Panopto Lectures

3-23-20

1) Ab-Ex, Fluxus, Sixties – Part 1 (~23m)

SLIDE 1
Hello again! This lecture will be in two parts for easier access. This week, we are going to look at
several forms of performance that existed outside the theatrical mainstream during the 1960s.
They drew from various sources – the historical avant-garde, including Dadaism and Surrealism,
the theatrical theories of Brecht and Artaud, and pre-war trends in modern dance and music.
Together, the sixties used performance in new and stranger ways. Mostly, these works
emphasized the content of the artwork a lot less – less emphasis on the story, characters, or
plot – and more emphasis was placed on the audience and the formal qualities of performance
itself. What did it mean to be a performer? An audience member? An author of performance?
Through a few characteristic art movements of this period, we’ll answer these questions many
times over.

SLIDE 2
But, before we look at the main movements of the period, I want to discuss a key idea about
Cold War culture, particularly in the United States. That idea is containment. I realize that this
word may mean something very different to us right now, as we are in the middle of an
epidemic. But, there are links between the way we have been thinking about disease today and
how Cold War populations thought about the contagion of ideas.

When I refer to the Cold War, I am referring to an ideological battle between two nations that
came out of World War 2 with some success – largely, these are referred to as the West,
comprised of the democratic nations of the USA, the UK, and Western Europe, and the Eastern
Bloc or Soviet bloc, or those countries either a part of the Soviet Union, or USSR, or those
countries heavily under its influence. This divided the world into two ideological camps. The
West embraced capitalistic economics and versions of representative democracy. The Soviet
bloc, on the other hand, espoused the Communist values of the USSR under Stalin, and
opposed democracy and free markets. Both sides were fairly evenly matched militarily, and so
ended up in a sort of global stalemate, exacerbated by the fact that both the USA and the USSR
had stocks of nuclear weapons pointed at each other. As a result, the war was “Cold” – open
conflict never broke out among the two countries, but instead, “proxy wars” developed –
conflicts in other locations, backed secretly, or not-so-secretly, by the two major world powers.
The wars in Korea, Vietnam, and Afghanistan, as well as the Cuban Missile Crisis, are
characteristic battles between superpowers in other locations.

The main ideology of the Cold War, from the perspective of the USA, was a principle called
containment. The United States and its Western allies took it as their job to contain the spread
of Communist ideas, and to liberate those who had already fallen under Soviet influence. This
policy was clearly stated by president Harry Truman in 1947, in what was been known as the
Truman Doctrine. The US would “support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation
by armed minorities or by outside pressures.” Such a policy stated that the United States would
lend its military power to anti-Communist factions in a number of countries, and underpinned
US interventions in many civil wars and coups between 1947 and 1980: Korea, Cuba, Vietnam,
Guatemala, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and many others. Containment of Communist ideas was
the officiation US foreign policy until President Reagan’s administration in 1980. Importantly for
us, containment conceptualized Communism as an ideological illness, that if left unchecked,
would take over the world.

SLIDE 3
Here is a map of the major spheres of influence in the world around 1970. Blue and green
countries are either allies or economic partners of the United States and NATO (the North
American Treaty Organization, which is the principle military alliance around which “the West”
was constructed). Red countries are the Soviet Union and its allies, and Orange countries are
non-Soviet communist countries. Notably, Chinese communism and Soviet communism parted
ways beginning 1955, with the death of Stalin. The new Soviet Union under Nikita Khrushchev
and the Chinese version of Communism, still under the leadership of Mao Zedong, had
important differences in ideology, culture, economics, and influence. However, from the point
of view of many in the West, one Communism was as bad as any other Communism.

As you can see, this world map is heavily divided into two camps. And it was this idea that
founded Containment thinking. Before leaving this idea, though, I want to explore some of the
ways that Containment influenced art and culture. Theatre Historian Bruce McConachie, one of
the authors of our textbook, has argued that containment was a pervasive theme in US Cold
War culture. Much television, film, and theatre functioned around ideas of containment
because the idea was so pervasive in US political and social life. This basic idea has a few
correlating ideas. First, containment assumes that there is something to protect – we contain
the enemy, or the Other, we assume some basic identity, some “healthy” idea, and that was
often ideas of goodness associated with the US. It could be the nuclear family, or the healthy
democracy, or the individual himself. Secondly, containment presumes a threat from some
Other. One of the things that happened a lot in Cold War culture was that people who did not
fit in an idea of American normalcy – who were not white, or straight, or gender-conforming, or
Protestant – became a threatening Other. This was not the first time that the US depended on
Other-ing rhetoric; one need only go to anti-immigrant attitudes of the 19 th-century (or today),
or to the Japanese interment camps, to find othe examples. But, in the Cold War, white,
heterosexual, masculine, middle-class, perhaps even suburban culture was conceived as the
goal. There is also the risk of infection or conversion; given exposure to Communist ideas, good
people might become bad; they might succumb to the Other. And sometimes, the answer to
who we “really” are, whether we are good or bad, mainstream or other, lives inside of us, in our
blood or our sexuality or our race or our politics. Finding out that you were actually an “Other”
is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers moment, one that shows that all along, you were actually
one of THEM. These are the fears that drove containment culture, that drove the Red Scare and
the McCarthy hearings (Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist
party?) and, McConachie argues, much of the resistance to civil rights, feminism, and gay rights.
Nonwhite others, powerful women, queers, and communists all threatened some essential
American goodness. This goodness that was fictional, yes, but seemed to be real to many.

