photographer walks right onto the stage to take his pictures. Mr. Vasudevan, the PR man for the Kathakali, sat next to me. The only thing that seemed to disturb him was when the lighting guys carried their banner wearing dhotis and Western shirts.

It seems more like European opera than Kathakali. It is done indoors in the auditorium of a music academy. Proscenium stage, but no consideration for the formality of a proscenium situation.
After Professionalism
Authors: Bandyopadhyay Samik
Published: April 2006

The staging of Dinabandu Mitra's Niladarpan, December 1872, marked the beginning of the modern professional Bengali theatre in Calcutta. Before this, performances of Bengali plays were given only for invited audiences in private theatres sponsored by the aristocracy. Jatra, the traditional theatre of Bengal, was of course available to everyone, but the rising middle classes of Calcutta, which had come to favor Western forms of art, regarded it as a corrupt and indecorous entertainment. Jatra, complained the middle-class audiences, followed neither the classical Sanskrit definitions of drama, nor the newly fashionable Western models. Jatra was two-thirds song; the dialogue, improvised during the performance by illiterate players, had no literary distinction; and, unlike the new drama represented by Niladarpan, Jatra used no scenery or permanent stage.

Performances of Niladarpan were open to anyone who could afford a ticket, an innovation in Bengali theatre which led to the opening of several other public theatres in the city, each with its company of players, giving regular performances.
Paterson Strike Pageant
Authors: McNamara Brooks , Ashley Jessie , Boyd F. Sumner , Dodge Mabel , Haywood William D. , Reed John , Sanger Margaret H.
Published: April 2006

On June 7, 1913, the Industrial Workers of the World presented the Paterson Strike Pageant at Madison Square Garden. It was a powerful and innovative use of the pageant form: On a huge stage, more than 200 feet long and capable of holding more than 1,000 performers, workers from silk factories at Paterson, New Jersey, recreated the central events of their strike, which was led by the IWW. The strike had begun in February. By June, two workers had been killed by random gunfire from police and private detectives hired by the mill owners. Nearly 1,500 strikers and sympathizers had been arrested. Among those arrested was the young journalist John Reed, who was later to write Ten Days That Shook the World.
Audience Participation
Authors: Schechner Richard
Published: April 2006

Many think that because participation is new to them, it is new to the theatre. These same people automatically participate in responsive readings at church, flag saluting, standing for the national anthem at sporting matches, cheering, and agreeing to umpire a few innings of sandlot baseball. In fact, participation in theatrical events is a very old, widespread practice. It has been limited in our culture for several hundred years for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is “professionalism.” Because trained, skilled performers have come to be expected, there are those who grow uneasy contemplating direct interaction between performers and the unskilled audience. The audience, by and large, expects a show to begin and end on time, to be “finished” and “packaged” like other products of the Ameriaan culture. Therefore, many in the theatre are loath to risk a process that may upend these anticipations, such as accepting a rough or long performance, or not being sure how something is going to work.
Liquid Theatre
Authors: Larsen Lance
Published: April 2006

Last night we put the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre to rest. It was two years and five months old and it went out very quietly. Too quietly. Just like real life, hmmmm?

Of course it will be back, here and there, now and then. We can bring it back, raise it out of its ashes full formed. But then it will be a re-creation of something done once truly without fiction or pretense. The audience last night saw the last real event. They also witnessed The Company Theatre saying goodbye to a life-style.

I am full of sentiment on the day after the death of my old friend.

But it was a party. It began with a blind walk through a maze and culminated in a kind of ecstasy when the audience and The Company in a giant huddle sent their massed voice through the ceiling to the sky with the high decibel music and danced and shouted and hugged their way to exhaustion.
Luca Ronconi's XX
Authors: Godard Colette
Published: April 2006

The play XX takes place entirely within a two-story house of twenty rooms. These rooms—ten on each floor—have been constructed around a large hall with stairs. They are connected to each other by doors, which lead into corridors and also from room-to-room. On the second floor, the rooms have windows and through these, as well as through the corridors, the spectator can see theatre seats, in this case those of the Odéon in Paris, dimly outlined in the shadows. Looking upward, one can see the decorative ceiling of the famous Paris theatre. Even before the performance begins, it is simply and clearly established that the spectator [for the purpose of this article, the author] is at the theatre, within theatrical space/time.

The play, however, does not begin at the same time for everyone. The relationship between actor and spectator is established on new ground.
1789
Authors: Kirby Victoria Nes
Published: April 2006

“The revolution must stop at the perfection of happiness.”

