bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Festival Mondial du Theatre
Authors: Kirby Victoria Nes
Published: April 2006

Nancy, a historic city of 150,000 inhabitants, lies near the Meurthe River in the Northeast corner of France. One hundred and ninety miles from Paris and ninetythree from Strasbourg, Nancy is the capital and cultural, commercial, and university center of Lorraine.

Nancy became a model of eighteenth-century urban planning under Stanislas I, the last duke of Lorraine. The former king of Poland, Stanislas was given the dukedom in 1737 after his daughter married Louis XV of France. Under his patronage, Nancy was transformed into a city of wide avenues, imposing squares, a large public park, and many buildings that were considered by many to be among the finest architectural accomplishments of the eighteenth century. Nancy's center is still Place Stanislas, which contains a statue of its favorite duke.
The Theory and Practice of Orientation Therapy
Authors: Wepner Franklyn
Published: April 2006

If we examine environmental theatre workshops from a viewpoint outside of the magical world of the theatre, they appear to be a form of social group work. People congregate regularly under the supervision of a group leader, and they subject themselves to certain processes that elicit great expenditures of energy on activities which apparently are devoid of specific practical results. In contrast to most human institutions of these hyperspecialized times, environmental theatre workshops are devoted to experiencing the wholeness of human life and reflecting this experience in art. In this article I examine the technology of environmental theatre in terms of basic biological and social events that occur at these sessions. I am concerned especially with the flow of energies between the perceptual and motor worlds of the performer as he achieves a high degree of interaction with other performers and with his environment.
The Shamanistic Origins of Popular Entertainments
Authors: Kirby E. T.
Published: April 2006

A special category of theatrical activity includes types of performance that appear to be unrelated, or only indirectly related, to each other and to drama proper. Ropewalking, conjuring, juggling, sword-swallowing, and other such acts associated with the wandering mountebank, the fairground, circus ring, side-show, and music hall represent particularized skills developed as a means of popular entertainment. One link with drama is an origin of clowning and comic performance amid activity of this type. Tumblers figure prominently in the Chinese theatre, and the Italiancommedia dell'artewas probably created by acrobats. The techniques of the stage magician contributed to the illusionism of nineteenth-century drama, and trained animal acts were employed in its hippodrome-like spectacle. Performances of this kind, such as acrobatics or magic acts, when practiced as popular entertainments, seem to relate to the esthetics of drama only through the use of skill and through a common theatricality; they seem independent of considerations of narrative form or of the representation or enactment of another reality.
Eisenstein's Wiseman
Authors: Gerould Daniel
Published: April 2006

Throughout the first decade of its existence, Soviet theatre sought inspiration and new directions in the popular arts. In the period after the Revolution, the most innovative Russian directors and writers, by turning to the clowning and novelty acts of circus and music hall attempted a complete break with the traditions of bourgeois drama—its plotting, psychology, and domestic themes—in order to create a vital new political and propagandistic theatre with, they hoped, broad appeal to the masses.

The painter Yuri Annenkov, in his version of Tolstoy's The First Distiller at the Hermitage Theatre, Petrograd, in 1919, added clowns and variety acts, made hell into a circus, and turned the devils into acrobats. Vladimir Mayakovsky collaborated with the professional clown Vitaly Lazarenko in staging his circus scenario The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle (See T-57) at the Second State Circus in Moscow.
Political Theatre as Popular Entertainment: The San Francisco Mime Troupe
Authors: Shank Theodore
Published: April 2006

In the exuberance of revolutionary zeal, it is natural that certain political theatre groups should turn to forms of entertainment associated with fun, with the common man, with people in general regardless of social, economic, or educational status, in contrast with the traditional aristocratic forms that have “artistic” pretensions and tend to be more contemplative than energetic. It is also predictable that such groups should shun ballet, opera, the symphony, and literary theatre, and use instead techniques from commedia dell'arte, circus, puppet shows, music hall, vaudeville, parades, magicians, carnival side shows, buskers, brass bands, comic strips, striptease, melodrama, minstrel shows, and other means of exhilarating celebration.

Since the present seemed to hold no answers, it was inevitable that the search by these groups for political theatre forms would turn to the past, a past which, through education and television, had become more accessible than ever before. Such breaks with the present served another purpose as well—they demonstrated a disassociation with the Establishment and its theatre.
Performance in Polish Villages
Authors: Young Marjorie
Published: April 2006

An unusually rich variety of forms of performance linked to seasonal, religious, and rural celebrations still survive in certain Polish villages, especially in the southern region. These performances are not staged for tourists as “folk theater” but are part of an authentic, on-going peasant tradition. They survive in surprising strength. Their existence does not seem to be well known among Poland's urban populace, perhaps due in part to the centuries-old schism between peasant and non-peasant classes in Polish culture.