Cold war popular culture was obsessed with protecting the family or the American public from
the external threat. Consider, for instance, the prevalence of movies about spies and monsters
in the Hollywood and popular culture of the 1950s and 1960s. What are spy movies about, if
not containment? Who are you really? Where do your allegiances lie? What are you really like,
inside? Think about the family sitcoms of the fifties and sixties, and their emphasis on
protecting the home, avoiding strangers and threats, and keeping the domestic location – often
the suburban house – whole and inviolate. And think about the intruders of the plays we have
been reading about; in A Streetcar Named Desire, the textbook reminds us, Blanche Dubois is
an “Other” who threatens Stanley and Stella’s marriage, and in A Raisin in the Sun, the
Youngers struggle to attain their own dreams against the forces of white containment and
racism in Clybourne Park. There are many more examples of this kind of thinking, and I invite
you think about your own examples in popular culture you are familiar with from this period,
from about 1945 until really the 1980s.

SLIDE 4
So, with that in place, here are the three topics related to Cold War arts culture we will discuss
today. First, we will look to visual art briefly, specifically the postwar movement known as
Abstract Expressionism. Then, we’ll look at two performance trends that fill out the scene of
avant-garde art in the sixties – the composition work of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, a
blend of music and dance and performance, and the idiosyncratic art and performance
movement known as Fluxus.

SLIDE 5
Abstract Expressionism was a movement that began in New York City in the 1940s, and
continued through the sixties. You may be familiar with paintings by Jackson Pollock, especially
his so-called “drip paintings,” or canvases such as Mark Rothko’s color fields, here shown on the
right. Artists associated with this movement began to make new types of work after World War
2, in a style that continued some of the principles of Expressionism from before the war, and
also that drew on Surrealist ,even Dadaist principles. The main concept here is that the canvas
becomes an emotional arena. The movement combined some of the principles of psychic
automatism (automatic writing, automatic drawing) from the Surrealists, with the abstraction
of movements like the Bauhaus Constructivists, Futurists, and Cubists. These painters combined
the emotional intensity, often the emotional self-expression of German Expressionism with the
anti-figural bias of other avant gardes. How can the abstract form – the drip, the geometric
shape, the block of color on the painted canvas – how can such abstraction communicate
emotional content? Jackson Pollock, for one, drew attention to the process of painting itself in
his drip paintings. The canvas is as much a record of past actions as it is a form in and of itself –
it shows how he poured paint, and how he dribbled it off a paintbrush. When Pollock painted,
he attempted to use his emotion to move the brush and canvas in automatic, emotional ways.
The resulting artwork was known as an “action painting” – a painting based out of action.
Rothko, who paints his color fields a little bit later, does something different, but similarly
emotional. Rothko painted huge canvases with large blocks of color, that he applied in many
layers to give it surprising depth and complexity. Then, he juxtaposed colors against each other
in sharp contrast. The idea here is that the painting swallows you in abstract seas of color, and
emotion. Rothko is attempting to communicate emotion, like the earlier Expressionists, but in
this case he wasn’t to do so by producing that emotional state in the viewer. Pollock and
Rothko are some of the most iconic examples of Abstract Expressionist painting, but they are
not the only ones. Many other artists found their own ways to combine emotion and
abstraction in their work, and collectively, they were known as the New York School in the 40s
and 50s. This group became quite popular in New York art circles, and was responsible for
moving the center of the art world from Paris to New York City after World War 2.

SLIDE 6
Here are the two main divisions of abstract expressionism we are looking at, explained.
Generally, action painting, as practiced by Pollock, slightly preceded color field painting, of with
Rothko is the best known painter, but not the only one. This image, a Kenneth Noland canvas,
shimmers in its contrasts, especially in person. The red, blue, and black are abstractly painted,
but invite you to fall into it in some way – the contrast reaches out and grabs your eyes, and the
target or well-like expanse of the canvas pulls you in as well. A few things are notable about
both of these trends within abstract expressionism. First, there is a move away from figural
content, but this move is accompanied by a turn toward the work of creation of the image
itself. It matters how Pollock painted, or how Rothko painted, far more than it mattered how
other painters worked. In this, the artist’s process becomes more a part of the artwork than it
has been before. Similarly, audience response is being brought into the painting; your own
emotions as you stand before large, abstract canvases become a part of the artwork. This
inclusion of audience response also has roots in, say, Futurism, Dada, or the Surrealists, but it is
developed in the gallery in new ways by artists like Pollock and Rothko. (They were also,
incredibly popular; this art style caught on among the well-to-do in the relatively financially
well-off 1950s, especially in major urban centers like New York.)

SLIDE 7
At around the same time, other experiments in other arts were beginning. Like the abstract
expressionists, performing artists were also turning toward the performer and the audience
and away from representational or planned content. Two such artists are John Cage and Merce
Cunningham, who produced much of their early work at Black Mountain College. Black
Mountain College was a college in North Carolina that sponsored events and workshops
centered around the avant-garde. They brought in promising artists to work with students, and
often the artists built new work or companies using Black Mountain’s resources. John Cage was
an avant-garde American composer who was interested in very new composition techniques.
Cage’s work varied widely, and he experimented with many new techniques. He experimetns
with unusual and challenging rhythmic structures, sometimes with many rhythms occurring in
the same piece or simultaneously, and he also used modernist scales and methods including
the “tone row” system, in which structure is provided by a line of unrelated tones as opposed
to the typical rules of Western musical harmony. He is also famous for composing pieces for
new or altered instruments, including the “prepared piano,” which you see in his photograph
below. You “prepare” a piano by inserting objects into the strings (sticks, nails, brackets, paper,
etc…) to change its sound. Scores for Cage pieces contain instructions for how to prepare your
instrument, using what objects, and where to place them. Odd, avant-garde, but also
interesting stuff.

