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 Italian commedia dell'arte was 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.

There have been few attempts to seriously examine the architecture and design of traditional popular entertainments. For the most part, popular forms have not been thought to involve a high level of design or systematic organization of performance space. Yet, over the years, there. has emerged a distinctive scenography of popular entertainment. It has borrowed from conventional theatre, festivals, and folk performance. Essentially, however, it constitutes a highly independent scenographic strain While interest in that strain continues to grow, the scenography itself is rapidly disappearing. Increasingly, traditional popular forms are influenced by the scenography of the newest popular entertainments, television and film. The scenographic base of these new forms is quite different from that of traditional amusements: film and television are naturalist in their orientation. They are concerned more with presenting a seemingly coherent reality than with creation of spectacle and fantasy for their own sake—and the naive art of traditional popular forms is gradually giving way to the orderly and precise scenography of mass culture.

To the theatre historian, the year 1830 means Hugo and the premiere of Hernani. For the great majority of the theatre public of the period, however, Hugo was a name scarcely known and the battle of Hernani was a minor passing scandal. Neither the new romantic experiments nor the declining neoclassic tradition they were attempting to replace represented theatre to this public. For them, theatre was the rope-dancing of Mme. Saqui, the pantomimes of Déburau, Kiony the elephant performing in plays written especially for him, the view of Timbuktu at the Cosmorama, the spectacular melodramas of Bouchardy, or the full-scale Napoleonic battle recreated at the Cirque-Olympique.

This astonishingly varied popular theatre was the direct descendant of the fair theatres, which had challenged the entertainment monopoly of the state-supported theatres, with varying degrees of success, for two hundred years. Then, primarily because of the rapidly changing political situation, the great fairs had disappeared. The Foire Saint-Germain, destroyed by fire in 1762, was never rebuilt.

If too many murders or atrocities are committed in the theatre, if violence is staged with a taste for shocking detail, or if too much blood spills, the name “Grand Guignol” is usually evoked. The image of Grand Guignol as a theatre of horror is just, but the exact nature and magnitude of the violence and horror are not usually understood. By the same token, the history and stage practices of this theatre are not generally known either. Despite a long existence of more than six decades, the Théâtre du Grand Guignol has been disregarded by historians and theoreticians as an insignificant form of entertainment. However, the fact that Grand Guignol represents a highly theatrical and specialized genre, which involved innovative mise en scène techniques and a unique performer-audience relationship, makes it interesting and relevant.

In many respects the stage magician is an initiate in some of the subtlest, most sophisticated challenges ever to face a performing artist. Where he succeeds, his success is due to his unique solutions to problems that are by no means peculiar to his craft. They are problems of the deepest concern to many actors as well. The following observations compare the art of the actor with that of the magician. An effort is made to identify an area of both practical and theoretical concern that bridges theatre and the neighboring field of popular entertainment.

Most art conceals the complexity of its manufacture. In the performing arts, the problem of concealment is compounded because we do not see the product separate from its maker—nor do we even necessarily see it at the completion of its manufacture. The performing artist demonstrates the process of manufacture, and a large portion of our appreciation stems from his continual affirmation of its simplicity in the face of our knowledge of its inherent complexity.

Although we can conjecture about commedia in a historical framework, we cannot know what it was like. There are no existing scripts, no photos. There are only a few paintings, a few sparse descriptions, and a horde of mostly untranslated scenarios. Yet, a great interest in commedia continues. Anyone can open the drawer marked commedia dell'arte, but, having opened it, how does one know what to choose from it? For some, commedia means a dusty reincarnation of the postures and poses of a Callot, charming in print, but deadly on the stage. The magnetic appeal of commedia, for me, has been to rediscover the magic of the performer: how he worked, what he did, and to some extent, why he did it, consciously or not. The only possible approach is an inductive one. We must begin where we are.

In writing on theatre, various authors have pointed out that circus-type performances have always been more prevalent than performances of literary drama; that circus-type performance has been a deep secondary tradition of the theatre from which the legitimate stage has repeatedly drawn new strength and vitality; and that the circus is looked to by the public “for violent satisfactions, the intentions of which do not deceive them.” I use the term “circus-type” to emphasize an important distinction between the very ancient “circus-type” skills of contortionists, equilibrists, tumblers, jugglers, clowns, etc., and the modern form of “circus,” even though the latter is the most obviously significant depository of the former.

The modem circus is by no means a direct descendant of the ancient Roman circus. Roman circuses, such as Circus Maximus, were architectural structures designed primarily for chariot races.

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.

Just a few words. The theatrical program of the Proletkult does not involve the “utilization of the values of the past” or the “invention of new forms of theatre” but the abolition of the very institution of the theatre as such, replacing it with a showplace for achievements in the theatre or with an instrument for raising the standard of training of the masses in their day-to-day life. The real task of the scientific section of the Proletkult in the field of the theatre is to organize theatre studios and to work out a scientific system for raising this standard.

All the rest that is being done is “provisional”; to fulfill secondary, not basic, aims of the Proletkult. The “provisional” runs along two lines under the general heading of revolutionary content.

1. Representational-narrative theatre (static, real-life—the right wing): the Proletkult's Zori, Lena, and a series of not fully realized productions of the same type—this being the direction of the former Workers Theatre with the Central Committee of Proletkult.

On March 14, 1920, Bertolt Brecht wrote to Doris Hasenfratz (Doris Manheim) that he had just returned to Munich at midday after a fifteen-hour train ride from Berlin and had gone directly to the cabaret Charivari where the comedian Karl Valentin was playing; Brecht sat “convulsed with laughter until 11 o'clock.” Bernhard Reich, a director closely associated with Brecht during the twenties, describes the fascination Brecht had with these performances:

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

The Bread and Puppet Theatre has often been described as a street theatre whose desire is to reach a popular audience. Often this has meant performing in streets, parks, and city ghettos, doing anti-war parades, setting up workshops in poor neighborhoods, or building puppets with children and getting them involved in the preparation of a show. However, along with these outdoor performances, they have always done indoor shows. There are obvious differences between a “chamber play” such as Fire, played in a specific area before a limited number of spectators, and a street piece like A Man Says Good-bye to His Mother: Although both plays have the same “subject” (the war in Vietnam), the first one conveys the story by the form itself—movements, sounds, colors, volumes, etc.—and it is, in a way, the spectator's job to “read” it through all the assembled elements.

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.