The title Room 106 refers to the large lecture hall on the seventh floor of Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, in which the piece was presented. Although the following description is intended partly as a guide for anyone wishing to recreate the work, the title and almost everything else in such a re-creation—the dialogue, the structure, possibly even the physical set-up —would change. As was indicated when such a re-creation was presented in Argentina, based only on a vocal description, the “integrity” of the piece lies not in the particular words and images used in the original performance, but in the concept and the manner in which the material is generated.

T’ai Chi Ch’uan is a system for activating the body for the simultaneous development of physical, emotional and mental well-being. It is useful for the actor because it promotes a heightened perceptivity, sensitive awareness and stamina. Since the exercise has no stylistic mannerisms, it enhances the ability to manipulate the body expressively for any desired effect.

T’ai Chi Ch’uan (pronounced Tye Gee Chwon) has a long history. Its roots go back into the Chou Dynasty (5th Century B.C.), when concern for physical and mental health was being expressed in a philosophy of movement. But the organized exercise of T’ai Chi as we know it today dates from the 12th Century.

Dario Fo, Italy's foremost practitioner of AgitProp theatre, is one of the world's most versatile theatrical talents: actor, director, playwright, scene and costume designer, dancer, mime, mimic, and political clown. Because of his extensive use of mimicry, masks, and puppets, Fo's theatre is mistakenly characterized as stemming primarily from commedia dell'arte.But commedia satirized social stereotypes, whereas Fo's political satire (broad comedy and highly presentational), originated in the period between the tenth and twelfth centuries, the post-feudal age when the Italian peninsula experienced a burst of political freedom; jesters roamed the land with a repertoire of gags and skits celebrating the end of feudalism, and ridiculing the remaining feudal overlords and the Church. Performing in streets and market places, presenting comic routines consisting of simple language, mime arid mimicry, the feudal jester delighted the common people while awakening them to the tyranny of the nobility.

In its willingness to expend resources towards the construction of worlds that end, theatre models the possibility of a response to crisis that refuses to make action in the present contingent upon the promise of a future. Three recent works reflect a contemporary metatheatrical preoccupation with this combination of exertion and conclusion, and suggest the need to reimagine conservation and sustainability once we’ve embraced the structuring logic of “the end.”

This Is Not a Theatre Company’s Readymade Cabaret 2.0 combines classic Dada dramaturgy with a Covid-era virtual theatre of short vignettes, much like the original Dada performances at the Cabaret Voltaire. Character-based dialogue strikes at the same existential questions explored by the Dada collaborators, especially prescient in the context of a global pandemic that has drastically altered our daily lives.

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.

Ionesco is the closest thing we have to an abstract expressionist in the theatre. His plays are plainly autobiographical and confessional. “I try to project on stage an inner drama (incomprehensible even to myself) telling myself, nevertheless, that since the microcosm is the image of the macrocosm, it may happen that this torn up, disarticulated inner world is in some way the mirror or the symbol of universal contradictions.” He discovers the astonishing in the banal, the unreal in the real, the new in the old, the fresh in the stale, and the archetype in the stereotype. His work is romantic and subjective, mirroring his own anguish and inner struggles, translating them into symbols and patterns that have been empathetically embraced by audiences throughout the world. But this empathy should not confuse us.

Written in 1930-1931 after a Party directive to bring more women into the various German Communist organizations and first produced in January, 1932, Brecht's adaptation of the well-known Maxim Gorky novel, The Mother, was the subject of an intense esthetic and political debate among theatre critics and left-based theatre workers.

Thoughts come to my mind at any point, anywhere—I could be on the subway—and if I am alert enough and I have a pencil and paper, I write these messages that come. It might be just a thought, like a statement about something, an insight, or it could be a line of dialog. It could be something that someone says in my head.

I have a box filled with these scribbles. Some of them are on paper napkins or the backs of envelopes. These things are often the beginning of a play. Most of the lyrics of the songs that I write are based on these notes—as opposed to a play, which, once it starts, I make. I usually gather a number of those things that have some relation—again, I do not even know why I consider that they are related—and I put them together.

The American Conservatory Theatre publishes the most elaborate programs in the Bay Area. In addition to credits for all 16 of the season's plays, the programs introduce us to “The Man behind the ACTion,” William Ball; to “The ACTion People” —other directors, design and production staff, training staff, acting company, and acting fellows. A brief history of the two-year-old company is included, as well as behind-the-scenes information on training, staging, and funding. Almost everyone connected with ACT, however remotely, can see his name in print —with the exception of those in ACT's publicity department. And that's a pity, because they may well be the busiest people of this very busy company.