But, for our purposes, I’m interested in his use of chance. After working with Cunningham at
Black Mountain College, Cage became very influenced in the role that chance, random
occurrences could play in creating art. Around 1950, Cage became interested in the I Ching, a
Chinese text used for divination. Using this text can be similar to using a tarot card deck, or a
magic 8 ball; to use it, one casts sticks, grass, reeds, or dice to get a six-digit binary code (as
series of 1 or 0 responses, represented in the I Ching by broken and unbroken lines). Then, by
referencing the code (called a hexagram) in the text, one reads a short statement that relates to
one’s question or current situation. John Cage used chance operations such as these to create
his tone rows and other structures in his music. This mean completely throwing out the usual
rules of harmony, structure, even what sounds pleasing to the ear. Can chance produce music?

Cage’s most famous piece, though, is as performative as can be. It’s called 4’33”, and you may
have heard of it before. The piece begins with a pianist coming on to the stage, sit down, and
close the lid of the piano. After each of three movements, about a minute or two long, the
pianist raises the lid, and closes it again. After precisely four minutes and thirty-three seconds –
hence the title – the pianist gets up, bows, and leaves. There are several ways to interpret this
piece. One, it is an avant-garde joke, in the sense of the Dadaists or Futurists. It’s a concept,
first and foremost, and requires that you treat it as a conceptual piece of art, like The gas Heart,
for instance. But it is also an invitation to consider the music that is already in the room – what
occurs, by chance? Is someone rustling paper? Does a door close? Is someone breathing,
coughing, shuffling in their seat? Are there birds? What makes the music from the piano any
more important than the music around us all the time? Thirdly, 4’33” is a work of pure duration
– it is structured by the amount of time that it takes. It reminds us to focus for that amount of
time, and it invites us to consider our experience of duration itself – which is different than
waiting. If music is sound over time – a basic definition of music – then 4’33” is duration taken
to an extreme. Would 4 minutes and thirty-three seconds of a pianist performing “rests”, as
opposed to “notes,” be music? Why or why not?

Chance was also interesting to Merce Cunningham, who was in residence with Cage at Black
Mountain at the same time. Cunningham was similarly inspired by chance operations, and his
compositions used similar random compositional techniques. By throwing a coin, for instance,
you might be invited to reorder the choreographic elements in one of this performances. Or
dice might tell you which gestures or movements to include in which order. In other works, the
dancers themselves are given limited freedom to improvise; this, too, provides an aesthetic of
chance. This mode of composition removed some authority from the choreographer, but also
changed the relationship of the choreographer to the artwork itself. Without content, without
representation, or emotion, or idea, could pure dance exist? How can the use of chance
challenge the typical rules of structure, or of dance style and technique? John Cage and Merce
Cunningham had a long artistic and romantic partnership, and they often collaborated on work.
Fittingly, they didn’t always tell each other what they were working on ahead of time;
Cunningham’s dancers might be hearing Cage’s music for the first time while they are
performing with it – more chance!

And that’s where I’ll leave it for the first part. I’ve included some links here in the slides, and
also in the Powerpoint section on MyCourses. Please take a moment to watch this clip of 4’33”
– experience the duration! – and of the New York Times obituary video of Cunningham. The
latter, in particular, will give you a good sense of Cunningham’s massive contribution to modern
dance. There are also some other links, too – advice from Cunningham himself in his last
months, and a link to the Merce Cunningham Trust website. Those focusing on Dance might be
particularly interested in some of these videos.

Both abstract expressionists and avant-garde composers and choreographers, such as Cage and
Cunningham, were reinventing art in the wage of World War 2. While a kind of realism,
conformity, and containment overtook much of Broadway and commercial performance in the
fifties, there were other strains of experimentation. Many of these strains would burst out in
the 1960s, and that will be the subject of our next lectures in this unit. First among them is
Fluxus.

2) Ab-Ex, Fluxus, and the Sixties – Part 2 (~19m)

In the activity, I asked you to read and restage two fluxus performances: Emmett Williams’ 1962
“The Gift of Tongues,” and Meiko Shiomi’s 1963 “Shadow Piece.” Both of these contained
several values that were important to Fluxus artists: the use of everyday materials, an element
of chance and spontaneity, a radically democratic approach to performance (in the sense that
anyone could do it), and a playful, today we might say “disruptive” approach. Fluxus artists
impishly attacked high art, the art market, and other self-important trends of the day, such as
Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism, by creating artistic, often beautiful, and sometimes surreal
or strange interruptions in life. For the Fluxus artists, art was everywhere. Some performances
did involve audiences – look for Ken Friedman’s “Cardmusic For Audience” in the workbook –
while others were meant to be performed by dedicated performers, or in some cases, they
could not be performed at all, but were meant to be thought about, and the thinking itself
constituted the performance.

SLIDE 2
Fluxus was a loose art movement that developed several main ideas that we have previously
discussed. From the Abstract Expressionists, Fluxus continued its pressure against
representation, and encouraged the interpretation of the viewer. However, Fluxus artists
despised the high-culture critical acclaim the Ab-Ex artists were getting. John Cage and Merce
Cunningham were more direct influences, as their work with chance, with silence, with
performativity, and with the non-personality of the artist (in direct contrast to the Abstract
Expressionists) inspired the Happenings’ embrace of emphemerality and chance, and the
Fluxkit’s do-it-yourself ethos.
The name Fluxus itself was derived from a Latin word that denotes a continuous passing or
flowing. It suggested a fluidity between media, creating a new version of what we have
discussed as an intermedia art. The combination of art forms and performance interventions
made Fluxus one of the most radical and experimental art movements of the sixties. It was
founded in 1961 by George Maciunas, whose stated goals were social, not aesthetic, and
ultimately directed toward “the gradual elimination of the fine arts.” He saw the fine arts – at
least as practiced in galleries showing Jackson Pollocks and Andy Warhols – as a complete
waste of resources, and art could be put to more “socially constructive ends.” However, the
boundaries of Fluxus are hard to define, as the movement encouraged each artist to make his
or her own artwork on its own terms. As Maciunas said, “each of us had his own ideas about
what Fluxus was and so much the better. That way it’ll take longer to bury us. For me, Fluxus
was a group of people who got along with each other and who were interested in each others’
work and personality.” When asked to define the movement, all Maciunas said was that it was
“an act of flowing, a continuing moving or passing by, as of a flowing stream; a continuous
succession of changes.”

