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?

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.

In Western Europe, where Brecht's plays have by now become standard fare for bourgeois audiences and where political theatre remains, by and large, the domain of students and middle-class intellectuals, the work of Dario Fo stands out as an anomaly. He is a gifted poet and playwright, as well as an actor, director, and full-time cultural activist; but, although his plays are known throughout Italy and numerous other European countries, they are usually discarded after a few months’ performance. His company does not consider itself avant-garde, and eschews formal experimentation for its own sake, yet it has incorporated many innovative techniques both in the dramatic structure of its productions and in its mode of organization. Although his group does not perform agit-prop or guerrilla street theatre, it is small, flexible, mobile, and militant. Fo has definitively renounced the commercial stage and dedicates his energies to serving the revolutionary movement in Italy; yet he continues to enjoy enormous popular support.

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.

Behold the drive for purity in art as art is practised these days. Behold this writer striving for the purely poetic, another for the purely lyrical, the purely epic, the purely dramatic. The painter ardently seeks to create the pure painting, the musician pure music, and someone even told me, pure radio represents the synthesis between Dionysos and Logos. Even more remarkable for our time, not otherwise renowned for its purity, is that each and everyone believes he has found his unique and the only true purity. Each vestal of the arts has, if you think of it, her own kind of chastity. Likewise, too numerous to count, are all the theories of the theatre, of what is pure theatre, pure tragedy, pure comedy.

The work of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes is not very well known in the United States. Although he appears to be a playwright of some importance, none of his plays has, until now, been translated into English. Of course there are reasons for this neglect, one of which may be that he has been involved in other arts, primarily painting, and has not concentrated his energies exclusively in the theatre. During his lifetime, Ribemont-Dessaignes, who is now 87 years old, has been a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, composer, radio personality, actor and “dancer,” as well as playwright. In addition, he has written a children's book and translated into French works by Nietzsche and Michelangelo.

The son of an obstetrician, Ribemont-Dessaignes was born on June 19, 1884, at Montpellier in the south of France. When he was young he secretly composed symphonies, operas and quartets and wrote a drama.

A critic of modern dramaturgy with a bent for Brecht and O'Casey, the TNP and the Berliner Ensemble, Morgan and Frazer, Marx and Bloch, has one outstanding difficulty to come to terms with, if he is to be sincere to his trade and himself: Samuel Beckett. If the chief measure of a major dramatist is a happy union of relevance and consistency of dramatic vision, there is little doubt that in our cultural circle—middle and western Europe, based on the Mediterranean, with the massive wings of the Soviet Union and North America—the two major dramatists since World War II are Brecht and Beckett. Yet it is rare for a critic devoted to Beckett seriously and knowledgeably to face Brecht. I can think of only one such comprehensive effort—Martin Esslin's—and that one, to my mind, is finally unconvincing. Conversely, however, I can think of no critic of the Brechtian bent who has attempted a comprehensive study of Beckett.

The first stirrings of the Cinema Nôvo movement were in the early 1950's, when some young filmmakers began to protest the expensive imitations of Hollywood and cheap musical comedies (chanchadas) that made up the traditional Brazilian cinema. This protest found an immediate echo among young film critics.

In 1952, Italian neo-realism was the main inspiration of my first film, Agulha no palheiro (Needle in a Haystack), for which Nelson Pereira dos Santos served as assistant director. Neo-realism dominated dos Santos’ own first two films, Rio, 40 grans (Rio, 40 Degrees), 1955, and Rio, zona none (Rio, Northern District), 1957, as well as his production of Roberto Santos’ O grande momenta (The Great Moment) in 1958. From 1958 to 1962, there was a series of experimental short films.

The name of the movement, Cinema Nôvo, appeared for the first time around 1959-60, but even then it was as fluid and undefined as that of the French nouvelle vague.

We have moved into the position now of where we are more concerned with being directly a part of the political activity of our time than we are with being a part of the theatrical activity of our time.” So said Julian Beck of The Living Theater. He was speaking in the somewhat derelict three-story brownstone near the Brooklyn Academy of Music that has been the home of the twenty-member collective for the last couple of years. Judith Malina, Beck's wife and co-founder of the theatre, explained that on January 1st of this year The Living had begun another rehearsal phase in its development of The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of some 150 plays to be performed not in theatres but throughout a city.

The Legacy of Cain is a unique theatrical/political piece. The Living collective has been working on the development of the cycle for four-and-a-half years, and it is estimated that it is at least three or four years from culmination.