Saint-Just

1789, directed by Ariane Mnouchkine, is a production of the Théâtre du Soleil. It was created in Milan in 1970 at the invitation of the Piccolo Teatro and has been a tremendous popular success during 1970-1971 in Paris. The play is performed in a former cartridge factory and army barracks in the forest of Vincennes, on the eastern outskirts of Paris. Inside the large rectangular building the theatre company has divided the huge space into two parts, cleaned it up, and minimally painted it. One section has become a “lobby,” where tickets are picked up, some costume racks are stored and a photo display of former productions is mounted on panels.
A Work by Joan Jonas Organic Honey's Visual Telepathy
Authors: De Jong Constance
Published: April 2006

Joan Jonas uses video TV as an imagemaker and conjures herself. Working alone in the studio with the camera, the TV is her toy and her other. She plays with it and constitutes with it. As a form of play, the TV is a fixation. Fascinated by her image on the monitor, she locks into it. Playing with it, she explores the black and white image, relating it to objects and materials … her accumulated special effects. As a form of constituting, the TV supplies an other. The TV image is an opposite: oneself given back as an other. It suggests one who can become a series of identities, a complexity of associations, a series of images.

As she used it in the studio, the TV was a mediumistic device … a magic and an instructive tool. It allowed for exploration in privacy and for the making of a solo, video tape.
Theme and Variations
Authors: Israel Robert
Published: April 2006

On the stage is a table with a folding chair behind it. On the table are a bottle of wine, a wine glass, a bell, a hammer, a book, chalk and a small blackboard propped up so that the spectators can see it. The long booms of three microphones angle down over the table.

Between the audience and the stage, three television monitors rest high on a board stretching between two ladders. The spectators may easily watch the television sets and any activity at the table at the same time. Close to the television sets, in the center of the hall, is a television camera aimed at the stage. Below it, technicians sit at video tape recorders.

A man—Robert Israel, who conceived the piece—enters the stage. He picks up the hammer; his image appears on the first television screen.
Otomor Krejča's Use of the Mask
Authors: Burian Jarka
Published: April 2006

Otomar Krejča's productions employing masks have formed a small but striking part of his total oeuvre. A contemporary Czech director, Krejča (along with Josef Svoboda and Ladislav Vychodil, both designers, and Alfred Radok, a director) has drawn international recognition to the theatre of Czechoslovakia. Consistently seeking to expand the limits of his art, he has extended the parameters imposed by a socialist-realist policy in the arts that has been influencing theatre in Czechoslovakia for nearly twenty-five years. His productions have ranged from fresh ventilations of Chekhov (The Sea Gull, Three Sisters, Ivanov) to boldly staged Shakespearian revivals [Hamlet, Brussels, and Romeo and Juliet,, Prague) to work with new Czech dramatists such as František Hrubín, Josef Topol, Válav Havel, and Milan Kundera.
The Bread and Puppet Theatre: The Stations of the Cross
Authors: Towsen John
Published: April 2006

The Bread and Puppet Theatre was established in New York in 1962 by Peter Schumann, with the idea that “the theatre should be as basic as bread.” Using masks and a variety of puppets as their basic theatrical tools, the group has created its own distinctly innovative performing style. Their presentations often combine religious themes with a political message, with the war in Vietnam a particularly persistent topic. The troupe has done a large amount of traveling outside of New York, performing at GI coffeehouses and at various political demonstrations in the United States and Europe. Their desire to reach a popular audience that does not usually go to the theatre has led them to perform in the streets, parks and ghettos of cities. Bread and Puppet has always been a poor theatre, with unpaid actors and little or no admission charge.
Terayama's Jashumon
Authors: Merin Jennifer
Published: April 2006

Tenjo Sajiki, which is one of Japan's most famous experimental theatre troupes, was founded in 1967 by Shuji Terayama, the chief director and playwright of the troupe. During the Summer of 1971, they toured several European cities with their piece, Jashumon, written and directed by Terayama. The theme of the six-scene play concerns the tragic nature of the family as an institution, which is characteristic of traditional Japanese society. The plot revolves around the enormous emotional and economic interdependence of Yamataro, the son, and Ogin, his aging mother.

