Focusing on performance that functions outside explicitly theatrical frames, art installations staged in Hong Kong between June and October 2020 progress a broader view of Hong Kong’s complex development as global financial center, creative hub, and meeting point between “East” and “West.” Artists Mark Chung, Nadim Abbas, and Christopher Ho interrogate Hong Kong at a historically definitive moment, allowing audiences to study what constitutes “home” beyond what conventional academic analyses, traditional publishing outlets, and social media allow.

A cave bear skull from the Upper Paleolithic is carefully positioned on a modified block in the Skull Chamber of Chauvet Cave. The Skull Chamber, as the culmination of a speleological parcours, has apparently been strategically modified in order to increase its performative potential — an early architectural attempt to reconfigure a space en route towards a theatre.

US theatre suffers from insufficient funding, mass unemployment, and widespread structural inequities. The Green New Deal, with its calls to create millions of highwage jobs and promote equity, offers a solution: establish a Green Federal Theatre. This examination of two historical Federal Theatre Project structures — the National Service Bureau and the Community Drama Program — culminates in a manifesto for a Green Federal Theatre.

Digitization is taking over every sphere of life—including the arts. Through the process of digital commodity fetishism, major technology companies threaten to efface the very qualities that make creative expression—particularly the performing arts—distinct and meaningful. To resist or even question these forces, we must excavate an invisible digital politics that can displace (and replace) traditional sources of authority in the performing arts. By examining the basic mechanisms of the “creator economy,” this politics can be found and confronted—in the arts and beyond.

Art and politics have long been bad bedfellows. Politicians have converted art into propaganda and artists have welcomed alienation from bureaucratic societies. It very well may be that the modern nation is inimical to art, knowing at best how to “tolerate” it and at worst how to “suppress” it. In which case, my discussion is ended. But if art and politics are not oil and water; if, indeed, perception is basic to “social action,” we may develop a rapport whose possibilities should make both artist and politician stop and think.

At a 1967 symposium in Montreal, I, along with other colleagues, had to answer the question: “What kind of theatre should we do?” Throughout almost my entire professional life, I have been asked that same question and with each new stage of my life I responded differently. But when I heard it in that foreign country, where the only thing familiar to us Latin Americans were the Indian reservations, I suddenly felt I was on another planet, stunned. I don't remember what I answered. I said something vague and unrelated—“anti-culture”—and I realized I was again entering a new stage.

At this time I had just finished Documents from Hell, which was staged by Danilo Tenorio of TEC (Experimental Theatre of Cali), my own theatre in Colombia, and was the most serious attempt we at TEC had made to become involved in the life of our people.

Walking from the Disneyland plaza into Tomorrowland, it is difficult to comprehend at first that the Carousel Theatre, partly visible behind the PeopleMover and the Mission to Mars, is a completely circular building. Once you arrive at the point where a view of the theatre is not blocked by any other structure, your proximity to the wall of the theatre reduces its curve and makes it appear straighter, just as proximity to the earth's surface causes it to seem flat. As a result it is mildly perplexing to pass the turnstiles, after depositing an 85-cent ticket, and follow the metal guide rails that lead to the outer wall of the theatre. However, it is at most a four-minute wait until the entire theatre turns itself and brings a door in front of the spot where you are standing. This door opens automatically, and you are permitted to enter a comfortable 240-seat auditorium just in time for the beginning of America Sings, regardless of what time it is.

Over the past twenty years there have been a number of scattered but promising experiments with visual scripts. (By “visual script” I mean a non-representational graphic pattern which an actor is handed and asked to find some way of performing.) In his 1958-9 Graphis project (T30), Dick Higgins provided actors with “scripts” that consisted of words spread out irregularly over a page with lines drawn between them. Performing the script was defined as physicalizing the process of moving from one word to another over the routes of semantic association suggested by the connecting lines. (For example, getting from “lock” to “locksmith” entailed a detour through “macaroni”….) More recently, in 1971, the Anna Halprin Company tried using a “graphic score” devised by John Muto as the basis for a piece called Animal Ritual (T59).

From the mid-1960's on, Jack Smith—best-known as the director of Flaming Creatures (1962-63), a key work In the American avant-garde film—has astonished New York audiences with a series of highly influential performance pieces. Although Smith's theatre, which is even more fugitive and underground than his film production, has attracted little critical writing, it has made itself felt in the work of artists as otherwise disparate as Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. At the same time, Smith's refusal to separate his persona from his art presaged the gallery-based “performance artists” of the mid-1970's. His presentations include the ongoing slide-show (known variously as Spiritual Oasis of Lucky Landlord Paradise, Fear Ritual of Shark Museum, Horror of the Rented World), which has in some ways superceded his 16mm film work, and a number of individual plays. Both modes are original and important contributions to American art.

Orlando Furioso is an environmental spectacle developed by director Luca Ronconi and writer Edoardo Sanguineti, based on the poem by Lodovico Ariosto. It was first performed last summer in Milan and toured throughout Italy and the continent. It most recently appeared at the Odin Teatret's spring seminar in Denmark. Performances in New York and a U.S. tour are tentatively scheduled for the fall. The photos which accompany this article are from a performance in Milan.

Autobiographical work is the only thing that interests me, apparently because that is what I do best. I write about my family. In many ways I would like to break out of that, but I don't know how to break out of it. In fact I would really like to write more about the people who were before my own immediate family, like my grandparents and their family. I have two children, but I've never been able to write about them.

I feel overwhelmed by family problems and family realities. I see my writing as being an outlet for inner, psychological confusion and questions stemming from childhood. I don't know any other way. It's really figuring out the “why” of things—that is, if that is even possible. I'm not sure you can figure out the “why” of anything anymore.

I feel a lot of reluctance in attempting to describe any part of a process which, by its truest nature, holds an unending mystery. At the same time I'm hoping that by trying to formulate some of this territory I can make certain things clearer to myself.

I've always felt that the term “experimental” in regard to theatre forms has been twisted by the intellectual community surrounding the artist to the extent that now even the artist has lost track of its original essence. In other words, a search for “new forms” doesn't seem to be exactly where it's at.

There comes a point where the exterior gyrations are no longer the most interesting aspect of what you're practicing, and brand-new exploration starts to take root. For example: In the writing of a particular character where does the character take shape?