Two examples of such performance are the King Herod Play, a short folk piece about the fall of King Herod performed by village school boys from door to door on Christmas Eve, and the mountain “Vagabonds”—groups of miners and farmers who dress up as gypsies, goats, horses, shepherds, Jews, Death, clowns, old men, devils and so forth, and run rhythmically through their village at New Year's, pausing occasionally to engage onlookers in improvised scenes, to play pranks, and to act out pantomime scenarios of probably pre-Christian origin.

The people involved in these events do not label their activity “theatre.” Nor do they use a theatre vocabulary to describe what they do.
The Teatro Campesino
Authors: Morton Carlos
Published: April 2006

Among the ancient Aztecs and Mayans, the sign of the serpent was often one of rebirth and transfiguration. So it is with the Mexican and Chicano of today—heirs of those moss-covered symbols etched on stone—who are using La Serpiente to signify change. Like the serpent that sheds its old skin, The Teatro Campesino of San Juan Bautista, California, is growing into a new way of life that revolves around the spiritual and material reconquest of their Indian origins.

Luis Valdez and his gente (people) have expanded into El Centro CampesinoCultural (Farmworkers Cultural Center), which is situated on forty acres of land. The center includes, besides the Teatro, facilities for creating music, publications, paintings, videotapes, and films. It also will house the more than thirty members (ranging in age from a year to thirty-four) of the Teatro as well as sheep, cows, chickens, and horses.
Charles Ludlam's Ridiculous Theatrical Co.
Authors: Argelander Ronald
Published: April 2006

When I was in conventional theatre, even when I was going to school, people thought my acting was too broad, too pasty.So I had to create a theatre where I could exist.I had to create, for my own survival,a world where I could take advantage of my talents.

Charles Ludlam

In 1967, Charles Ludlam organized the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, patterning it after modern dance companies where composer and choreographer perform with the group. It was an actors’ company, primarily composed of untrained actors, non-actors, and filmmakers. Most had experience working in “underground“ films, but few had any professional training. Ludlam was the only one of the group with extensive schooling and experience in acting, directing, and playwriting.
Dada Berlin
Authors: Gordon Mel
Published: April 2006

During recitals of simultaneous poetry of the most incomprehensible kind, we attacked the art-loving, Boulevard public with toy guns, toilet paper, false beards, and the poetry of Wolfgang Goethe and Rudolf Presber … Under the motto “Art is shit!”, the Dadas began their demolition … (of bourgeois culture).

Erwin Piscator

In the years 1918, 1919, and 1920, the Berlin Dada movement, mounting less than thirty productions, exerted a formidable, if indirect, influence over the development of the German theatre. This influence would later lead to the dismantling of Expressionism as the dominant theatrical force in Central Europe. Retooling the theories and performance techniques that they inherited from the Futurists and the Zurich Dadas to their own specifications, the Berlin Dadas introduced the use of pure—onomatopoetic or vowel—sound and abstract movement, improvisation, simultaneous and illogical actions, verbal and physical assault on the spectator, antiillusionist scenic design, and the incorporation of popular entertainments, such as cabaret acts and cinema, into German performance.
Feminist Criticism
Authors: Lamb Margaret
Published: April 2006

In a review for Ms. (December 1973), the poet Yvonne contrasted the musical Raisin with Lorraine Hansberry's original play, in which the

Three Younger women formed the most complex, thoroughly honest portrait of the archetypal black woman to have appeared on the American stage…. The spine of Hansberry's original plot was provocative and clear-cut. It was the conflict between life and the profit motive, a conflict in which a black man, Walter Lee Younger (Mama's son, Ruth's husband, Beneatha's brother), having chosen money as his god, becomes his family's moral antagonist. In the new musical, the dramatic focus is switched from the women to the man. The total production—script, music, lyrics, direction, choreography, sets—is created by everybody but the black woman. The women's most intense speeches are cut, their stage movements made awkward and their personalities made shallow or reversed. Many of their lines and dramatic gestures, particularly those showing warmth and depth, are given to Walter to make him a less vindictive and more likeable character.
The Meyerhold Centennial
Authors: Hoover Marjorie
Published: April 2006

Where is your grave—Or maybe even just a mound-Vsevolod EmilyevichMeyerhold?Where can we put a monument?There is no grave.You cannot be frozen into a statue,Like some docile teacher's pet.You blazeFrom the pedestals of the world stage,Vsevolod EmilyevichMeyerhold.

The 100th anniversary of Vsevolod Meyerhold's birth on February 9, 1874, was celebrated this year in the Soviet Union. The centennial celebrations honoring the great Russian theatre director began in January and continued well past the actual birth date. The recognition extended throughout the Soviet Union, including Leningrad, where Meyerhold began his career as director more than a decade before the Revolution. As a result of these celebrations, his rehabilitation is openly recognized now and his influence widely acknowledged.
Ontological-Hysteric Manifesto II
Authors: Foreman Richard
Published: April 2006

One always begins with the desire to write a certain kind of sentence (to put on stage a certain “kind” of gesture. That “kind” then turns out to be about that-which-becomes-your-content).