What follows is a description of the production of Jashumon, which was presented at the Nancy International Theatre Festival, Nancy, France, on April 28th and 29th, 1971. Shigeo Takenaga assisted Terayama with the direction of the piece. The sets were designed by Ryoichi Enomoto.
Meyerhold's Production of The Magnificent Cuckold
Authors: Worrall Nick
Published: April 2006

On the 20th of April 1922, having rehearsed with a scratch cast of actors for less than a week, Meyerhold mounted a production (his fifth version) of Ibsen's “Nora” (A Doll's House). The performance took place at the Actors’ Theatre in Moscow (formerly the “Nezlobin”) and the set consisted of old Nezlobin flats with their painted surfaces reversed, arranged in a fairly indiscriminate manner against the back and side walls of the stage.

A few days after this, on the 25th of April, this time with a fully trained cast of actors from his own Workshop, Meyerhold staged a production of the Belgian dramatist Fernand Crommelynck's lyric farce in three acts, The Magnificent Cuckold (Le Cocu Magnifique) with Constructivist decor by Liubov Popova.
Robert Wilson's Ka Mountain and Guardenia Terrace
Authors: Trilling Ossia
Published: April 2006

Robert Wilson first came to public notice when he staged The Life and Time of Sigmund Freud at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1970. He began to acquire his growing international reputation the following year when Deafman Glance transferred from Brooklyn to Paris, via the Nancy Festival. In Paris, he provoked as much adulation as dismissal, both public and critical. One convert to his theatrical style was Louis Aragon, who saw in Wilson the logical heir to the Surrealists. Aragon once belonged to the Surrealist movement but turned his back on it. It now seems he is willing to take it seriously once more, thanks to Wilson. If Wilson achieves nothing more, that alone would be worth the effort.

His Paris success at the Théâtre de Paris and a newly devised companion piece in a radically different manner called Prelude that was centrally staged in one of the auditoriums of the Espace Cardin earned Wilson an invitation to the Shiraz Festival in 1972 in Iran.
An Audience-Structure for: The Balcony
Authors: Zanotto Ilka Marinho
Published: April 2006

The Balcony opened at the Ruth Escobar Theatre in São Raulo, Brazil, on December 27, 1969; it was performed through 1971 and during most of 1972 and was seen by thousands of people. In this presentation of Jean Genet's play, which was directed by Victor Garcia and designed by Wladimir Pereira Cardoso, the theatre became the scenery itself—a sculpture inside of which the actors played, flying in the air.

Wladimir pereira Cardoso, 39, is a former student of Architecture and Fine Arts whose theatrical designs have won several national prizes (including one for The Monsters, directed by Jérôme Savary, who now leads The Grand Magic Circus). When Garcia arrived in Brazil to work for Ruth Escobar, he found Cardoso ready with sixteen sketches for the reformation of scenic space. They were deeply influenced by Walter Gropius’ conception of Total Theatre.
Chicano Theatre: El Festival de los Teatros Chicanos
Authors: Copelin David
Published: April 2006

Teatro Chicano is perhaps one of the best kept secrets in North American theatre today.

Jorge A. Huerta, Teatro de la Esperanza, Santa Barbara, California

The fourth annual Festival de los Teatros Chicanos was held in San Jose, California, on June 15-24, 1973. It was a gathering of teatros from the many different regions in the United States where Chicanos—persons of Mexican-American descent—have settled. There also were several theatre groups from Mexico itself.

Chicano theatre has roots in the ancient culture of the Mayans, but its contemporary awakening dates from 1965, when Luis Valdez first organized El Teatro Campesino, a theatre based in San Juan Bautista, that played in the fields for the huelgistas (strikers) of the United Farm Workers in support of the strikes and boycotts against table grapes and, more recently, iceberg lettuce.
Community Art as Life Process
Authors: Halprin Ann
Published: April 2006

How can I compress into a few printed pages the vitality, the excitement, the heartbreaks, frustrations, the wonder, joys, sadness, the miracles, and ecstasy that have characterized the “Journey into Body Consciousness” that many talented people who have been part of the Dancers’ Workshop have experienced together. Some of these people have gone on to pursue their own journeys, a few of us have remained to deepen and clarify, and new people have come in to reinforce and add their own intensities and lifestyles. There has been one thread along the way that has been the ongoing aspect of this journey: an attempt to find a process that unites personal growth with artistic growth, life and art, one aspect feeding off of the other and continuously coming together in new ways.
BIM-BOM and the Afanasjew Family Circus
Authors: Gerould Daniel
Published: April 2006