Several distinctive art forms were made in Fluxus, and not all contained performance, even
though the main art forms we are looking at today are performative. Sculpture, collage and
assemblages, and the beginnings of video art were also associated with Fluxus experimentation.
For our purposes, we will be looking at happenings and fluxkits. Happenings were one-time
performances, often of many genres of art, assembled in a space or occurring in the “real
world.” Happenings are distinguished by their tendency to see real life “as if” they were
theatre; placing a frame of performance onto regular events turned them into aesthetic
experiences. You experienced some of this when you did the Fluxus Workbook activities.
Fluxkits, sometimes called fluxboxes, were do-it-yourself “kits” for performance that Maciunas
produced in a mail-order fashion. Following their radically democratic ideals, Maciunas and
other Fluxus artists believed that by providing instructions for new types of experiences,
anyone could create their own Fluxus performances or evenings. This inspired a number of
artists to create artworks out of essentially only directions for performance; for these artists,
like George Brecht (no relation to Bertolt) or Yoko Ono (yes, that Yoko Ono) providing only the
instructions was a way of directing attention to the performance itself as the main element of
the artwork.

Many of these artists, including Alan Kaprow and George Brecht, studied with John Cage, either
at Black Mountain College, where Cage and Cunningham initiated their partnership and worked
on productions such as Theatre Piece No.1 – which might be considered an early happening – or
at the New School for Social Research in New York City, where Cage taught a class in
“experimental composition” in the late fifties. There, Cage developed some rules for
happenings, so called because the frame of the performance drew attention to the singularity
of passing time and actually-occurring events. Nothing was a “repetition.” Cage also taught a
course in mushroom identification at the New School in 1959, and I will let you make of that
what you will.
SLIDE 3
George Maciunas’ Fluxus Manifesto was the first work that named the movement and set out
its major principles. Here is the manifesto as it was first distributed to other artists by
Maciunas. It combines definitions of “flux” from the dictionary with a few key ideas. Among
them are its claims to “purge the world of bourgeois sickness, intellectual, professional and
commercialized culture,” to purge the world of dead art, artificial art, abstract art, and to purge
the world of “europanism.” Here, Maciunas is echoing the revolutionary claims of the Futurists,
as he too is sweeping away the remains of the past and the decadence of the then-
contemporary art world. In its place, Maciunas suggests a great flood of art production,
washing away the old in a “revolutionary flood,” to promote living art, anti-art, and non-art
reality. The emphasis on accessibility and democratic engagement is particularly clear;
Maciunas has it out for the “dilettantes and professionals” of the art world. Rather than
separate us by class, education, or knowledge base, Maciunas argues, art should fuse us all in
revolutionary action, using art as weapon. Maciunas himself thought that art could shake up
the social world through humor, surprise, and a renewed attunement to living things. Out of the
galleries, and into everyone’s home! Maciunas’ artwork included the Fluxshop (where you got
the mail-order fluxkits) as well as organizing concerts and showings of many artists’
performances, sculptures, and other artwork.

SLIDE 4
Happenings are curious performances. They are not unrehearsed, and they are not random.
However, they do reject many of the elements that we normally associate with theater. Division
between audience and performer, the traditional use of script and rehearsal, and even
narrative are thrown out. Happenings are playful, multimedia events. Often times, they would
occur in nonperformance locations, as well.

What did it feel like to view a happening? While the performance was tightly controlled by
instructions and roles for performer and audience, there was no plot, narrative, or even climax,
necessarily. Rather, chance, participation, and playfulness were the main aesthetics. This type
of happening, consisting of instructions and unrehearsed actions, became associated with
Kaprow’s early work on this style. During his life, Kaprow insisted that happenings could only be
performed once, and in a certain sense this is inevitable – performance is always different.
However, in his will, Kaprow allowed for re-performances of his early work. Later, the
happening would come to include other types of designed spectator experiences, and not only
those in gallery spaces. However, each could only occur once. This framing of experience
became a precursor of performance art, and might also be linked to the aesthetic ideas of
today’s immersive theater.

SLIDE 5
While John Cage may be the primary inspiration and theorist behind Happenings, Allan Kaprow
is the artist most associated with bringing the Happening into reality. The most important
historical performance here is 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which occurred in a large, warehouse-
like space separated by translucent plastic curtains. The audience was given instructions for
participation, which read “The performance is divided into six parts...Each part contains three
happenings which occur at once. The beginning and end of each will be signaled by a bell. At
the end of the performance two strokes of the bell will be heard...There will be no applause
after each set, but you may applaud after the sixth set if you wish.” The audience moved from
room to room at various points. The happenings themselves varied from musical performances,
to lines of plastic fruit that were to be sorted by size or color, to painting, to dances, to
someone squeezing orange juice.

Now, a few ideas from this performance worth explaining. First, yes, these events are as small
or as random-seeming as they look – painting, playing music, sitting before cubes of numbers,
seeing oneself in a mirror. But they only seem random; in fact, they are designed and selected,
but designed to be everyday. Kaprow was interested in blurring the line between art and life,
and continually redefining what is performance and what is reality – keeping both in flux. Later
happenings (after 18 Happenings) frequently occurred outdoors, or in multiple locations. Like
John Cage’s 4’33”, this reframed what “counted” as artwork, as the accidents of travel or simply
life in the intervening time became a part of the art itself. We might also think about how this
was performed – in several small rooms, with the audience moving from experience to
experience. Rather than bounded play on stage, Kaprow was interested in discontinuous,
geographically diverse, unique experiences designed for participating audiences. Finally, the
embrace of such discontinuity created a collage-like effect. This disjointed, “potpourri” like
effect would become important to the postmodernists, as we will see in a later lecture, and it
also developed ideas of collage that had been around since the Dadaists, at least.