The key, however, is in this sentence (gesture) cell. Most people don't see the cell, are perceptually unable to see small enough (ephemeralization). Because their LIFE training is that to “see small” means to enter the realm where contradictions are seen to be at the root of reality—and that disturbing realization they would avoid at all costs.

The desire to write a certain kind of sentence (gesture) is akin to the desire to live—be—have the world be in a certain kind of way. (Art as a solution to what is—Musil. Through style, through smallest possible units. Bricks determine one style of architecture, stone another, etc.)
‘Let It Begin Here!’
Authors: Canaan Christopher
Published: April 2006

On Saturday morning, April 19, 1975, two skirmishes between American Colonials and British Regulars were reenacted at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, marking the beginning of the nation's Bicentennial celebration.

The initial commemorative event was the confrontation between British troops and American Minutemen at, the Town Green in Lexington. Spectators began lining the Green at about 3:00 a.m. By 5:30 a.m. there were more than 30,000 people standing six to seven deep around the square. Hundreds watched from rooftops, porches, and trees. Shortly before dawn, three buses carried the 200 men who would portray the British troops to the east end of the town. The spectators met the troops with cheers and good nature d heckling.

At 5:40 the canon from nearby Buckman's Tavern fired, and the Lexington Militia ran onto the Green. The spectators responded with a loud cheer as the men emerged from their rallying point inside the tavern.
Brecht's Mother Courage
Authors: Ryan Paul Ryder
Published: April 2006

Why Mother Courage and why still the Manheim translation over the Bentley? “Because Brecht was dead and Manheim was in Paris”

—Richard Schechner, tongue in cheek, coming off Tooth.

There were other reasons, too, why The Performance Group elected to stage Brecht's Mother Courage, which opened in late February, 1975, at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York City after almost a year in rehearsal. The women in the group — Elizabeth Le Compte, Joan Macintosh, and Leeny Sack — had called for a play with large roles for women since the group's last production, Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, had revolved around male rock ‘n’ roll recording artists. So, after Richard Schechner, a co-director of the group, brought the play by the garage and there was a reading in which members simultaneously used three translations — Manheim, Bentley, and Hays — because there were not enough copies of one version available, the group unaminously settled on Mother Courage and the Manheim translation, which they felt was the most “modern.”
The Throw-Away Theatre of Dario Fo
Authors: Cowan Suzanne
Published: April 2006

In Western Europe, where Brecht's plays have by now become standard fare for bourgeois audiences and where political theatre remains, by and large, the domain of students and middle-class intellectuals, the work of Dario Fo stands out as an anomaly. He is a gifted poet and playwright, as well as an actor, director, and full-time cultural activist; but, although his plays are known throughout Italy and numerous other European countries, they are usually discarded after a few months’ performance. His company does not consider itself avant-garde, and eschews formal experimentation for its own sake, yet it has incorporated many innovative techniques both in the dramatic structure of its productions and in its mode of organization. Although his group does not perform agit-prop or guerrilla street theatre, it is small, flexible, mobile, and militant. Fo has definitively renounced the commercial stage and dedicates his energies to serving the revolutionary movement in Italy; yet he continues to enjoy enormous popular support.
On Political Theatre
Authors: Kirby Michael
Published: April 2006

Is all theatre political? Some people claim that it is. To some extent, this view is based upon a misunderstanding of the word “political.” Webster defines “political” as:

1.

of or concerned with government, the state, or politics.

2.

having a definite governmental organization.

3.

engaged in or taking sides in politics; as political parties.

4.

of or characteristic of political parties or politicians: as political pressure.

These definitions may help us to understand the nature of political theatre, but they do not apply to all theatrical activity.

Some of the people who claim that all theatre is political seem to confuse “political,” “social,” and “economic.” Of course, all theatre exists in a certain socio-economic context. By definition, it involves an audience; it is not a solitary activity. But this does not mean that it necessarily is concerned with government or that it must take sides in politics. The psychological elements and interpersonal relationships of, say, A Streetcar Named Desire may be magnified into social statements.
A Chamber Dance Concert
Authors: Forti Simone
Published: April 2006

Two women in white. The feet of one, red. The feet of the other, green. They begin to circle counter or clockwise and keeping opposite each other establish a circle whose radius is the span of the outstretched arm of either, reached toward the outstretched arm of the other, hands meeting palm to palm. Their stride is smooth and medium fast. Again and again their arms are lifted to check the measure, and dropped to let the elements settle into a constant dynamic equilibrium, as their bodies incline slightly toward the apex.

Consider the seven circles of the Star of David; one in the center surrounded by six others, all of the same size. Superimpose on these two more, forming a figure eight whose halves join on the center of the central of the seven circles.

After a time of circling together, one of the women steps along the radius, straight to the circle's center, which she then takes for a point along the circumference of another circle.
Loïe Fuller
Authors: Sommer Sally R.
Published: April 2006

Loïe Fuller's contributions to the theory and practice of theatre and dance are numerous, yet few dancers and even fewer theatre people know of her work. Most dance and theatre historians, if they mention her at all, only devote a cursory paragraph to her achievements. As is often the case, repeated omission is gradually solidified into misinformation. Other people have often been credited with her innovations.