A number of amateur student theatres that expressed a longing for something other than drabness and conformity in art and life arose quite spontaneously in Warsaw, Cracow, and other principal Polish cities toward the end of the Stalinist period in Poland (1950-1955). They developed chiefly as a reaction against the boredom and the constraint of the official professional theatre. Of all these theatres, the group that developed in Gdansk, Bim-Bom and its later off-shoot, the Afanasjew Family Circus, was unique in its emphasis on the visual, in its combination of images from painting and sculpture with traditional forms of entertainment. Bim-Bom was essentially a nonliterary theatre that sought its inspiration both in the fine arts and in the popular arts of circus, carnival, street fair, music hall, and film. Its prime aim was to amuse. Bim-Bom was popular avant-garde.
A Return to Mayan and Aztec Roots: At the Chicano and Latin American Festival
Authors: Shank Theodore
Published: April 2006

For two weeks in late June and early July, 1974, Chicano and Latin-American theatre groups held a festival in Mexico City and at the Pyramids of Teotihuacan and Tajfn. It was unique as international festivals go, for unlike the festivals at Avignon, Nancy, Spoleto, Dubrovnik, Edinburgh, and Sao Paulo, the gathering in Mexico was not sponsored by an agency of the establishment as a tourist attraction. Instead, it was sponsored by two alternative theatre organizations having an affinity with indigenous culture on the two continents—the Chicano organization Teatro Nacional de Aztlan (TENAZ) and the Centro Libre de Experimentacion Teatral y Artistica (CLETA) of Mexico. The theme of the festival was “One Continent, One Culture, for a Free Theatre and for Liberation.” There is an assumption that the United States government has divided America and not merely by building the Panama Canal.
The Living Theatre's Money Tower
Authors: Ryan Paul Ryder
Published: April 2006

We have moved into the position now of where we are more concerned with being directly a part of the political activity of our time than we are with being a part of the theatrical activity of our time.” So said Julian Beck of The Living Theater. He was speaking in the somewhat derelict three-story brownstone near the Brooklyn Academy of Music that has been the home of the twenty-member collective for the last couple of years. Judith Malina, Beck's wife and co-founder of the theatre, explained that on January 1st of this year The Living had begun another rehearsal phase in its development of The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of some 150 plays to be performed not in theatres but throughout a city.

The Legacy of Cain is a unique theatrical/political piece. The Living collective has been working on the development of the cycle for four-and-a-half years, and it is estimated that it is at least three or four years from culmination.
Foreman's PAIN(T) and Vertical Mobility
Authors: Davy Kate
Published: April 2006

All of my art is concerned with the problem of consciousness, the structure of consciousness, and, specifically, with the problem of making art.

Richard Foreman

In order to deal with an artist's rehearsal techniques, it is necessary to discuss a particular system or process; in Richard Foreman's work process is important. Foreman has been producing his plays for five years and, although there have been changes, his esthetic and style have remained distinctively constant; partially because he is concerned with the problem and process of making art. He wants the spectator to notice not only the “art that is made” but also that “art is being made.”
Black Critics on Black Theatre in America
Authors: Jeyifous Abiodun
Published: April 2006

One of the highest priority items among those of us who are concerned with the history, theory, and criticism of Afro-American theatre is a redefinition of Afro-American theatre within the framework of Afro-American culture. We must not continue to accept a Euro-American concept of what constitutes a good play or a bad play, how an audience ought to behave, and so on. If we do, we will never even begin to discover the vast and beautiful and exciting history of our own theatre.

Carlton W. Molette, 1970

Until 1965, when Imamu Amiri Baraka and others founded The Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, there was not a black theatre but an “American theatre of Negro participation” (the phrase is Clayton Riley’s, I think). The Negro Digest’s commemoration of black theatre in a 1968 issue was titled “Black Theatre: From Shakespeare to LeRoi Jones.” It contained a photographic galaxy of the “stars” of black theatre: actors, actresses, and other performers predominated over playwrights and directors. The point, of course, is that the major playwrights, producers, and directors in this black theatre were white. In practically all the histories of black theatre (except Loften Mitchell’s Black Drama), one finds that the black actors and performers played merely supporting roles to the true white heroes of this black theatre.
Japanese Political Theatre in Context
Authors: Goodman David
Published: April 2006

The political character of Theatre Center 68/71, a Japanese troupe based in Tokyo, is best understood as part of the historical space within which it operates. This space may be delineated in terms of three coordinates: the murderous disunity of the Japanese New Left, the popular evasion of historical accountability facilitated by the “split-level” nature of Japanese historical consciousness, and the need to enunciate revolution as a redemption of history, as a plausible goal in the Japanese intellectual and linguistic context.

