Anita Enters came to New York City from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late in 1919 to begin study at the Art Students League. (According to personal correspondence and various newspaper interviews, her given name is Angna, although she was addressed by her family, her early friends, and her husband by the nickname Anita.) She was probably 18 years old at the time, although her birth date is usually given as April 28, 1907. If the description of her life before arriving in New York, as told in her fictionalized biography Silly Girl, is only partially true, it is certain that she was a precocious, withdrawn, independent child.

After the first quarter at the Art Students League, she became discouraged with her artwork and did not register for the next quarter's classes.

D.E. was a political review in three acts and fifteen episodes directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and first produced in Leningrad on June 15, 1924, for delegates to the Fifth Congress of Comintern. It re-opened on July 3, 1924, in Moscow at the Meyerhold Theatre. Based primarily on Ilya Ehrenburg's novel, Trust D.E., it also drew heavily on Bernard Kellermann's The Tunnels and touched upon novels by Pierre Hamp and Upton Sinclair.

A 1927 program offers a synopsis of the play, as well as the order of the episodes. Two world powers, the falling bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat, are juxtaposed in short theatrical sketches. Three American millionaires—Jubs, Twist, and Hardayle, who are in search of new markets—accept a proposal by Jens Boot, an international adventurer, to form “D.E.,” an organization whose aim is to destroy Europe, without boycotting American products or disseminating Socialistic ideas. Their ultimate goal is to claim Europe as an American colony.

On the southern coast of India, the three-hundred-year-old Kathakali ritual theatre still flourishes, a mixture of dance and pantomime, religious inspiration and mythological tradition. This essay is neither an aesthetic analysis of Kathakali nor a study of its origins or its relationship to other forms of Indian theatre, for my main purpose in studying Kathakali was to acquaint myself with a specific technique and assess the possibilities of adapting it for the training of European actors.

According to the Kali chronogram Grahya Stutirgathaih, the gods made important contributions to the Indian theatre. Krishna appeared in Kalikut in 1657. He met a high priest and gave him a peacock feather; to celebrate this extraordinary event, the Krishnattam was created. It was a religious dance drama which glorified Krishna's exploits and the prowess of his Gopies. The spectacle soon became famous all through the state of Malabar.

I am a bit impatient when asked, “What is the origin of your experimental theatre productions?” The assumption seems to be that “experimental” work is tangential (toying with some “new” technique each time) and tributary. The result is supposed to be a contribution to modern staging—scenography using current sculptural or electronic ideas, contemporary music, actors independently projecting clownish or cabaret stereotypes. I know that scene: I used to be part of it. Our Theatre Lab productions are going in another direction. In the first place, we are trying to avoid eclecticism, trying to resist thinking of theatre as a composite of disciplines. We are seeking to define what is distinctively theatre, what separates this activity from other categories of performance and spectacle. Secondly, our productions are detailed investigations of the actor-audience relationship. That is, we consider the spiritual and scenic technique of the actor as the core of theatre art.

Genet is related to that family of people who are nowadays referred to by the barbaric name of passéistes. An accident riveted him to a childhood memory, and this memory became sacred. In his early childhood, a liturgical drama was performed, a drama of which he was the officiant; he knew paradise and lost it, he was a child and was driven from his childhood. No doubt this “break” is not easy to localize. It shifts back and forth, at the dictate of his moods and myths, between the ages of ten and fifteen. But that is unimportant. What matters is that it exists and that he believes in it. His life is divided into two heterogeneous parts: before and after the sacred drama. Indeed, it is not unusual that the memory condenses into a single mythical moment the contingencies and perpetual re-beginnings of an individual history.

Is all theatre political? Some people claim that it is. To some extent, this view is based upon a misunderstanding of the word “political.” Webster defines “political” as:

1. 1. of or concerned with government, the state, or politics.

2. 2. having a definite governmental organization.

3. 3. engaged in or taking sides in politics; as political parties.

4. 4. of or characteristic of political parties or politicians: as political pressure.

These definitions may help us to understand the nature of political theatre, but they do not apply to all theatrical activity.

Some of the people who claim that all theatre is political seem to confuse “political,” “social,” and “economic.” Of course, all theatre exists in a certain socio-economic context. By definition, it involves an audience; it is not a solitary activity. But this does not mean that it necessarily is concerned with government or that it must take sides in politics. The psychological elements and interpersonal relationships of, say, A Streetcar Named Desire may be magnified into social statements.

Loïe Fuller's contributions to the theory and practice of theatre and dance are numerous, yet few dancers and even fewer theatre people know of her work. Most dance and theatre historians, if they mention her at all, only devote a cursory paragraph to her achievements. As is often the case, repeated omission is gradually solidified into misinformation. Other people have often been credited with her innovations.

