The French theatre group ATEM (Atelier Théâtre et Musique) was formed by composer Georges Aperghis in the fall of 1975 to begin explorations that would lead to a series of productions in which commonplace gestures and sounds are scored according to musical principles. The group has developed what Aperghis calls a “grammar” consisting of “systems” that provide a means of structuring fragments of everyday life, setting them off in such a way that the spectator perceives them afresh rather than ignoring them as commonplace.

Five actor-musicians, together with Aperghis, comprise the entire group, taking on all of the research, administrative, technical, and performance responsibilities. They are subsidized in part by the city of Bagnolet, a bedroom suburb of Paris with a population of 36,000, and have attempted to relate their work to everyday life in the community.

In theatre, a heightened perception and experience of structure is possible in three kinds of work. The first is theatre based on strong codified conventions, as in Oriental theatre and a large part of Western folk theatre. In viewing Kabuki or No productions my awareness of structure is heightened not only because of the great variety and distribution of theatrical signs and their apparent systematic codification but also because, as a foreigner to Japanese culture and theatre, my attitude during the production is one of deciphering.

This. This is. This is a. This is a simple. This is a simple additive. This is a simple additive process. Obviously patterns of this sort can also be employed with visual or musical elements, but since we are dealing here with typeface on paper, it seems most appropriate to begin with words.

Then there are. Rotations then there. Are rotations then. There are rotations. Or at least “rotations” is the term I like to use for patterns of this sort. We could also consider this a type of phasing. Since there are four words but only three are permitted in each sentence, the word pattern falls out of phase with the syntactical pattern and the two do not come back in sync until the word pattern has been repeated three times and the syntactical pattern four times. Again, this is a device that can be easily applied to nonverbal materials.

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

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

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

Over the sweeping view of the stage the dancers turn and pivot, some take steps, all of them talk, gesture, but none leave the given spheres in which they began.

Him or Me: a portrait of a detective drama, the second of Jim Neu's plays to be presented in New York, opened at the Squat Theatre on March 9, 1979. The performers were Nancy Shinkle, Carol Mullins, John Nesci, Jim Neu and Bob Feldman, saxophonist. Recorded music was composed by Lenny Pickett. Bill Wert designed the projections. The play was directed by Jim Neu and John Nesci.

The audience is seated in tiers of seats facing a square, flat performing area which is quite bare. The large storefront window of the Squat Theatre is concealed by a white backdrop that doubles as a screen and onto which slides are projected from backstage. Lighting, pink and white, is projected from overhead and from two downstage side spots. Scene settings are suggested by light and music with a minimum of props—table, chairs, a divan, etc.

More than five years ago, a group of young English artists formed a workshop in London under the direction of Anthony Howell. This group, eventually to be known as the Theatre of Mistakes, uses improvisational exercises—strictly controlled by formal structure—to develop performances.

Howell concedes that he was influenced in particular by an exercise of the Living Theatre, used in Paradise Now, in which one person performed an action and another copied it. The interaction was far more interesting to Howell than anything the traditional theatre could offer. And he also felt that this exercise was more significant than the “histrionics” of the Living Theatre because it implied a new means of working in a group to create performance art.

For the next two years, such concepts as repetition of each other's actions were used as the basis for exercises for the group, and performances were built from chosen exercises.

Is it a: 1) critical method, 2) an artistic process, 3) neither or 4) both?

The correct answer to the original question is—structuralism is both, as Barthes so succinctly states. But what of the phenomenon referred to as “structural film“? Is “structural film” “structuralist film” in disguise?

Many structuralist plays could be made quite directly into structuralist films. The time or durational structures of the live performances could simply be filmed, with or without the filter of changed camera angle and variation of frame size, to make a movie. Even the three-dimensional spatial structures important to most structuralist plays could be represented or “translated” in film. (For example, two alternating and interwoven stories separated spatially on stage could be distinguished in a film by using different color filters for each; spatial progressions could be translated into color progressions; etc.) Yet it would be impossible to make most structuralist films into live performances. Structuralist films tend to exploit the high degree of mechanical control inherent in the medium, a control that is not possible in live performance. Thus an analysis of selected films that may be called structuralist should tell us something about the media of film and theatre and about structuralism itself.

As a sculptor, photographer, playwright and director, Michael Kirby has been and is still an articulate proponent of the interanimation of the arts. As a practitioner as well as a theoretician of several arts, he has made and defended work that not only mixes media but also transposes forms and preoccupations of one art to others. Kirby’s commitment to the lively cross-fertilization of the arts partially accounts for the rise of Structuralist Theatre since that movement, in certain respects, appears to have been influenced in important ways by the tendency of Minimalist Art referred to as systemic painting.

Some of Kirb’s Structuralist plays, like Revolutionary Dance and Identity Control, are composed of a series of dramatic, narrative vignettes that have no apparent causal or chronological relation. Kirby created his dramatic incidents as a painter might choose a color or shape, i.e., with an eye to its place in the overall formal structure.