At approximately six o'clock on the morning of March 14, a male caller identifying himself only as a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League (Kakumaru) telephoned the Police Press Club in Tokyo. “This morning at 3:22 we torpedoed Chūkaku's Honda at an apartment in Higashi Kawaguchi. This is in repayment for an attack on our comrade Namba Tsuyoshi and is intended to show what happens to people like Chūkaku, who become the willing pawns of bourgeois power.”
The Shaliko Company's: The Measures Taken
Authors: Vicentini Claudio
Published: April 2006

“And what baseness would you not commit could you rid the world of all baseness?”

-Brecht.

For the Shaliko Company, rehearsals for The Measures Taken, which began in January, 1974, became a way of “studying the paradoxes of radical commitment.” Leonard Shapiro, the director, commented that “Patty Hearst was kidnapped at about the same time we started to work on the play, and that certainly influenced the way we worked at it.” The Brechtian Lehrstück, he felt, was directly related to the problem of political terrorism. “In 1930,” Shapiro explained, “everything was falling apart in Germany. The need to pull together behind the Communist Party seemed like the only thing that could have saved the country from Hitler.” The problem illustrated by the play about the political necessity of killing a comrade was at that time related to the problem of obedience to the party.
The San Francisco Mime Troupe's: The Mother
Authors: Gordon Mel
Published: April 2006

To me The Mother is one of Brecht's worst plays, sentimental and party-dogmatic. Later on in his career, I tell them [Denny Stevens and Steve Friedman of the Mime Troupe], he [Brecht] learned how to do these things much better, how to sink dialectic into the human situation…. And when I insist on the play's being a lesser work, I get a very cold smile from Steve: “We disagree entirely.”

Review by Michael Feingold in the Village Voice (2 December 1974)

Written in 1930-1931 after a Party directive to bring more women into the various German Communist organizations and first produced in January, 1932, Brecht's adaptation of the well-known Maxim Gorky novel, The Mother, was the subject of an intense esthetic and political debate among theatre critics and left-based theatre workers.
Experiments in the Art of the Dance
Authors: Foregger Nikolai
Published: April 2006

The contemporary era is a working era. Every day, every hour—a new thrust forward, a new blow at the dying order. Simplicity, precision, expediency—these are the requirements called for in works of art. “I create-as the bird sings”; “I am above all and create what my leg desires”; “Art is accidental”; “Art for art's sake,” are phrases that now have been forgotten. The muses have become production workers and have dispersed to their respective trade unions. They meet not on Olympus but at the All Union Central Council of Trade Unions (VTSPS), and are summoned not by Apollo but by Tomski.

The dance fulfills certain functions, strengthens the basics for self-discipline in the masses, provides practice for the learning and mastery of rhythm (mass dances), which is so necessary in all labor processes. It can be said that the work of the Scientific Organization of Labor (NOT) is the inculcation of the dancing instinct in industrial manufacturing.
The N.Y. Apparition Theatre of Ken Jacob
Authors: Pam Dorothy S.
Published: April 2006

Ken Jacobs’ two-and-three-dimensional shadow play, “ ‘Slow Is Beauty’—Rodin,” was performed over several weekends in the fall of 1974 in a loft at the Idea Warehouse on Reade Street in New York City. The central aim of Jacobs is to make “depth recognition an esthetic event as.is done in dance and sculpture, to tune the audience into the sensuality of depth intervals.”

The traditional shadow play is done by backlighting puppets, hands, or actors who perform behind a translucent screen, curtain, or panel. The effect is flat and two-dimensional. To achieve a three-dimensional effect, Jacobs uses two opposingly polarized sources of light, each of which causes the object before it to cast a shadow. The audience thus sees two separate shadows, which may overlap to some extent, for one object. When the viewer puts on a pair of polarized glasses with eyepieces of opposing polarities, he sees only one image with each eye.
Zen and the Actor
Authors: Feldshuh David
Published: April 2006

Zen has been called “the religion of no religion.” It is a branch of Buddhism, both having originated in a single event: the enlightenment of Guatama Siddhartha who, after meditating for six years, is said to have awakened, as if from a dream, to become The Enlightened One, the Buddha. It is significant that the seed of Zen Buddhism was neither a set of scriptures nor a messianic creed, but the dedication of a single man to gain greater perception into his own nature and the nature of reality through meditation. The practice of meditation is at the heart of Zen, and the word “Zen,” derived from the Chinese “Ch'uan,” means “meditation.” Predicated on practice rather than belief, without sacred scriptures, fixed canon, or Divine being, Zen is “no religion.” It is rather a type of training intended to promote a special presence, a particular quality of consciousness with which to meet the world.
The Visual Script: Theory and Techniques
Authors: Cole David
Published: April 2006