Between 1865 and 1891, Fuller had a rather successful career as actress, manager, and sometime. playwright. After 1892, she influenced (and was influenced by) Art Nouveau, Symbolism, and Impressionism. She was written about, painted, and sculpted by most of the important artists in Paris at the turn of the century. A theatre was even built for her. And she set up and managed the initial European tours of Isadora Duncan, Maude Allen, and two Japanese acting companies. All the while, she kept on writing plays.
Take Off: An Activity in Genova
Authors: Kaprow Allan
Published: April 2006

Take off is at once a parody and a series of collusions masked as deceptions (or put-ons). The central issue is trust in the truthfulness and loyalty of a confederate. The confederate is trusted to carry a desired impression to another person. But she or he is also the confederate of that other person and may not be loyal. The possibility of secrecy and intimacy exist on all sides. And betrayal.

But since all three parties become at some point go-betweens (or confidence women/men), each one is able to take certain advantage of the others by manipulating the truth. The take off lies in the fact that the whole Activity is a grand collusion in which each of the the participants knows the scheme from the start, and knows that the others know.
German Expressionist Acting
Authors: Gordon Mel
Published: April 2006

The New Man possesses even greater, more direct feelings. He stands there grasping his heart. And from the surge welling up in his blood, he is in an absolutely impulsive state. It is as if he would wear his heart painted onto his chest. Now he is not an image anymore—he is actually MAN. Completely entangled in the Cosmos, but with cosmic perceptions. … Not counterfeit thoughts, but his emotions alone lead him and guide him. Only then can he advance and approach absolute Rapture, where the tremendous ecstasies soar from his soul…. Yet, these New Men are in no way crazy or foolish. Their thought-processes work according to a different nature. They are untouched. They reflect upon nothing. They live not in circles nor through echos. They experiencedirectly. And that is the greatest secret of their artifice: it is without psychology.

Kasimir Edschmid, On Poetic Expressionism, 1917
Jozef Szajna's Replika
Authors: Neumiller Tom
Published: April 2006

The expressionistic images that Jozef Szajna employs in his production of Replika have their roots in the World War II concentration camps of Poland, where the Polish director was sent when he was seventeen. This past spring he brought his production to the Slavic Cultural Center in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York, from his Teatr Studio in Warsaw. It played March 12 through April 2. Szajna commented that “the concentration camps were my university.” After he was freed, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he began “to re-examine what we call acting in the theatre.” He soon found that the theatre itself had become another concentration camp. “It was the pop art that was created by the Fascists: hair, shoes, limbs, dolls, naked people.”
ProVisional Theatre's XA: A Vietnam Primer
Authors: Zuckerman Stephen
Published: April 2006

The ProVisional Theatre from Los Angeles performed two of the three works in their repertoire at the Experimental Theatre Festival in Ann Arbor. In addition, they gave a workshop, conducted by Steve Kent, a non-performing director of the group. It consisted for the most part of animated body work and theatre games. Exercises from Viola Spolin's canon as well as sound and movement exercises developed by Joseph Chaikin and The Open Theater were demonstrated, as well as improvisational games of their own. It was obvious that, in addition to the political aspect of The ProVisional Theatre's work, there was a desire to experiment with developing the actor's technique.

The ProVisional Theatre is an eleven-member group and, although they consider themselves highly political, they refuse to identify themselves with any specific philosophy.
Perlini's Othello
Authors: Davy Kate
Published: April 2006

Memé Perlini is the producer and artistic director of “La Maschera” of Rome. His fourth spectacle, Otello (Othello) billed as “after Shakespeare,” was presented in May, 1975, at the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. The piece was originally created at the Venice Biennale where it was performed in a sixteenth century church for 2,300 spectators in November, 1974.

In Nancy, Otello was presented in a large gymnasium-like exhibition hall. The audience seating section was placed at one end of the rectangular space and consisted of tiered bleachers with a seating capacity of approximately 2,000 people. The spectators entered the building from behind the bleachers and immediately encountered hundreds of white paper plates spread neatly across the floor. Walking on the plates, around the bleachers, the spectators confronted the space. Creating a polka-dot pattern, the plates covered the entire floor area except that used for performing.
Sakonnet Point
Authors: Aronson Arnold
Published: April 2006

I knew I wanted to do something, and I wanted to do it with a child and with women. I like children and I like women.