SLIDE 7
While happenings are happening, other Fluxus work was also ongoing. I mentioned the
Fluxshop earlier. This was Maciunas’ mail-order catalog and shipping business that provided a
kit for performance. These kits would contain everything you needed to create your own
experiences, from illustrated cards to event scores to paper to fold to sensory paper boxes that
approximated sculptures. The fluxkit was originally a suitcase that was present at Fluxus events,
and then versions of certain aspects of the fluxkit were available for mail-order purchase for $4.
In later iterations, they consisted of collections of Fluxus “experiences” from a variety of Fluxus-
affiliated artists. They were not widely popular at all, but the creation of the kits themselves,
and the shop for selling them, became a part of the Fluxus way of approaching artwork. Selling
the kits more of a work of performance art as it was a legitimate business venture; the project
was never meant to make money, and it never covered its own costs. As Ken Johnson writes,
“You could think of Fluxus as an international, utopian conspiracy to alter the world’s collective
consciousness in favor of noncompetitive fun and games and other peaceable and pleasurable
pursuits. Their weapons of choice were feeble jokes, verbal and visual puns, satiric publications
and instructions for absurd performances. Bypassing the commercial gallery system, Fluxus
novelties were meant to be sold cheaply by mail and in artist-run stores.” The best known
fluxkits, however, were not collections of many artists’ work by Maciunas, but rather groups of
performance instructions that were created by single artists.

SLIDE 8
George Brecht’s collection of event scores, called Water Yam, was one of the first kit-based
Fluxus performances. Water Yam was available in some later kits that were sold through the
mail. It consisted of a series of scores for events. Like a musical score, the cards in Water Yam
provided the instructions for private performance events. One shown here, “Three Lamp
Events” consisted of ambiguous instructions for a performance with a lamp. Another, in the
photograph, was a set of drips to be executed by a performer, dripping water from a cup into a
larger basin on stage. By making the instructions the artwork, the performance, and not the
object itself, became the focus of Brecht’s work. Many of these performances were conducted
by Brecht or others in salon-like concerts. Yoko Ono, as well, collected a series of her poetic
“instructions” for Fluxus performances in her 1964 collection Grapefruit. Two pieces that Ono
written are reproduced here. The first, involves imagining snow during a conversation, and asks
the performer (you are the performer) to judge time against the imagery of imagined, falling
snow. Another of my favorites, “Tunafish Sandwich Piece,” has you imagine spectacular images,
across time, and follows it up with the mundane task of making a sandwich. These collections of
instructions, some to think or imagine and others with actions to perform, expand the mind of
the performer while they challenge what really can be called a “performance.”

SLIDE 9
Fluxus lasted until about 1978 when it ended with Maciunas’ death. The traditions of
conceptual performance art continued, however, even while the do it yourself aesthetic and
playfulness of chance happenings faded by the end of the seventies. The tradition of
performance art took up much of what Fluxus started, in that performance events themselves
came to occupy a space between theatre and gallery-based visual art. In the later sixties and
seventies, performance and intermedia art often took on more explicitly political ends, allying
themselves with Vietnam war protests, the women’s rights movement, or any of several other
political trends in the seventies. Minimalism, as we will hear about later, also took up the
challenge to the art world Maciunas sought with his Fluxus work.

Fluxus work also influenced the development of performance art in the United States. Two
performance artists who bridge Fluxus work and the later trends of body-based, arguably
feminist performance art are Yoko Ono and Carolee Schneeman. Ono’s Cut Piece (1964, video
1965) consisted of a stage on which Ono sat “in her best suit” with scissors in front of her, and
the audience was invited to come up on stage and cut off her clothing, taking a bit of clothing
with them. She did not react, even when some audience members made large cuts or seemed
to threaten her with the scissor blades. A video is linked on MyCourses, and it raises questions
of participation and voyeurism, of giving and taking, of male privilege and feminine reticence.
Similarly, Schneeman’s Meat Joy (1964) bridged the freedom of Fluxus with the possibility of a
more political message. In this work, raw meat and fish, paint, and paper are placed in the
space, while men and women in underwear dance with and writhe over the meat and each
other. The performance is meant be simultaneously erotic, disgusting, sensual (just imagine the
smell), and spontaneous. We will pick up with another expression of the ritualized, freed body
in the next lecture. Please take time to peruse the links for this lecture on your own time, and
especially to view a minute or two of the Ono and Schneeman pieces before moving on.
 1) Schechner and Grotowski

SLIDE 1 – TITLE
With this lecture, I will explain the work of two directors and teachers whose work in
the mid-to-late sixties combines several trends that we have discussed so far in this course.
Richard Schechner founded the Performance Group in 1968, and for a decade the theatre
company experimented with ensemble-based, sometimes group-devised performance creation
methods, often beginning with a source text and then radically re-envisioning it. Their
performance space the Performing Garage, was inherited by the Wooster Group in 1980, a very
famous postmodern performing group still working today. Jerzy Grotowski was a Polish director
and teacher of acting who founded several theatres in Poland, notably the Theatre Laboratory
in Opole, Poland in 1959, and whose reinterpretations of classic European texts and
theorization of the “poor theatre” made his work very popular internationally in the later
twentieth century. The introduction of Grotowski to the West, beginning with a production of
Akropolis in Edinburgh in 1964, attracted a lot of critical attention to a performance style that
had up until them been obscured from the rest of the US and Europe by the Iron Curtain.