Over the past twenty years there have been a number of scattered but promising experiments with visual scripts. (By “visual script” I mean a non-representational graphic pattern which an actor is handed and asked to find some way of performing.) In his 1958-9 Graphis project (T30), Dick Higgins provided actors with “scripts” that consisted of words spread out irregularly over a page with lines drawn between them. Performing the script was defined as physicalizing the process of moving from one word to another over the routes of semantic association suggested by the connecting lines. (For example, getting from “lock” to “locksmith” entailed a detour through “macaroni”….) More recently, in 1971, the Anna Halprin Company tried using a “graphic score” devised by John Muto as the basis for a piece called Animal Ritual (T59).
E.F. Burian: D34–D41
Authors: Burian Jarka M.
Published: April 2006

Emil Frantisek Burian. who was to become the leading avant-garde director in the Czech theatre of the 1930s, was born in 1904 (d. 1959), the son of Emil Burian, a leading baritone of Prague's National Theatre Opera, and his wife Vlasta (née Hatláková), a teacher of singing. His uncle was Karel Burian, a concert tenor. The musical environment established by his family was sustained in Burian's musical education: he graduated from the Prague Conservatory and subsequently completed master's study in composition in Prague under the Czech composer J. B. Foerster. Burian eventually composed seven operas, numerous ballets and chamber works, and most of the music for his theatre productions.

If the roots of Burian's general creativity may be found in music, the roots of his philosophy may be found in Marxism: while still a student, in 1923, Burian became a member of the Czech Communist party.
El Teatro de la Esperanza: Keeping in Touch with the People
Authors: Huerta Jorge A.
Published: April 2006

El Teatro de la Esperanza began as a student group composed of Chicanos attending the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1969. Then known as Teatro Mecha, the Teatro left the ranks of a student organization, called M.E.Ch.A., in order to get more fully involved in Santa Barbara's Chicano community, in the summer of 1971. This move proved to be an asset for both the community and the Teatro, for the group took part in the acquisition and remodeling of a 22,000 square foot warehouse which soon became La Casa de la Raza (The House of the People).

Prior to 1965, there was little unity of sociopolitical direction among Chicanos and Mexicans in the United States, and the Casa was a symbol of the effort to address the problems of this bilingual minority. The Casa maintains a line of communication with the barrio by offering over thirty programs ranging from a free health clinic to an office of information for undocumented workers, otherwise known as illegal aliens.
…I Thought I was Hallucinating
Authors: Wilson Robert
Published: April 2006

I began writing I was sitting on my patio this guy appeared I thought I was hallucinating a few days after the final performance of Einstein on the Beach in November of 1976.

I wrote a few pages of dialog at a time in a large notebook with blank pages that I often write and draw in when working on a piece. The language I wrote was more a reflection of the way we think than of the way we normally speak. My head became like a TV, switching from thought to thought (and in writing from phrase to phrase) like flipping a dial from channel to channel.

I write when I am alone and work best when there are no interruptions. I sometimes keep a television on at low volume and incorporate phrases I hear into my text, which I write quickly, usually leaving it untouched and in its original order once the words are on the page. Every few days I had a few pages of writing typed up.
The Omer Festival of Kibbutz Ramat Yochanan [Israel]
Authors: Cherniack-Tzuriel Abba
Published: April 2006

In the years 1943-1944, when the German High Command, despite alarming losses on all fronts, suddenly began to divert, precious fuel supplies, men, building material, and transportation facilities for the mass extermination of over six million European Jews; when, independent of any Nazi blueprints, vicious pogroms broke out everywhere in German-occupied Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; when the British government found itself spending millions of pounds patrolling the Eastern Mediterranean, preventing escaping Jews from reaching sanctuary in Palestine; when the United States broke off secret negotiations with the Hungarian government and the Swiss Red Cross to save 100,000 Jewish children, who later perished; in the years 1943-1944, thought to be the most disasterous, by many historians, in the Jews’ nearly four-thousand-year-old history, an ancient community performance was being recreated in a small kibbutz in Mandate Palestine.
Contemporary Italian Theatre
Authors: Prosperi Mario
Published: April 2006

What is particularly Italian about the theatre that is produced in Italy? What characteristics make it different—recognizable—to the foreign spectator?

After the war, Italian theatre was scarcely significant for its innovations. An effort to restore tradition in theatre absorbed most creative energies. Three outstanding influences belong to this period. The first is that of the Academy of Dramatic Arts, founded in 1936 by Silvio D'Amico with the purpose of raising the cultural level of Italian theatre. The Academy concentrated on the critical analysis of texts. Orazio Costa and his students, Luigi Squarzina and Vittorio Gassman, were the main exponents of this concern for tradition. The institution was a profound influence on the generation of postwar actors.