Spalding Gray

Sakonnet Point, an hour-long piece “composed and directed” by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte, was presented at the Performing Garage in New York City in early June, 1975. It formed the third part of an evening of three plays presented by members of The Performance Group. (Later in the summer it was presented alone in a converted church at Westerly, Rhode Island, and again in October at the Garage.) Sakonnet Point (the title is taken from the name of a town in Rhode Island where Gray spent his summers as a child) is a very personal, contemplative piece, attempting to evoke dreamlike moods through images presented in soft, dim lighting.
The Pip Simmons Group: Commemorating the Nazi Concentration Camps
Authors: Shank Theodore
Published: April 2006

In July, 1975, the Pip Simmons Theatre Group performed for the first time in London since disbanding in April, 1973. As with previous works by this group, some critics and spectators were offended. The last two plays Simmons had created in England were Do It!, based on Jerry Rubin's book, and The George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show, staged shortly after Jackson had been killed and played by white performers in blackface. By affecting a fashion of dress and a vocabulary of four-letter words without actually being involved, these productions affronted those English liberals who romanticized the American Yippie and Black movements. Nazi concentration camps are the subject of the latest production, which appropriately opened in the The Netherlands of Anne Frank in the spring of 1975. The play commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the closing of the camps.
On the Pure Elements of the Actor's Art
Authors: Radlov Sergei
Published: April 2006

This article is a short summary of my theoretical conclusions, which are a result of more than a year's work led by myself and E. D. Golobinskaya of the Theatrical-Research Studio. Credit for the working out and embodiment in practice of the positions expressed here belongs to the senior assistants of the studio-A. V. Grigoreva, V. I. Polotnova, M. V. Fausek, G. N. Gurev, N. N. Ivanov, E. E. Labrovsky, and R. D. Raugul. (1923)
Psychological Release: Comic Ritual Dramas in Sri Lanka
Authors: Ranjini  , Obeyesekere Gananath
Published: April 2006

It is almost a truism to say that religious rituals are often dramatic in form: individuals take on roles different from their everyday ones and relate to each other (interact) in a special area clearly marked out from secular and mundane reality. Many rituals entail an actor, a role, a dramatic part or enactment and a stage or special area where the performance occurs. In most cases, however, the content of the drama is a part of the religious tradition of the group and in this sense is not a secular “play” precisely because it is ritual before it is drama. T.S. Eliot makes this distinction between art and religious sacraments (in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” Selected Essays,London, 1951).

Ritual drama-is both ritual and drama. Actors impersonate sacred beings and heroes from mythology. Often the drama itself is an enactment of the myth.
Anna Halprin's Theatre and Therapy Workshop
Authors: Jean Norma , Deák Frantiŝek
Published: April 2006

For the last two years the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop has concentrated on the workshop process rather than on public performance. This change of emphasis is closely connected to Anna Halprin's concern with therapy (a means and an end in itself) as the focal point of artistic activity rather than with the esthetic or formal elements of dance or theatre.

In a broad sense, the theatre experience—through empathy, for example—can be considered in terms of therapy. In the same way, therapy, especially group therapy, has “theatrical elements,” such as role-playing, acting-out emotions, self-revealing monologs, etc. But usually theatre and therapy, in their conventional contexts, remain two separate areas with only minimal overlapping.

Anna Halprin bridges the gap between therapy and theatre first by being a performer (a dancer with a long history of innovative approach to dance) and a dance therapist; and secondly by devising workshops in which the function of theatre and therapy are identical.
Sexual Fantasy Theatre
Authors: de Strulle Arlene
Published: April 2006

In 1974, Barry Farber, a nationally syndicated broadcaster, placed a full-page ad in Penthouse magazine. The ad, entitled “What Turns You On?”, was an appeal to those who had been having unusual forms of sexual relations and to those who had been suppressing their sexual fantasies (resulting in abstention from all sexual activity) to write letters detailing those fantasies to The Project. The Project was founded by Farber as a sexual minority research and education center, as well as a therapy workshop for fantasists.

A performance was created from the letters received in response to the ad. Seven fantasies (six of the seven fantasists selected were male) were reconstructed precisely according to the letters. In some cases, the fantasist was invited to direct her/his particular segment.

The performance, Another Way To Love, is staged in a large loft in New York City at 127 Grand Street.
Cosmic Mass
Authors: Falk Florence
Published: April 2006

The fifth presentation of the Cosmic Mass, a “pageant” and an “active meditation,” took place in New York, October 22 and 24, 1975, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine as part of the World Spiritual Summit Conference V at the United Nations. The Mass incorporates dramatized vignettes, mudras, and movements, meditation, pantomime, tableaux, and processions; a didactic narrative superimposed overall affirms and celebrates the unity of all religious and spiritual paths. Earlier versions of the Mass were performed in Boston (March 1974), Los Angeles (April 1974), San Francisco (December 1974), and 1800 meters high in the mountains of Chamohix-Mont Blanc, France (July 1975). The Mass was first conceived in 1973 by Pir Vilayat Khan and Saphira Barbara Linden For each presentation of the Mass,Linden has directed, Pir Vilayat Khan has narrated the script, and Allauddin Mathieu has composed and arranged the musical score.
Native American Performance
Authors: Jenkins Linda Walsh , Wapp Ed
Published: April 2006

Performance events are carriers of Native American cultural traditions and values. From the earliest European contact into this century, missionary and government efforts have been directed at eliminating performance in order to destroy Indian cultures and effect assimilation of Native peoples into Western customs and religions. From the first Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, efforts to Christianize Indians have forced alterations in or destruction of traditional performances. In 1646, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony drew up rules prohibiting curing ceremonies among the Indians they converted.