SLIDE 2 – 2 Productions
These two directors, and the two works we will be looking at today (Dionysus in ’69, 1968, and
Akropolis, 1964) share several key themes. First, both directors emphasize ensemble-based
acting, and the physicality of the actor, often over the importance of the text. Second, both
performances developed a new use of theatre as ritual; both productions use stylized
movement and text to create purposeful actions on stage that seemed to lift above the text.
These were creations of the director, generated in the rehearsal process as exercises and then
applied in some fashion to the stage. Third, they both developed physical methods of actor
training, requiring acrobating and emotional flexibility out of their actors in order to accomplish
the difficult tasks they required of their performers. Fourth, both embraced environmental
staging, blending audience and performing space, and rethinking the use of black-box style
spaces in order to bring the spectator closer to the action. Grotowski, in particular, re-designed
spectator space for each performance in order to provoke a particular emotional response out
of the audience. Finally, each had a lasting impact on theatre and theatre studies, though in
different ways. Schechner founded the Performance Studies department at NYU, and moved
theatre toward a study of rituals and anthropology as the basis of performance itself.
Schechner also inspired the development of American postmodern techniques, and founded a
very influential performance-based journal, the Tulane Drama Review (later, TDR). Grotowski is
best known for his acting and directing methods; the highly physical training procedures he
innovated and theorization of the “via negativa,” or actor training as the removal of psychic
blocks, instituted his ideas in a number of directing and acting methods, notably in the work of
director Peter Brook and actor Stephen Wangh.

SLIDE 3 – Dionysus in ‘69

Dionysus in ’69 premiered in 1968, as the first performance of Schechner’s Performance Group,
at a venue called the Performing Garage. The text was an adaption of Euripides’ The Bacchae. In
the original Greek tragedy, Dionysus arrives at the beginning of the play and explains that he
will take revenge on the town of Thebes, because the town has refused to acknowledge his
divinity and the identity of his mother, Semele, who was impregnated by the god Zeus. The
leader of the city and Dionysus’ cousin, Pentheus, has banned worship rites of Dionysus in the
city, despite the warnings of the seer-prophet Tiresias, who explains that denying Dionysus will
bring ruin upon him and his family. Dionysus, then, arrives with his group of female
worshippers, the Maenads, who remain outside the city gates. The Maenadic or Dionysian rites
are ecstatic, out-of-body experiences, appropriate to Dionysus’ role as the god of wine, fertility,
ritual madness, and theatre. In one choric ode in the play, a messenger explains the Maenadic
ritual to Pentheus: drunken and mad in ecstasy, the women dance, engage in sexual behavior,
and then set themselves upon a cow, which they then rip apart with their bare hands, and
consume the flesh. The play consists of several dialogues between Pentheus and Dionusys, and
then later, with Pentheus’ mother Agave, sister of Dionysus’ mother Semele. Dionysus plays
upon Pentheus’ pent-up desire and tricks him into dressing as a maenad – in drag – and spying
on the maenadic ritual. Then, Dionysus reveals Pentheus to the women, who in their ritual
madness mistake Pentheus for a lion and rip him to pieces. Many women of the city have been
entranced into performing these rites, including Agave, who is blind with madness and does not
know that her sisters have killed her son. She returns with the head of Pentheus on a pike, and
as the madness subsides, the tragic resolution of the play is her realization that she has killed
her own son, thinking him a lion. Dionysus arrives one last time, reveals his revenge on the city,
and banishes Agave and her family.

This bloody and gruesome play is often read as a story about the undeniably of the chaotic,
irrational, and emotional parts of humanity. Dionysus and his worshippers are coded in the play
as Eastern, female, and irrational, and it is the inflexible authority of Pentheus, perhaps derived
from too much male logic, that causes his downfall and the tragic outcome. Richard Schechner
was attracted to this play for several reasons. First, the embrace of the irrational, chaotic,
sexual, and bloody in the play made it a good candidate for ensemble-based exploration in the
spirit of sixties-era protest, “hippie” theatre. In adapting the text, Schechner and his actors
devised several pseudo-Dionysian rituals for the birth and death of Dionysus, which they then
added into the play. The images on the left of this slide represent the “birth” ritual. (The split-
screen technique was developed by filmmaker Brian DePalma, who filmed two performances
and sewed them together in an attempt to render the environmental staging of the play on
film. This film is linked in the notes for today’s lectures.)

The production itself spoke most of the words of the text, and scenes were presented, but
Schechner frequently blurred the lines between performer and role, and between actor and
audience. At points, the production would be interrupted by lines spoken as the actor, and not
as their Greek role, and at other points, audience members would be invited to participate in
scenes or in the rituals of birth, death, and ecstasy. Quite infamously, many sections of the play
were performed partially or totally nude by the actors, and some audience members disrobed
as well. This further complicated the slippage between the real and the imagined, and also
between the consensual and the non-consensual. As one of the first productions to radically
engage participatory theatre in this way in the US, and with such dark, violent, and sexual
themes, the production was groundbreaking but also contained the threat and sometimes the
actuality of assault or coerced sexual contact.

The play ended, as Euripides had written, with the reappearance and revenge of Dionysus, who
in the Greek original ascends to the heavens at the play’s finale. In Schechner’s version, the
doors of the Performing Garage were thrown open, and a procession began, chanting
“Dionysus in ‘69”! This was a semi-political act, as it claimed to be putting forward Dionysus, the
god of chaos and ecstasy, up for local or national office. Parades continued down Grand Street
and the performance dispersed soon after. This energy, literally taking the performance out
into the street, not unike the Living Theatre or Bread and Puppet Theatre had. However, this
was a celebration of the triumph of chaos against order, of the divine against the human, and of
the transgressive over the conservative. It remains one of the most famous productions of the
sixties. As the production continued, it developed a cult following, with some audience
members returning night after night to see the “new” performance with a different audience.

