The group Ouroboros takes its name from an alchemical symbol: a dragon that forms a perfect circle by holding its tail in its mouth. The symbol, according to the group, alludes to the structuralist tenet of the perfect autonomy of the signifier.

Pier Luigi Pieralli, the director of Ouroboros, created The Death of Geometry from a poem by Giuliano Scabia. The poem has the same relationship to the performance as it might have, for example, to a musical composition by Morton Feldman. The words are rendered “musical” by being stripped of any verbal value. Syllables are isolated, protracted and repeated; they proliferate other sounds (some of which are on tape) and the cumulative effect is rather meditative in a way that recalls Cage.

Alan Finneran, founder and director of SOON 3, comes from a visual-arts background, having studied sculpture and painting in Ann Arbor, where he also started The Third Incident Company. Since moving to San Francisco in 1973 by way of Boston—where he was a cofounder and director of Zone—his creations have progressed from gigantic, technologically complex structures that, ideally, required a gymnasium-sized performance space to small intimate pieces that only need a twenty-foot-square playing area. In the Cinemasculpture to be Performed, as he called the large-scale steel-and-plastic modular fabrications, Finneran tried to create a unique “hybrid performance form” synthesizing sculpture, film, and performance. Evolving from the cinemasculptures and retaining several connections, A Wall in Venice/3 Women/Wet Shadows represents Finneran's latest focus. The piece, hereafter referred to as “Venice,” was performed on April 28 and 29, 1978 at SOON 3's Dreamland Ballroom at 2678 California Street, San Francisco.

In September 1923, four months after the premiere of his provocative circus production of The Wiseman and three years before his recognition as Europe's foremost filmmaker, Sergei Eisenstein collaborated with the writer and linguist Sergei Tretyakov in the preparation of two new revolutionary plays, Do You Hear, Moscow?! and Gas Masks. More than Nikolai Foregger and Meyerhold, more than all of his teachers, the twenty-five-year-old Eisenstein was now considered by many as the most radical director in a theatre-mad Moscow. His manifesto “Montage of Attractions” [LEF #1 May 1923] and extreme reworking of Alexander Ostrovsky's nineteenth-century comedy, Enough Stupidity in Every Wiseman set theatrical circles on edge. [See T61 for a translation of the essay and a description of this production.] The young proponents of left-wing culture, centered around the poet Mayakovsky and the periodical LEF, hailed Eisenstein as the next intellectual/artistic savior.

The gymnasium measured 24 × 18 meters. The space was articulated primarily through the use of light. All other elements were reduced to two dimensions, so that the space appeared empty even though there was a “street” represented by a narrow strip of asphalt that entered from the open door and transversed the entire gymnasium. An obstacle on the side of the street was represented by a circle of 60-watt light bulbs attached to a metal base. Another obstacle was a sheet of plexiglass on which was projected a slide showing a window. To the right of the entrance were eighteen red velvet theatre seats with large plates of glass leaning on them to prevent anyone from sitting down. On the floor, perpendicular to the street, were six strips of wood that copied the line of vertical beams that supported the ceiling.

We chose this title because we like it. What is proposed here is only a moment of our research. We have analyzed the ways in which, among an infinite number of possibilities, the elements that constitute the language of the theatre may combine: space, time, rhythm, light, sound, objects and the “actor.” The latter, however, is continually attempting to work with language. We cannot help but glance at the uninterrupted flux of reality and notice the bustle of a thousand details all linked in a truly surprising manner to the universal situation. Our gratitude to Nietzche, to Laforgue and others who gave us permission to quote.

As for the rest, the text of our work does not depend as much on words as on concrete stimuli (objects, documents, photographs, slides, verbal material) that each “actor” grasps in its everyday “existing.”

Presagidel Vampiro (Presages of the Vampire) is not a performance. It is the refusal of performance. Presages: something extremely definite in itself—the single presentiment—but inarticulated, or better articulated according to a procedure not of “necessity” but of demonstration. Articulated a posteriori.

Presages of the Vampire is a selection from studies on the theme of the rapport inside-outside. The outside in the inside and the inside in the outside: the Duchampian door.

Presages of the Vampire leads to a reflection-decomposition of the theatre in the theatre, of time in the theatre, of space in the theatrical space, Vampire. One can have presentiments of war, presentiments of a storm, presentiments of being attacked, presentiments of death.