But the major efforts at purging Indians of their traditional ways were carried out in the nineteenth century, when by 1887 all of the extant tribes except the Papago had been brought under the reservation system. The agents, in virtual dictatorial control of the reservations, were to a large extent military men, and they in turn were influenced by missionaries as well as non-Indians who wanted land and mineral and water rights.
Hispanic Oratorio In New York City
Authors: Ndini William
Published: April 2006

Flanked by apartment houses on 156th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive, Our Lady of Esperanza Church serves Hispanic immigrants to New York City. The incongruous Classical Revival facade of the church evokes its aristocratic origins:

Archer Milton Huntington made his first trip to the Iberian Peninsula in 1892. From an archaeological camp at Italica, the first Roman colony in Spain, near Seville, he brought home Corinthian capitals, inscribed gravestone fragments, and jewelry…Since childhood Huntington's thoughts had dwelt on the ‘foundation of a Hispanic center where source material in documents and examples of the arts of Spain andiPortugal might be studied as a basis for original research.’ In 1904, he established the Hispanic Society. Two years later he donated land near Audubon Terrace for a Spanish church, a site that was known at the turn of the century as Spanish Hill.
The Manteo Family's Sicilian Puppets
Authors: Adler Lois
Published: April 2006

“The last example of a 300-year-old tradition” is what the handbill says, referring to a performance of the famous “Papa” Manteo Sicilian marionettes at the Loreto Playhouse on Bleecker Street in New York City.

Certainly, the Sicilian marionettes are special. First, they are rod puppets-not terribly common, although this kind of puppet existed in Roman times. A rod “control” is pushed through a hole in the head and hooked into an iron eye loop in the torso; another rod controls the right arm, which is the sword arm. Normally, the puppeteer uses the left hand to control the head and the right hand to control the arm. There is no leg control and the legs, therefore, swing free, moving by their own weight. This gives a realistic look to the walk, a kind of a stiff-legged stride which Bil Baird describes in The Art of the Puppet as being famous all over Sicily: “Students stiffen up and fall into the ‘Orlando’ walk just for fun…”
The Otrabanda Company
Authors: Maddow Ellen
Published: April 2006

It is dawn in early June. The wind is cool. The Mississippi slips quietly by the enormous silver arch that marks the “gateway to the west” at St. Louis, Missouri. A blue van pulling an orange trailer drives up, then a yellow truck. Ten people climb sleepily out of the vehicles and begin to unload: First, a number of oil drums, carefully caulked to be air-tight, then tongue-in-groove flooring, and, last, twelve seventeen foot two-by-fours with bolt holes drilled in them. They are the parts of Otrabanda Company's unmotored raft, ready to be assembled and provide transportation for the company on its annual tour down the Mississippi. They will stop in river towns along the way, put up their red and yellow striped circus tent, and perform a show, at the “world's most popular price, absolutely free.” There are ten members of the company.
The Para-Troupe
Authors: Setrakian Ed
Published: April 2006

Tom Murlin and Johanna Went, under the names of Murlin and Johanna, have performed street theatre across the United States since the spring of 1975. Much of their work consists of improvisation based on an object, an idea, or a suggestion that either performer may introduce before or during a performance. None of the pieces that evolve are rehearsed or plot-structured. No meaning is intended, although some spectators have claimed that they have derived meaning from Para-troupe pieces.

Murlin and Johanna's touring has taken them to many cities in California, Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, and Canada. They also have performed indoors at the Crippled Children's Hospital in New Orleans, the University of Toronto Convocation Hall, St. Francis College's Founders Hall in Brooklyn, Theatre Genesis in New York City, and the LaMama Theatre of Hollywood.

Murlin, a 37-year-old former attorney, became involved in street theatre after abandoning his practice in Los Angeles in the mid-1960's to write plays for experimental theatres in New York City.
The Marilyn Project: A Structuralist Play?
Authors: Kirby Michael
Published: April 2006

The Marilyn Project, a new play by David Gaard, was being presented in a special performance for the Directors’ Unit of the Actors’ Studio. Richard Schechner, who had directed The Marilyn Project, was moving about watching the actors from various vantage points. He stopped to talk quietly and briefly with one of the spectators. “This,” he said as he moved away, “is my contribution to the Structuralist movement.”

In what sense could Gaard's script and Schechner's staging of it be called “structuralist”? Of course, the answer will depend on how we define the term. If structuralism in theatre means that particular emphasis has been given to the structure of the presentation or that something unusual has been done with the structure, The Marilyn Project fits the definition.

When the spectator climbed a long flight of stairs at the Performing Garage and entered the large rectangular room, he saw a single row of seats along three of the walls.
Seeming, Seeming: The Disappearing Act
Authors: Blau Herbert
Published: April 2006

Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep: from whence then hast thou that living water?