SLIDE 4 – Dionysus in ’69, quotations from Bushnell

Audiences scattered about the garage were free to move during the performance, and often
were asked to speak, move, or dance along with the performers in certain sections. Most of the
participation was managed – though it could have been managed more specifically – but a few
moments strained the “rules” of participation. Schechner points to two of them. First, on one
night, “a bunch of students from Queens College kidnapped Pentheus, preventing his sacrifice
to Dionysus. As the seized him, William Shephard, playing Pentheus, went limp, and Jason
Bosseau, playing Dionysus, jumped between the students and the theater door. A fierce
argument raged between Bosseau/Dionysus and the students. ‘You came here with a plan all
worked out!” he shouted. They agreed and said, “Why not?” Arguments broke out among many
spectators not few of whom thought the whole thing was rigged by the Group. This contingent
cynically whined, “Come on now, we’ve had enough of this, get on with the play we paid money
to see!” Finally Pentheus was carried from the theatre and unceremoniously dumped on Grand
Street. He refused to come back and resume the performance.”

SLIDE 5 – More quotation

The production suspended itself, and then finally a volunteer from the audience who had been
to multiple productions, agreed to play Pentheus’ role, and the performance continues.
Schechner loved the spontaneity of this event, remarking that if he had “planned” the
production, it was only fair that the students should have “planned” an intervention in this way.
Finally, something real had happened in the theatre.

Another production ended with Pentheus’ salvation from the play. The actor William Shepherd
reported having an emotional breakthrough in one performance, and it was so strong that he
simply walked out of the theatre. He later explained that from Pentheus’ point of view, he
found the way out; to simply refuse to be “trapped” in the structure of the play. At that
performance Dionysus simply ceded defeat, and acknowledged that Pentheus had won.
Without the heavy emphasis on participation in the play, and the then-common changes and
interruptions from night to night, such a radical departure from the script would not have been
possible. Schechner was less enthusiastic about this intervention, and in future iterations,
Shephard continued to play Pentheus as intended. Even these one-off interruptions, however,
have gained the qualities of a founding myth for environmental staging, ensemble acting, and
participatory performance. After the production closed, Schechner continued to experiment
with these ideas, though few as spectacularly and graphically as the first production.

SLIDE 5 – Performing Garage Photos

These images show some later productions at the Performing Garage, and especially the ways
that they continued to innovate with audience placement and the actor-spectator relationship
remained close. For Mother Courage, a central acting space encouraged in-the-round acting
and a network of ropes and pulleys attempted to thematize the push-pull, transactional
relationships Mother Courage has with her family and customers in the play. Makbeth, a few
years earlier, was set in a distributed fashion around the garage space, using platforms,
staircases, and balconies for different scenes of the play. This production also used new ritual
content, invented for this production and inserted into a rewritten script, as Dionysus had done.
Schechner continued to innovate formally throughout the seventies with this group, initiating a
trend toward postmodern performance that has stayed with the space and its current
occupant, the Wooster Group.

SLIDE 6 – Grotowski Ideas and Theories

Jerzy Grotowski, on the other hand, developed his techniques separately from the other avant-
garde movements we had been looking at. He studied acting and directing using techniques
from Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, which he studied in Warsaw and Moscow. He founded the
Laboratory Theatre in 1958, and his most famous work derives from the decade or so he spent
training actors and making work with this company in Opole, Poland and later in Warsaw. His
career can be divided into several phases, of which only one, the Theatre of Productions,
created what we might properly call theatrical work. The rest were extratheatrical, and one was
even termed paratheatre by Grotowski. These later experimental methods applied theatrical
techniques to the development of groups, to personal training of the body and the mind, and to
the recreation of ritual ceremonies and contexts based on his own international travel and
research. For this reason, Grotowski and Schechner can be aligned as directors who both
developed the use of ritual in midcentury global theatre.

Two ideas that Grotowski developed during his directorship of the Opole Theatre Laboratory
were his concepts of the “via negativa” and the “poor theatre” aesthetic of his company. As
Grotowski’s training of actors intensified, he required absolute potential in his performers. They
should be able to execute any action or gesture necessary, and they should not be hindered by
either physical or mental blocks from telling a complete story with their bodies and voices. For
this reason, he developed a series of physical actor training exercises which sought to force the
actor to confront and then remove these blocks from their work. While much of the Theatre
Laboratory’s work appeared gymnastic or acrobatic in nature, these methods were not
undertaken for the purpose of acrobatics, clowning, or their own spectacle, as Meyerhold
would have done. Rather, his actors – who he referred to as “holy actors” – used the physical
exercise to limber up the body, to remove physical blocks of musculature and, more
importantly, the mental blocks that preclude the actor from being a near-perfect instrument of
communication in and through the body. The “via negativa” was Grotowski’s way of explaining
this removal of blocks. An actor’s behavior onstage was not an action that expressed desire, as
in “I want to do that,” but rather a result of a need to express an idea or emotion. The actor
“resigns from not doing it.” One must conquer all the reasons, physical, mental and spiritual,
that one would not do a given action on stage. Through this method, actors refine performance
into an art solely based on the actor him or herself.

The Poor Theatre is the aesthetic that Grotowski created in performance to throw emphasis on
this idea of the holy actor and his ultimate flexibility. In a world increasingly saturated by
television, film, and other media, the “technical methods” for reproducing the world surpasses
theatre, Grotowski thought. The only answer was for theatre to stop trying to complete.
Rather, the theatre he built, the poor theatre, is theatre in which “there remains only the living
man, the living man, that is the actor, who can transform himself for the others, the witnesses,
and who can find a sort of relationship with these others, with the spectators. In the end all
that is being done now, is the naked man, this actor.” Poor theatre consists of only the actor,
the audience, the space, and perhaps a few props or costumes. This minimal aesthetic became
Grotowski’s signature style during this period, and it was also influential for many theatrical
minimalists who would succeed him.