The second influence was that of foreign theatre. After the war, there was a consumer attitude toward French, English and American “hit shows.”
Giuliano Vasilicò's PROUST, with Some Antecedents
Authors: Prosperi Mario
Published: April 2006

Giuliano Vasilicò began his theatrical career in 1968 when he returned to Italy from Sweden, where he had spent eight years studying literature and the arts, though without any specific concern for the theatre. His sister, Lucia Vasilicò, had been working in Rome as an actress in experimental theatre and films with, among others, Fellini and Warhol. With her and Ingrid Enbom, who had come with him from Sweden, he began to articulate his ideas and formulate plans for theatrical activity. He and Enbom joined Giancarlo Nanni's group as actors in the production of Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode. Their association with Nanni, however, lasted only a few months. Vasilicò was impatient to verify his own ability as a playwright.

He subsequently staged two of his own plays: Psychopolitical Mission in 1969 and Occupation in 1970.
Anthropological Analysis: Before and After Andy Warhol's Last Love
Authors: Schechner Richard
Published: April 2006

According to Squat, the downstairs stage of Andy Warhol's Last Love is Warhol's Factory: the place he used to manufacture his art-objects. And upstairs the Blue Room, where the first part of “Warhol” is staged, is the actual living space of Eva Buchmüller and Istvan Balint. The street is 23rd Street, a theatrical environment only by virtue of the casement glass window separating Factory from street. As in Pig, Child, Fire!,the street is used in the show both randomly and by careful design. Randomly as passersby (and a few regulars, or knowing ones, like me) stop to see the same movie those in the Factory are seeing (the screen is transparent) or crowd in around the glass door to glimpse Kathleen Kendel, the naked witch, being interviewed in the Factory by (a) Warhol (lookalike).
Jungian Analysis
Authors: Mueller Carl R.
Published: April 2006

There are at least two ways of approaching a literary work of art from the standpoint of psychology: first, by simply analyzing the characters through their words and actions as real people; and second, by treating the work as a dream turned inside out, in which each character is a facet, or refraction, of the dreamer's personality. The virtue of the second approach is that it objectifies the action to the degree that it is easier to treat the problem on a social rather than on an exclusively personal level. Outside of therapeutic analysis the aim of a psychological approach to art should not be to read the mind of the artist, but to read the work of art as a societal dream; not as personal pathology, but as social pathology.

The second approach is also more profitable in certain works that are manifestly dream-oriented on a societal level—such works, for example, as Faust II, Ibsen's late plays, Strindberg's expressionist works, and Albee's Tiny Alice.
The Bird and The Dirt, Inc.
Authors: Rosen Carol
Published: April 2006

In the tradition of Artaud's commitment to a theatre “whose only value is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger,” and in the tradition, too, of his complaint that “no matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign,” thrives an arts collaborative whose works of “performance art” cross industrial castoffs of urban technology (such as tin can poptops, recycled Yellow Pages, vinyl, spark plugs, and barbed wire) with ceremonies and icons now lost to secular culture (images drawn from Indian, African, and Catholic rituals, including body paint, masks, feathers, animal sacrifices, skeletal relics, and crucifixes). The group's purpose is articulated time and again by its members as an attempt to create, in the words of Mary Klaus, its newest member, “a magic moment.”
Spirit Cult Festivals in South Kanara
Authors: Ashton Martha Bush
Published: April 2006

On the southwest coast of India, between the mountain rangeof the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, lies the South Kanara District of Karnataka State. Here, paddy fields and plantations of palm, mango, cashew and banana alternate with patches of thick jungle forest. In this lush setting, devotees of nearly three hundred cults meet in nightlong sessions offering worship to locally unique spirit deities. Some of these spirits are believed to have been sent to earth by Hindu Gods; others are considered the souls of persons who long ago died violent and untimely deaths. Yet others are recent ancestors troubling their descendants. As spirits have benevolent and malevolent aspects and are believed to possess power over human health, fertility and fortune and over the land and cattle, they must be ritually propitiated.

Each spirit has its own form, mythic history, special powers and propitiatory requirements. Therefore the worship of each spirit differs somewhat from that of all others.
David Gordon's What Happened
Authors: Barr Burt
Published: April 2006

David Gordon's dance piece, What Happened, opened at the American Theatre Lab, in September, 1978.