St. John 4:11

What we want to show is not only the structure we have come to but the conceiving process in the structure, what led to it and what leads back to its sources, in the world, in us, in the friction between us, the work, each other, the rage, the work, each playing upon each other, receding, the world, our gravity; a memory trace in a spoor of association, the thinking through. There is always the haunted and critical moment when what we're after seems almost not-there, the moment of Appropriation, the stepping back: “Is this not something more than fantasy?” Act? how? why? where? what for? for whom? and to what End? Why are we doing this in the first place? and can we? and since there is always the likelihood that nobody is listening or, if listening, cares what it means, what difference does it make? It may be that we are all listening to different voices, this candle, that flame; not for love or money the same light: Even before detente, one loved the Russians.
The Life in a Sound
Authors: Serban Andrei
Published: April 2006

We attempt to create a sound—a sound which grows and turns into a cry. We try to find the energy which produces this action and to become aware of it.

I see the sound as an image. I see what is enclosed in it—a column of air trying to break open. In the effort to produce the cry I attempt to replace heaviness with spontaneous vitality. The cry becomes either an expression of freedom and awakening or a sign of imprisonment; it all depends on how the sound is controlled and directed from inside.

At the beginning of this research real calm is required. One must accept the risk of passing beyond one's accustomed realm of habitual expression. One must try to discover an image, to nourish this image with something concrete, a taste, a smell.
Robert Wilson's: Einstein on the Beach
Authors: Flakes Susan
Published: April 2006

The world premiere of Robert Wilson's latest work, Einstein On the Beach, took place July 25 under the auspices of the Festival d'Avignon before beginning a tour that included performances at the Festival d'Automne, Paris. According to Wilson, what distinguishes this piece from his others is, in the first place, his strong collaboration with other artists, specifically with musician Phil Glass and with choreographer Andrew de Groat. In the second place, there is his fusion of rich visual imagery, characteristic of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin [T62], with formal and rigid structure, characteristic of A Letter for Queen Victoria. What triggered that fusion was the subject itself, Albert Einstein, a mathematician but at the same time a dreamer; for Wilson, he was one of the three most influential figures of our time (the other two: Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin).
Kate Manheim as Foreman's Rhoda
Authors: Davy Kate
Published: April 2006

Kate Manheim spent most of her life in France, coming to the United States in the fall of 1969 and to New York City in March, 1970. Because she speaks two languages without an accent, one of her first jobs in this country was at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she taught private lessons in both French and English. In the fall of 1971, shortly after she began working at the Anthology Film Archives, she met playwright/director Richard Foreman [T58, T62]. Foreman was already in rehearsal for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's fourth production entitled HċOhTiEṅL (or) Hotel China. Since one of the actresses had dropped out of the play, he went to the Anthology looking for a volunteer replacement. After walking back and forth several times through the office where Manheim was working. Foreman finally approached her and asked shyly, “Would you mind being an angel in my play?” She replied simply, “No, I wouldn't mind.”
With Foreman on Broadway Five Actors' Views
Authors: Nahshon Edna
Published: April 2006

On opening night of The Threepenny Opera at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, director Richard Foreman sent Elizabeth Wilson a note:

4-30-76

Dear Elizabeth,

You have beautifully redeemed Mrs. Peachum from the stock company character she's usually been & I thank you for your talent (which you can't help having) & your dedication to the show and my efforts: we come from different worlds but I feel we are together.

Love

Richard

The recent Lincoln Center production of The Threepenny Opera functioned not only as the meeting place of an avant-garde director and professionalactors, most of them strangers to the experimental theatre scene in New York; it also brought together two disparate theatre schools: one totally evolving around the actor's performance, the other regarding him as but another element of the production.
Actors on Brecht:The Munich Years
Authors: McDowell W. Stuart
Published: April 2006

Between September 1922 and March 1924, Bertolt Brecht worked in Munich on the original productions of three of his four plays, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle (later called Jungle and finally, In the Jungle of Cities), and Edward II. During this brief span of a year and a half, Brecht also made a short film, Mysteries of a Barber Shop, with many of the same actors from the three play productions. Unlike Brecht's later theatre work, which is thoroughly documented with many photographs and extensive production notes, these earliest productions remain relatively obscure. In an attempt to add to the information we do have, interviews were conducted with the three surviving actors in those first productions of Brecht's work: Hans Schweikart, who played a significant supporting role in Edward II; Blandine Ebinger, who played the comic-romantic lead in Mysteries of a Barber Shop (as well as several leading roles in other Brecht productions outside of Munich), and Erwin Faber, whose portrayals of lead roles in each of the four productions forms a veritable through-line of Brecht's professional work in his Munich years.
Romain Rolland and the French People's Theatre
Authors: Fisher David James
Published: April 2006

“And he was obscurely attracted by the new promised world—the people … Like other naive young men, he cherished great plans for popular art, people's concerts and people's theatre, which he would have been very troubled to define. He expected that revolution might make possible artistic renovation, and he claimed that he had no other interest in the social movement.”

