Except for Carnival, Bumba-meu-Boi, one of the most complex manifestations of Brazilian popular theatre, is the only festival that is still held throughout all Brazil. It is both a procession and a dramatic performance; its basic theme concerns the death and resurrection of an ox. Given the central theme of the Ox, it would appear that Bumba-meu-Boi should occur only in basically pastoral areas; however, it is performed in mining, fishing, and agricultural areas as well. It occurs during the “King's Day,” between Christmas and January 6, and during the Festas Juninas, the St. Anthony's Day, St. John's Day and St. Peter's Day celebrations, between June 13 and 29.

In parts of Brazil where life is still relatively traditional and provincial, the Bumba-meu-Boi maintains its primary structure, main characters, and the basic theme of the Ox.

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

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.

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 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).

Ramlila is a cycle play lasting ten to thirty-two days performed annually outdoors in the Hindi speaking region of north India. Its season is around the Dasarha holidays in September-October. The performance is based on Tulsidas’ late 16th-century epic poem Ramacaritamanas (RCM), a Hindi version of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. Although thousands of Ramlilas are performed, we shall describe only one—the 31-day cycle of Ramnagar across the Ganga River from Varanasi (Benares or Kasi). Due to the patronage of the Maharaja of Benares who resides in Ramnagar this Ramlila is the most extensive, best performed, and draws the largest audiences of any. It developed its present shape during the early and mid 19th-century. The whole subject of Ramlila is vast, touching on themes of pilgrimage, bhakti (devotional worship), Hindu ideas of reincarnation, the nature of a mixed oral-literate culture of immense sophistication, relationship between government, Maharaja, and ordinary people.

Come, come whoever you are,
An unbeliever, a fire-worshipper come.
Our convent is not of desperation.
Even if you have broken your vows a hundred times,
Come, come again.

On December 17, 1273 A.D., a universal genius, one of the greatest servants of humanity, the founder of the Mevlevi Sufi Brotherhood, the poet Mevlana Jalal al-din Rumi died at Konya. He was a philosopher and mystic of Islam, but not a Muslim of the orthodox type. His doctrine advocates unlimited tolerance, positive reasoning, goodness and charity, awareness through love. To him and to his disciples all religions are more or less good, as all are roads leading to the truth. Looking with the same eye on Muslim, Jew and Christian alike, his peaceful and tolerant teaching has reached men of all sects and creeds.

The expatriate Hungarian theatre company known as Squat has quite literally attempted to make their life their art. Because the two are seen as identical, art is not an activity that can be given up. They are totally committed. They did give up their theatre when authorities in Budapest prohibited their performances, and after performing in their apartment and other illegal places for four years and giving up their passports, they permanently gave up their country and moved to France, then Holland, and now New York. In the West they took the name Squat because it suggested new settlers—both geographical and spiritual.

Originally the group formed in 1969 as Kassák Theatre at the Kassák Culture House in Budapest. In 1972 when the company did its first completely new work, The Skanzen Killers, the group's license to perform was withdrawn on the grounds that it was “obscene” and “apt to be misinterpreted from a political point of view.”

Studio Scarabee was founded in 1965 when Adri Boon, a painter, presented a series of happening-related art performances at the Hague Art Circle. Since then, the activities of the Dutch group have been characterized by an extensive investigation of the possibilities in mixing different mediums. As a brochure of the Studio points out, Scarabee seeks to practice a form of total theatre in the tradition of Schlemmer and Moholy-Nagy, using techniques resembling those employed by Josef Svoboda. Havana JoJo, Scarabee's latest work, which was presented at The New Theatre Festival in Baltimore, incorporates many of the techniques and themes developed by the studio over the years. Popular culture is the basic source of the subject matter; elements of shock, violence and sado-masochism are parodied; transvestism is displayed (in the form of a fire-eating female impersonator); camp humor abounds; dadaist and surrealist principles of association between the elements are strong.

Alan Finneran, the director of Soon 3, came from San Francisco to the festival with a new piece called Black Water Echo. Finneran refers to the piece as a “task activated performance landscape.” He means that the performance consists primarily of a series of precise tasks, the performance of which alters the space (or landscape) of the piece, thereby dictating a new series of tasks that will further alter the landscape, dictating yet another series of tasks, and so on. By the end, the landscape has been radically changed and the audience has witnessed an entire biography of that change.

The basic landscape of Black Water Echo is a twenty foot square, marked on the floor with a covering of dark plastic. As the audience enters, the square is nearly empty: along its edges are arranged a series of objects that will be used throughout the performance.