The stage is well-lighted when seven women enter. Some of the women are wearing white walking shorts with kneesocks, others are in white pants, and all are wearing white tops. Across the width and depth of the stage dancers take random positions, paces away from one another. They face the audience, looking straight ahead, arms at their sides—a group of women simply being themselves.

A car being started is heard; the car moves away, then there is a crash, followed by police and ambulance sirens. When the sound of sirens dies in the distance, the women begin speaking and moving, the stage is awash in words and gestures.

Over the sweeping view of the stage the dancers turn and pivot, some take steps, all of them talk, gesture, but none leave the given spheres in which they began.
The Theatre of Jack Smith
Authors: Hoberman J.
Published: April 2006

From the mid-1960's on, Jack Smith—best-known as the director of Flaming Creatures (1962-63), a key work In the American avant-garde film—has astonished New York audiences with a series of highly influential performance pieces. Although Smith's theatre, which is even more fugitive and underground than his film production, has attracted little critical writing, it has made itself felt in the work of artists as otherwise disparate as Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. At the same time, Smith's refusal to separate his persona from his art presaged the gallery-based “performance artists” of the mid-1970's. His presentations include the ongoing slide-show (known variously as Spiritual Oasis of Lucky Landlord Paradise, Fear Ritual of Shark Museum, Horror of the Rented World), which has in some ways superceded his 16mm film work, and a number of individual plays. Both modes are original and important contributions to American art.
Pierrot Assassin of His Wife
Authors: Margueritte Paul
Published: April 2006

Head and hands, of plaster white, protrude from a white cloak, lownecked and pleated, with huge buttons. The head, eyes, and lips are clearly marked in black and red: in this fashion the look in the right eye—the other eye is closed—and the laugh puckering a single corner of the mouth acquire animation. Forehead enlarged by a white headband which is gripped by a second band—the traditional one—in black velvet. The hands, also of plaster, and the wrists, beneath the ample and flowing sleeve, have narrow cuffs. Broad trousers which disclose the Instep and shoes with silver buckles.

N.B. Pierrot seems to speak?—Pure literary fictionl—Pierrot is mute, and this drama, from start to finish, mimed.

Curtain

The room with its paneling of dark old oak is dim and gloomy; against the wall, here a wardrobe, there a dresser; a chair to the right, a table to the left, bottles on the floor, their necks broken.
The C.C.C. Murder Mystery
Authors: Kreizenbeck Alan
Published: April 2006

It is six o'clock on a spring day in rural Virginia. The year is 1938, and in a small C.C.C. camp located near Charlottesville the enrollees are just finishing their evening meal. (The C.C.C—Civilian Conservation Corps—was the relief agency created in 1933 to employ jobless young men on land and forest reclamation projects.) Talk of the day's work is interrupted by a large black automobile that roars to a stop in front of the mess hall.

A uniformed man jumps from the car, rushes into the hall, and, flashing a sheriff's badge, demands to see the camp commander. The two men move to a corner of the room where they engage in an animated conversation. Everyone else is silent, straining to hear what is being said. The consultation ends, and the sheriff pounds on the nearest table for attention.
Sign Functioning in Performance
Authors: Nadin Mihai
Published: April 2006

Between May 12,1664 and March 15,1669, there took place one of those battles of the theatre without the understanding of which it would be difficult to correctly evaluate the force of the theatre, its ability to adapt, and the limits of its evolution. The premiere of L'lmposteur—written by Molière who, after a none too easy career, was finally being spoiled by the muses and his king (without whom the contribution of the muses would have had less effect)—resulted in the banning of the play and a series of events that finally led to royal permission granting that a completed text be published and presented onstage, a permission under whose grace we still find ourselves. Between the possible premiere and the version considered acceptable, the text was changed several times, proposing even more variants for performance.
Joan Holden and the San Francisco Mime Troupe
Authors: Cohn Ruby
Published: April 2006

At 10:00 a.m. a red metrovan truck rolls up to a Bay Area park. Along its side white letters blare “San Francisco Mime Troupe.” Within a few minutes two old cars park near the truck, and 10 people alight from the vehicles. They confer swiftly before unburdening the truck of collapsible platform, costume rack and prop boxes on wheels. One of the people points to the sky, designating the path of the afternoon sun; the stage must be positioned with the sun behind the audience. Practiced hands then set the small platform on jacks, elevate the stage frame with its narrow curtain, and underpin the whole. Casual conversation punctuates the hard physical labor. By noon the small performance space is ready, and the Mime Troupe actors select their several costumes for the afternoon's play.