John Arden has been a bête-noire for middlebrows and a blue-eyed boy for intellectuals ever since Serjeant Musgrave's Dance got its first critical drubbing at the Royal Court Theatre in October 1959. But until recently Arden's reception has had little to do with political or ethical sympathies. The most conservative critics have been ready to go into raptures over Wesker's william-morrisy socialism or Orton's freebooting sexuality: and such playwrights are welcome to declare cold war on the establishment till kingdom come, as well it may. They have, it is assumed, the decency to stand up and be counted: the sabbatical critics therefore sink back into their stalls to do the counting, handing out awards to promising playwrights as if to bright but bolshy sixth-formers who'll soon learn the right side of their bread to butter. But with Arden the talent-spotters never used to know where they were: turning his own declared pacifism topsy-turvy in Musgrave one minute, the next he'd be suggesting that the action of Armstrong's Last Goodnight, a play about medieval Scotland in dog-gaelic, was tangential to the Congolese civil war.

I am in a state of culture shock. When this way of naming my state occurred to me, I thought it metaphoric. Now I do not. I have decided that the Public Participatory Event (PPE) was a nascent community, a subculture appearing as an event. An event is more ephemeral than the network of structures we call a “culture,” but the event I concluded a few days ago leaves me more a stranger at home and work than I felt the first day I stepped foot in either. I have no choice but to reconceive the assumption which I have carried to much of my scholarly work in religious studies and anthropology, namely, that culture is a configuration largely of language, thought, and art. I am certain now that culture also resides quite literally in the bones; that is, in our patterns of moving, breathing, walking and so on.

Critics show more toleration than enthusiasm for Marlowe as a dramatic artist. They praise his thought, his poetry, his psychology, but they offer excuses for his stagecraft. This is a pity, for there is no need to excuse it. Marlowe handles his medium with imagination and subtlety.

The root of the difficulty lies in mistaking a drama of spectacle for a drama of character. Marlowe was writing in a period of transition, when an abstract theatre was fast becoming a narrative one, and the development entailed an important shift of emphasis. Narrative throws stress on the characters of men and the motives that lead to the actions portrayed, while the abstract world of the morality play uses the stage action as a projection of an inward and spiritual action of the soul. A drama in which action is image was changing to a drama in which action is fact.

Self-Service, a piece without spectators, was performed in the summer of 1967 in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. It spanned four months, June through September. Thirty-one activities were selected from a much larger number. Their time and locality distribution were determined by chance methods. Participants selected events from those offered for their city; each had to pick at least one, although doing many or all was preferable. Details of time and place were flexible within each month; choices made from month to month overlapped, some actions recurring.

This is a recording. A man comes out on stage, stands down-center and begins to breathe. He stands there for a long time. His head is tilted slightly up, his eyes seeming to fix on a point in the balcony. His shoulders are down and his chest is not blown up, but his elbows ride high to the rear as if to suggest a soldier at attention. He wears a white sleeveless undershirt and untapered dungarees. And he doesn't move. Once or twice he wobbles an inch. Perhaps he does this deliberately: homing, by approximation, on the dead center of his gravity. For the rest, the only movement you see on stage is the occasional rippling and stretching of his undershirt across the bellows of his breath. No one can say this man's presence is sympathetic; and no one can say it is hostile.

Among the cultural odds and ends that supply the architectural imagination are prevailing conceptions of the human body—its functions, perfectibility, and possibilities for pleasure and pain. Though architects of various periods have employed ideal proportions of the human body in conscious decisions about the structural proportions of monuments and buildings, this is not the only way, nor the most interesting way, in which the human body informs architecture. What is also meant by the body's relationship to architecture is the memory of body states that architecture evokes in the observer. These body states are recalled in the form of their psychological derivatives: moods, affects, and emotions. These derivatives initiate and qualify our aesthetic judgments about architecture.

Director and playwright Stan Lai premiered his marathon play Ago in Shanghai at the end of 2019. Staged in his signature “lotus pond” theatre-in-the-surround, Ago is fueled by Lai’s cross-cultural sensibilities and Buddhist philosophy. If theatre is an art of illusion-making and life is like a dream, Lai turns theatre-going into a ritual of self-encounter and self-reflection, where an illusion mirrors a dream.