Between 1865 and 1891, Fuller had a rather successful career as actress, manager, and sometime. playwright. After 1892, she influenced (and was influenced by) Art Nouveau, Symbolism, and Impressionism. She was written about, painted, and sculpted by most of the important artists in Paris at the turn of the century. A theatre was even built for her. And she set up and managed the initial European tours of Isadora Duncan, Maude Allen, and two Japanese acting companies. All the while, she kept on writing plays.

Stage fright is a state of morbid anxiety disturbing the sense of poise. This, at least, is how it makes its appearance at a certain point; for, like all morbid states, stage fright proceeds through various phases. Thus I shall try to describe it longitudinally. Also, since not all anxiety states lay claim to the sense of poise, stage fright is a particular species of anxiety, and a psychological study of stage fright will involve more than an inquiry into the general nature of anxiety. We shall have to look into, for example, a psychology of poise. And as poise depends upon our anticipations of others’ receptions of how we are hoping to represent ourselves, we shall have occasion to account for feelings of personal fraudulence and the dread of exposure and to refer to a psychology of imposture.

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.

In contemporary Western society, theatre has become primarily a source of entertainment and sometimes of social criticism; its older function of articulating and instilling prevailing values is now performed by the mass media and specialized educational and propaganda institutions. In Indonesia, however, and elsewhere in Asia where mass media and educational facilities are less developed and private reading is not a widely established habit, popular drama still transmits sociopolitical ideals between the court (or city) and the countryside, and reinforces religious tradition. While some of its communicative role is now shared with movies and other new media, live theatre is still a vital and popular teacher.

In Java the Wayang Kulit, or shadow-puppet theatre, epitomizes the traditional Javanese world view; it has functioned as an art form, a religious rite, and a medium of instruction for more than a thousand years.

Two jokes; a dream. “A man came to the circus manager and asked him if he needed a bird imitator. ‘No,’ answered the circus manager. Then the man flew away through the window.” This and a second joke are told twice—in the first and in the last part—in Pina Bausch's Arien (Aries). “Berlin. A man asks a cabdriver: ‘Can you tell me how I can get to the Philharmonic?’ The cabdriver answers. ‘Sure, man, that's very easy: practice, practice, practice.’” “They practiced and could fly for two hours,” someone noted after an Arien performance. In Pina Bausch's Macbeth paraphrase there is the same dream. “How will you live?” Lady Macduff asks her son. “As the birds do.” It is cited twice.

June, 1897. At a historic eighteen-hour session in the Slavic Bazaar, a restaurant in Moscow, Stanislavski and Nemirovich- Danchenko agreed to pool their acting companies and form the Moscow Art Theatre (MAT). Stanislavski wrote:

What makes Zora Neale Hurston different as a musical theatre writer is her concern about the creation of safe spaces for black women actors. By looking at the theatrical representation of black women in Hurston and Dorothy Waring’s Polk County, it is possible to see ways in which they resist intersecting oppressions of gender and race. Hurston’s adaptation of the blues and folk music for the musical is also subject to analysis, as is her lasting impact on musical theatre.

During the past dozen years or so a number of contemporary theatre groups in Tokyo have been exploring, each in their own way, new and intensely theatrical approaches in the actor's art. Each group bases its work on ensemble playing, so that in the midst of the exploration, some consistency of performance style has seemed desirable. In either formal or informal ways, this usually means an actor training system created out of the group and designed for its own needs. A training system that is especially Japanese is the one developed by Tadashi Suzuki with members of the acting company of the Waseda Little Theatre (Waseda Shogekijo see T60, T65).

Suzuki formed the Waseda Little Theatre in 1965. Among the twenty members of the acting company today, seven are part of that original group. They gather four nights a week, after working at other jobs, to train under Suzuki's direction. Suzuki, with the actors, has created a series of training disciplines, combining voice and body, which, while being flexible and capable of variation, are precise in their structure.

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.

Henry Box Brown, a Black man born into slavery in the American South, devised an unforeseen yet ingenious plan to achieve emancipation: he was shipped to the North in a cramped, wooden box. The first testament of Brown’s escape was not his emergence from his box, but instead his voice responding to the box’s addressee. Later, Brown reenacts his original escape in Victorian England and becomes “The King of All Mesmerizers” by envisioning an alien future for himself, much like musician and philosopher-poet Sun Ra.

Each of Harold Pinter's four plays ends in the virtual annihilation of an individual. In Pinter's first play, The Room, after a blind Negro is kicked into inertness, the heroine, Rose, is suddenly stricken with blindness. In The Dumb Waiter, the curtain falls as Gus and his prospective murderer stare at each other. Stanley Webber, the hero of The Birthday Party, is taken from his refuge for “special treatment.” In The Caretaker, the final curtain falls on an old man's fragmentary (and unheeded) pleas to remain in his refuge.

As Pinter focuses more sharply on the wriggle for existence, each of his successive hero-victims seems more vulnerable than the last. Villain assaults victim in a telling and murderous idiom.