The best known of Mayakovsky's plays are Vladimir Mayakovsky, A Tragedy (1913), Mystery-Bouffe (the second version, 1921), The Bedbug (1928-29), and The Bathhouse (1930). These works appeared in 1968 in a book entitled The Complete Plays of Vladimir Mayakovsky. However, between 1920 and 1930 Mayakovsky wrote several other dramatic texts. Among these are And What If?… May First Daydreams in a Bourgeois Armchair, A Small Play About Priests Who Do Not Understand What Is Meant by the Holiday, How Some People Spend Time Celebrating Holidays (all three of these playlets were written in 1920 for May Day), The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle (written in 1920 for the circus), Yesterday's Exploit (playlet, 1921), Radio October (1926), and Moscow Is Burning (written in 1930 for the circus).

The Balcony opened at the Ruth Escobar Theatre in São Raulo, Brazil, on December 27, 1969; it was performed through 1971 and during most of 1972 and was seen by thousands of people. In this presentation of Jean Genet's play, which was directed by Victor Garcia and designed by Wladimir Pereira Cardoso, the theatre became the scenery itself—a sculpture inside of which the actors played, flying in the air.

Wladimir pereira Cardoso, 39, is a former student of Architecture and Fine Arts whose theatrical designs have won several national prizes (including one for The Monsters, directed by Jérôme Savary, who now leads The Grand Magic Circus). When Garcia arrived in Brazil to work for Ruth Escobar, he found Cardoso ready with sixteen sketches for the reformation of scenic space. They were deeply influenced by Walter Gropius’ conception of Total Theatre.

How can I compress into a few printed pages the vitality, the excitement, the heartbreaks, frustrations, the wonder, joys, sadness, the miracles, and ecstasy that have characterized the “Journey into Body Consciousness” that many talented people who have been part of the Dancers’ Workshop have experienced together. Some of these people have gone on to pursue their own journeys, a few of us have remained to deepen and clarify, and new people have come in to reinforce and add their own intensities and lifestyles. There has been one thread along the way that has been the ongoing aspect of this journey: an attempt to find a process that unites personal growth with artistic growth, life and art, one aspect feeding off of the other and continuously coming together in new ways.

Edinburgh is an impressive place to hold a festival: its center, where virtually all of the activities take place, is dominated by a sixteenth-century castle perched at the top of a steep craggy rock. From there the “Royal Mile,” consisting of a main artery, myriad picturesque alleys, and tall grey sandstone buildings, stretches to Holyrock Palace, the domicile of former Scottish kings. “Auld Reekie,” as this area is called, has a brooding quality to it, somewhat like the old city of Prague: One feels it should always be raining. The hilly geography extends to the southeast, where the legendary “Arthur's Seat,” described as a “volcanic eminence,” overlooks Holyrock Park and the rest of the city.

Among the productions at the 1973 Dubrovnik Festival, the one which elicited the greatest interest from the tourists, including vacationing governmental leaders, was actually an implicit deprecation of the exploitation of and by tourists. The performances of Christopher Columbus were presented this past summer on board an oversized replica of the Santa Maria, as it sailed with crew and audience out of the Dubrovnik harbor, continued through the night in search of the new world, and came into port to discover a new land exactly like the old one from which they had departed two hours earlier—a waterfront lined with restaurants, souvenir stands, and tour boats.

The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, a circus scenario, was written in the Fall of 1920 during Mayakovsky's work at Window ROSTA. It is possible to establish almost the exact date from the text. The line stating that Pilsudski, the Polish Champion, “doesn't want to fight anymore” refers to the armistice at the Polish front concluded on Oct 20, 1920. In the last lines, the Referee urges spectators to join the Red Army in the fight against Wrangel; the Red Army defeated Wrangel on Nov. 15, 1920. Thus, “The Championship” must have been written between Oct. 20 and Nov. 15, 1920.

The propaganda themes and characters from “Championship” are also present in other works written by Mayakovsky in the Fall of 1920. The title, The Championship of the Universal Class Struggle, is a line in the poem “150,000,000” written in 1919-20.

If we examine environmental theatre workshops from a viewpoint outside of the magical world of the theatre, they appear to be a form of social group work. People congregate regularly under the supervision of a group leader, and they subject themselves to certain processes that elicit great expenditures of energy on activities which apparently are devoid of specific practical results. In contrast to most human institutions of these hyperspecialized times, environmental theatre workshops are devoted to experiencing the wholeness of human life and reflecting this experience in art. In this article I examine the technology of environmental theatre in terms of basic biological and social events that occur at these sessions. I am concerned especially with the flow of energies between the perceptual and motor worlds of the performer as he achieves a high degree of interaction with other performers and with his environment.

One of the most imaginative and innovative productions of recent London seasons was Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. It was staged by the National Theatre of Great Britain in the Spring of 1971. Arrabal set his microcosmic fantasy on an island inhabited by a solitary man who lives without any knowledge whatsoever of civilization or mankind. As the play begins, this creature stands midstage, terrified by the roar of an approaching jet aircraft. The intensity of the sound builds as the aircraft passes low overhead. A deafening crash follows. The creature, petrified with fear, falls to the floor and hides his head. At this point, the second of the play's two characters appears. He approaches and announces himself as the only survivor from the crash. The panic-stricken creature flees, uttering bird-like screams of terror.