As the very first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic ebbed in the United States, a new production of Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring (1975) appeared online. Performed on Senegal’s shoreline, Dancing at Dusk resituates Bausch’s choreography within the beach’s formative histories of racialized violence, colonialism, and white supremacy. In this context, the performance also prompts considerations of the relationships between the enduring histories of racial capitalism and the futures of choreographic economies.

Between November 1890 and March 1892. the Théâtre d'Arstaged seven productions. It was during these two years that it became associated with the symbolist poets and finally came to represent the symbolist poetic in theatre. The staging of pierr Quillard's play La Fille aux Mains Coupées (The Girl with Cut-off Hands), the first stage production of Maurice Maeterlinck's plays L'Intruse (The Intruder) and Les Aveugles (The Blind), the recitation of poetry from the stage, and the staging of Song of Songs-all at the Théâtre d'Art—represent four different aspects of symbolist performance.

The Girl with Cut-off Hands, a mystery in two scenes performed on March 19th and 20th, 1891, was the first distinctly symbolist production in regard to its mise-en-scene and design. To a great extent it influenced the staging practice of Théâtre d'Art. The play was performed on a stage separated from the audience by a gauze scrim immediately behind the footlights.

In the fifth century B.C., the Jews of Persia were saved from a plot to murder them. Their deliverance, narrated in the Scroll of Esther, is celebrated each year on the holiday of Purim in the Hebrew month of Adar (February/March). The holiday includes a variety of performances: masquerade, pranks, intoxication and general licentiousness pervade the holiday and contribute to the inversion of the social order that is its hallmark. One major performance is the ceremonial public reading of the Scroll of Esther, where the ralson d'être for the holiday is retold. During the reading, the villain Haman is smitten by the listeners, who make loud noises to kill the sound of his name each time it is mentioned. A second opportunity for performance is the festive meal, which may feature extended parodies and folk plays.

Just as the widely-heralded American Pageant Movement began to show a decline in both artistry and general interest, Percy MacKaye, the already well-known playwright and poet, staged the gigantic spectacle Caliban on May 25, 1916 at New York City's Lewisohn Stadium. Although not the largest production of the pre-World War I period—MacKaye's collaboration with Thomas Wood Stevens, St. Louis, a Civic Masque (1914) utilized the participation of more than 7,000 St. Louis citizen-actors and was seen by nearly 500,000 spectators during its five-day run—MacKaye's Caliban was thought to be the most lavish and grandiose, as well as best documented, pageant of its time.

Off Off-Broadway is theatre without theatres, but it accounts for the most adventurous and promising work now being done in New York. Half a dozen plays or more, most of them by new playwrights, are produced every month on Off Off-Broadway's four principal stages. Many of the actors and directors are amateurs, students, or novices trying their wings; others are trained professionals who, finding few occasions to work and almost no chance to develop as artists within the professional theatre, are opting out of the system. They can—and sometimes do—work in the new regional theatres. But New York is still the center of the arts in America: someplace has to be.

Off Off-Broadway began as entertainment in coffee houses. The Caffe Cino was producing plays regularly as early as 1959, and various other Greenwich Village cafés had occasionally presented theatre to their customers.

My thinking about the medium of performance began in the late Sixties. In saying that, I am pointing to a particular conceptual context that was fully developed when I began to work—one that concerned itself with discovering new forms of movement and totally new ways of structuring the temporal shape of an event. Yet, when I survey the seven years of my work against that background of performances in the Sixties, I realize that those specific concerns with movement and temporality are not my concerns. My own thinking and production has focused on issues of space—ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it. I have returned again and again to a specific set of formal/material metaphors with which to shape this space.

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.

I first saw Stanislavski’s work in 1922, when the Moscow Art Theatre presented in Paris The Lower Depths, The Brothers Kammazov, and The Cherry Orchard. I was carried away with admiration for The Cherry Orchard. The play is written in an impressionistic style that leaves room for silence and long pauses. Although it was bathed in a profusion of naturalistic detail, the production grew into a brilliant, comic, and moving spectacle. I felt that this was poetry—poetry without rhetoric, theatricality, or lyricism. Solely through the skill of the actors, everything became as true as life.