SLIDE 7 – Akropolis
The play Akropolis premiered in Poland in 1964, and was presented to the West in 1968 at the
Edinborough Festival. Like Dionysus in ’69, it takes an established text and radically reinvents it.
The original play by Polish playwright Stanislaw Wyspianski takes place in a cathedral in the
Polish city of Krakow on the night before Easter Sunday. In this play, classical and biblical
characters on the tombs and walls come to life, and combine with figures of Polish history in a
sort of historical pageant that tells a story of resurrection, and one which can be “considered as
both salvation from death, intertia and forgetting, but also a task beholden upon each human
being.” The play ends with the mythical and historical figures being assumed back into history.
When Grotowski reinvented the text, he moved the setting from the premodern Wawel
Cathedral in Krakow – a great historical Polish site – to the death camp at Asuchwitz. Grotowski
felt that this site, only a few hours’ drive from Krakow, was a monument to the new and
horrifying modern world. In his interpretation, the same scenes of Helen of Troy, of Jacob and
the Angel, and of others are performed, but they are performed by prisoners of the death camp
as distractions from their work. Each vignette is depicted in “poor theatre” detail, through
striking vocal extremes, held muscles of the face to represent death masks, repetitive
movements evoking work and pain, and a solo violin. Song and chants permeate the piece as
well. The prisoners attempt to break out of their work tasks, which is to build the camp and the
crematorium itself, by playing at these characters from history and myth. The audience was
distributed throughout a large, wooden space, and the actors played in and among the
audience for much of the production. Finally, after the camp was fully created, the prisoners
join in an ecstatic dance, following a Savior played by a rag doll, and they pile into a small grave-
crematorium in the center of the space. In the words of The Grotowksi Institute, “The prisoners,
in constructing a camp on stage and showing with intensity the hellish futility of life in it,
therefore also created, using Wyspiański’s words as the foundation, a certain synthetic
repetition of the history of humanity which forever returns to the same starting point – a site
which is also the centre of inertia.” More information can be found from the Institute at
www.grotowski.net.

The production was notable for its use of innovative acting methods that focused on the body,
the face, and the voice. The physical stamina of the performers was impressive, and their
movements precise, pained, and emotionally evocative. The aesthetic of the production was
also influential, as it demonstrated Grotowski’s poor theatre idea – with words, basic costumes,
and a few props, an entire history of the world, and of the modern destruction of it, could be
told. It was also thought to be a fitting tribute to the pain and suffering of the Jews and other
Holocaust victims. The alien, hostile, cold world of the play is stripped bare to revel the
theatre’s only essential element – the creativity and power of the actor.

SLIDE 8 – Cieslak and physical Training of the Actor

The training method employed by Grotowski at the Theatre laboratory emphasized the physical
training of the body en route to the mental training. I’ve already described the via negativa, but
here are some images of representative techniques, some of which have made their way into
acting classroom curricula. The training method can be divided into two tracks, the corporals
and the plastiques. The corporals are exercises in physical movement of the body, including
handstands, leaps, types of walking, and jumps. The tiger leap, on the bottom right of the
screen, involves a running jump over a partner, landing on one’s should in a somersault, and
returning to standing. Stephen Wangh’s book An Acrobat of the Heart describes this technique
as useful for simultaneously training the body and the mind, as it forces the student to confront
blocks, resistances, and fears in the completion of the task. The plastiques are flexibility
exercises, essential long-form stretching of the body, face, and limbs. A frequently used
exercise here is the cat exercise, in the center of the slide here, which simulates the movements
of a cat arising from rest in order to wake up the arms, legs, and spine. The ideal actor is the
flexible one, for whom any extraordinary action is simply a matter of course. Grotowski’s own
star actor, Richard Cieslak, taught a number of courses in the corporals and plastiques. Cieslak
took a main role in many of Grotowski’s works in the sixties, including Akropolis, and his
exceptional control over his body and face greatly contributed to the success of Grotowski’s
productions.

SLIDE 9 – Environmental Staging of Grotowski

Finally, Grotowski used environmental staging, similar to Schechner, but used it in a different
way than the Performance Group. In these photos and renderings of three productions of
Grotowski’s company, the space is used as a way of tuning the emotional state of the viewer.
Grotowski and his designer, Jerzy Grurawski (very similar names), reconfigured spaces to
provide particular types of viewing experiences. In The Constant Prince, a play which mostly
takes place in medieval-style torture chamber, Grotowski set the audience among he sides of
the space and above the action, to provide the sense of a medical theatre of surgey viewing-
room. His Dr. Faustus placed the audience at two long banquet tables, and the actors played on
top of the tables in a runway fashion. Kordian, set in a mental institution, drew inspiration from
metal bunkbeds, and placed the audiences in haphazard groupings around the performers,
giving a sense of chaos and unpredictability. In each of these, as in Akropolis, Grotowski used
the space itself to help place the audience in a particular mood for viewing, which them
underscored the themes of the production itself. While this may not be surprising in today’s
world of immersive and environmental productions like Sweeney Todd or The Great Comet,
this use of space was revolutionary at the time. Today’s audience experiments have Grotowski
to thank, in part, for their innovations.

Taking these two directors together, we see some common themes. The use of ritualized and
non-naturalistic movement is certainly one of them. They also staged environmentally, and
focused on the body of the actor or the ensemble as the main bearer of meaning. Both worked
with established scripts, but they rewrote them in order to create productions that were
distinctive statements of their own directorial vision. As the seventies dawned, more directors
would come to take this stance, and the auteur director would be a more influential part of
theatrical production. No longer was the text the major conveyor of meaning, at least in
performances such as these. The body, the director, and the performance space itself were all
taking on further meanings, creating performance in which there was not only one text, but
perhaps multiple ones. We will develop these themes more in future lectures.