In January, 1930, the Soviet Central Agency of State Circuses asked the poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky to write the text for a circus pantomime to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1905 Revolution. Natalya Briukhanenko, a friend of Mayakovsky and a secretary in the “Klubnyi Repertuar” publishing house that contracted to publish Moscow Is Burning three weeks before the poet's death, left the following recollection: “All the possibilities of the circus were to be exploited: trapezes, water, etc…. Mayakovsky liked the idea. The circus technique, stadium, mass show, all this encouraged him to work….” [Wiktor Woroszylski, The Life of Mayakovsky, The Orion Press, New York, 1970, p. 512.]

“1905 or Moscow Is Burning was an entirely new phenomenon in the field of circus pantomime. It was a sharp political satire developed in motion-picture style in separate sequences.

The fourth annual Festival de los Teatros Chicanos was held in San Jose, California, on June 15-24, 1973. It was a gathering of teatros from the many different regions in the United States where Chicanos—persons of Mexican-American descent—have settled. There also were several theatre groups from Mexico itself.

Chicano theatre has roots in the ancient culture of the Mayans, but its contemporary awakening dates from 1965, when Luis Valdez first organized El Teatro Campesino, a theatre based in San Juan Bautista, that played in the fields for the huelgistas (strikers) of the United Farm Workers in support of the strikes and boycotts against table grapes and, more recently, iceberg lettuce.

At least as far back as Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872) scientists have studied analogic (as distinct from digital) modes of communication. Clearly all artists other than writers are technicians of the analogic.

Unlike many other dance events in which setting is background for choreography, Nikolais dancers are immediately involved in a visual matrix. The relationship of dance motion to the total environment is established largely through the use of light. A solo may be illuminated as a major protagonist in the dance event and then instantly be absorbed as a minor element in the matrix. A duet may be performed down center, but the concern with the total environment is always present.

Directly related to Nikolais’ treatment of the entire stage space are his view of man and his theory of decentralization. Alwin Nikolais sees man as a minute, though important, mechanism in the universe. Sometimes man has a major relationship to other elements; other times the relationship is a minor one in which he is obscured by the mechanistic workings of the universe. He is not dominant.

The Tenth World Festival of Youth and Students was of such proportions that it seems difficult to believe it really happened. “Think big,” I was told before I went to East Berlin, capital of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), “only then will you have some idea of what to expect.” Even with this advice, I was totally unprepared for what was probably the biggest festival in the world since World War II.

The opening ceremony unleashed activity that grew in momentum, scope, and size for nine days. As part of a festival by and for young people, it was much more colorful and boisterous than any Olympic opening. Delegations of young people from 119 countries marched through the city of Berlin for three hours before arriving at the festival stadium, which was already packed with nearly sixty thousand people. The event itself was so big that the delegations had been split into two groups in the morning.

Kinesic and proxemic behaviors are only two of many cross-referenced expressive means that convey information about situations. Because of this, communicative aspects of movement and position, like rules of language structure (grammar, syntax, etc.), have tended to remain “invisible,”overshadowed by subject matter and other expressive means. This is not the case in Scott Burton's Behavior Tableaux, a five-part performance piece composed of approximately 80 silent tableaux vivants. Some tableaux, lasting only a few seconds, are static pictures exhibiting proxemic (spatial) relationships between interactants; others, lasting as long as five minutes, offer isolated elements of kinesic behavior (movement), which develop the scene beyond what could be conveyed by spatial relationships alone.

Behavior Tableaux is about how males relate to each other through “body language” and manipulations of “personal space” within five distinct group situations: the harmonious peer-group; the discordant peer-group; the group and leader; the group and outsider; and the “non-group.”

Red Grooms is an artist whose creative activities have been numerous and varied in arts peripheral to (but making use of) painting, such as film, sculpture and performance.

In 1963, Grooms began to have one-man shows regularly in New York. These took place at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on 57th Street. At least two of his five art exhibits in this gallery included films—Fat Feet (1966) and Tappy Toes (1970). Prior to 1963, Grooms had “performed” an action-painting entitled “A Play Called Fire” (1958), a proto-Happening called The Burning Building (1959), and a Happening-like work dubbed The Magic Train Ride (1960).

While Grooms’ art includes a wide range of mediums, there appears to be no sharp stylistic differentiation between them. His paintings, films and performance pieces all exhibit a highly personal, if not idiosyncratic, way of working. Many of his friends appear as performers in his films and theatre pieces, and as cutouts in his constructions.

Few artists have managed to play a leading role in the avant-garde for half a century without taking their share of barbs and innuendos. This holds particularly true for a director working within the sensitive, politicized milieu of Soviet theatre, and Nikolai Okhlopkov is no exception. His colleagues tended to regard him as a dangerous anomaly, someone who, like Kafka's Odradek, does no apparent harm to anyone, but whose mere survival is almost painful.

Western theatregoers are highly suspicious of anyone working in a political theatre that upholds the Establishment. Soviet reviewers, both those who support Okhlopkov and those who deplore his “social irresponsibility,” are obliged to discuss one major question: does his theatre reflect the essence of life in an evolving socialist society? Further complications arise from the fact that any director subsidized by the state is continually called upon to affirm the expectations of both spectator and sponsor.