Romain RollandJean-Christophe
The Theatrical Style of Tom O'Horgan: The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria
Authors: Simmer Bill , Creese Robb
Published: April 2006

Tom O'Horgan's first widespread public attention came in 1968, when he directed Hair on Broadway and won an Obie Award for directing Paul Foster's Tom Paine at La Mama. He had already been involved with the theatre most of his life: he began acting when he was four years old and he composed and staged a full-length opera, called The Doom of the Earth, when he was nine. Later, he studied music and supported himself for several years with a nightclub act—telling jokes, singing songs and accompanying himself on a harp. In the early Sixties, he performed in musical revues and began directing small productions at various lofts and theatres around New York City, including the Caffe Cino. In 1964, he directed Genet's The Maids in his own loft on Third Street, using men in the female roles as Genet had suggested.
Stein's Path to Shakespeare
Authors: Lackner Peter
Published: April 2006

The work of Peter Stein is so integrated with the work of the Schaubühne am Halleschen Ufer that an analysis of his individual style or method as a director is almost impossible. Even in speaking of “forms,” one must see how Stein has applied his creative energy at a very fundamental level—striving to create the proper conditions that would then, through the work process, give rise to new “forms,” as well as new content and style. However, a description of the development and results of the most recent project directed by Stein at the Schaubühne, together with an analysis of certain attributes that this project has in common with earlier work, may reveal a pattern definable as Peter Stein's own theatre practice.
“I Write These Messages That Come”
Authors: Fornés María Irene
Published: April 2006

Thoughts come to my mind at any point, anywhere—I could be on the subway—and if I am alert enough and I have a pencil and paper, I write these messages that come. It might be just a thought, like a statement about something, an insight, or it could be a line of dialog. It could be something that someone says in my head.

I have a box filled with these scribbles. Some of them are on paper napkins or the backs of envelopes. These things are often the beginning of a play. Most of the lyrics of the songs that I write are based on these notes—as opposed to a play, which, once it starts, I make. I usually gather a number of those things that have some relation—again, I do not even know why I consider that they are related—and I put them together.
Sologub and the Theatre
Authors: Gerould Daniel
Published: April 2006

Fydor Sologub (pronounced Sulagoup, with the stress on the last syllable) is best known as a poet and novelist, famous for his elegant; musical verse and for his grotesque fictional masterpiece, The Petty Demon. Born in 1863 and a member of the first generation of Russian symbolists, Sologub—a man of proletarian origins whose real name was Teternikov—was almost forty-five when he wrote his first play and had already been active in the literary world for over twenty years. Yet at this point the shy and withdrawn poet embarked upon a new career in the theatre and became a major symbolist dramatist and theoretician of a new stagecraft.
Lenten Rites and Practices [The Philippines]
Authors: Mendoza Liwayway
Published: April 2006

In April, just as the summer heat begins to reach its peak, the Philippines joins the rest of the Christian world in the observance of Holy Week (Semana Santa), recalling Christ's passion, death and resurrection. In rituals born of his Hispanic heritage, the Filipino mourns and celebrates Semana Santa, infusing it with a distinct pagan fervor. Local traditions and medieval rituals combine with modern day innovations to suit varying temperaments and locales.

From Ash Wednesday to Good Friday a piercing lamentation fills the air as the life of Christ is chanted in gatherings called pabasa. For seven weeks, at odd hours of the day and night, participants recite the passion and death of Jesus Christ from the Holy Book. There are as many versions of it as there are dialects.
The Bernardine Pilgrimage [Poland]
Authors: Young Marjorie B.
Published: April 2006

Every year during Easter Week, about 50,000 people gather in a tiny town in southern Poland to participate in an unusually realistic open-air reenactment of the major events in the last week of the life of Jesus Christ. These incidents are not portrayed on a single stage; instead, each takes place in front of one of a series of twenty-four chapels spread over a six-mile route that winds up and down gently sloped hills and weaves in and out of thick forests. Spectators and players walk together from chapel to chapel, singing appropriate songs that link scene to scene. As the crowds follow Jesus, they relive his experience with deep emotion, freely weeping, crying out against the Roman guards, and trying to touch Jesus’ robes as he walks the path to his death.
The Sagra Delia Croce [Sicily]
Authors: Vicentini Claudio
Published: April 2006

The Sagra della Croce is a three-day parade and celebration that takes place once a year, in May, in Casteltermini, a town of about 10,000 people in Sicily. The parade is performed in honor of a wooden cross that, according to an old legend, was miraculously found several centuries ago by a cow in the fields near the town. The cross is kept in a small church (the Chiesa di Santa Croce) on the hills about two miles from Casteltermini. Preparation for the Sagra takes the whole year and comprises a large part of the town's social life.

The Sagra has been performed for several hundred years. Originally it was prepared and performed by three “ceti” (guilds): the pecorai (shepherds), the borgesi (farmers)—who also included the burdunara (muleteers)—and the schetti (bachelors).