Psychologically, the solo can be seen as the quintessential form of performance. The audience's relationship to the soloist is undivided, gratifying the performer's deepest desires not only to be seen but to be the center of attention. The solo is a means of presenting the self to others, generally in terms of a display of virtuosity designed to elicit the spectator's admiration and awe. Traditionally, the personal, psychological significance of the solo form remains unacknowledged in the performance, shielded, so to speak, by the display of virtuosity. But in the work of Jack Smith, Stuart Sherman and others, the submerged motives of the solo become apparent because it is the play of private obsessions that commands the audience's attention. Amy Taubin's solos are less personal than Smith's or Sherman's. But they are also concerned with emphasizing the solo as a representation of the self.

The information contained in the following tables is only the rawest of raw material, to be approached with awesome cautiousness. They are by no means comparisons of theatres, since often the same figure will mean different things to different theatres. Salaries, for example, in one instance may include the pittance paid to non-Equity extras, in another there may be no non-Equity to pay. Foundation grants may throw box-office percentages off. A proper sorting job would have required a particularly active computor—and it is being done by the 20th Century Fund for publication next year.

The figures have been gathered bit by bit from all over. In every case they have been checked with the director or business manager of the theatre involved, but only with imagination, intuition, and a certain amount of brashness can they be interpreted.

For some time now I have been trying to shrug off the hunch that contemporary audiences and dramatic critics have lost the art of seeing plays. Now this is a disturbing thought to anyone engaged in the practice of theatre. It is hard to work without some faith in the intelligence and appreciation of either critics or audiences. When you don't succeed in maintaining that faith to some degree, you feel anxious and guilty, and begin to get paranoic.

But “paranoia” occurs when imaginary dangers are identified as real; and although I am perfectly willing to regard my feelings as neurotic, I have also found that they seem to be widely shared in the profession. Something has happened to audiences and critics that fills the theatre with irritation. The mere mention of a critic's name in professional circles causes hackles to rise.

It had been placed there by Aleister Crowley, occult magician, poet, and author of the advertised ceremonies. It was located directly at the end of an article that rapturously praised a preview of the Rites held during the past summer. The article was signed “P.”—certainly not the most inventive of Crowley's numerous pseudonyms, which included “Lord Boleskine,” “Oliver Haddo,” “Count Vladimir Svareff,” and his favorite, “The Beast.”

Crowley's predilection for fictive names was matched by his fascination with costume, whether it was the leopard-skin robe he wore as a Magician of the Golden Dawn, the black gown of the alchemist, the Headdress of Horus with the eye in the triangle, or, as “Baphomet,” full Masonic regalia. The theatrical urge in Crowley becomes apparent from whatever direction he is viewed. His early interest in the occult and its secret systems of knowledge was quickly focused on ritual magic. His poetry was soon elaborated into dense mystery plays. He even dramatized the personality conflicts between himself and others—William Butler Yeats, for one—by engaging them in “magical combat.”

The Rites of Eleusis occurred in Aleister Crowley's life at a point midway between a series of visions he had in North Africa in 1909, which revealed to him his true nature as a Magus, and his involvement with a secret society called the O.T.O. in 1912, from whom he learned the rudiments of the sex-magic that obsessed him for years. He was 35 years old at the time of the performances. The persecution by the press, which was to last until he died in i947, had not yet begun. He saw himself as the prophet of a new religion— Crowleyanity—and the Rites were to be his first great evangelization.

An accomplished dancer, acrobat, and physical theatre performer, Hanna Cormick became ill in 2014 with a trifecta of rare genetic conditions that make her severely allergic to pollutants in the air — smoke, detergents, and food particles — and her bones and internal organs prone to dislocation. In January 2020, during Australia’s summer of unprecedented bushfires, Cormick staged The Mermaid, risking her life to make a performance about the climate emergency and how we are all vulnerable bodies at risk in a changing environment.

After participating in the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, I felt hopeless because I wanted the capitalist death machine to collapse, but the protests eventually died out. I then learned about 400 pilot whales who died off the coast of Tasmania after being stranded there, and connected whale death to Black death and thought about how the whale bodies feed the ocean when they die.

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Brooklyn, New York, on Lenapehoking, the homeland of the Lenape people. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They are on the faculty at Movement Research NYC, Editor-in-Chief of Movement Research Performance Journal, and the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from their life/art/movement work, Improvising While Black. www.improvisingwhileblack.com

In 1953, Shanghai Film Studio produced a Shaoxing opera film version of The Butterfly Lovers as the first color film of the People’s Republic of China. Noted for its immense popularity in the Sinophone sphere throughout the 1950s, the film actually exemplifies a history of Shaoxing opera that is connected to urbanization and nationalism as well as women’s liberation and the cultural politics of early communist China. It is an early example of how Chinese opera and modern media technology contribute to transnational negotiations and imaginations of Chinese identities.

Sakonnet Point, an hour-long piece “composed and directed” by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte, was presented at the Performing Garage in New York City in early June, 1975. It formed the third part of an evening of three plays presented by members of The Performance Group. (Later in the summer it was presented alone in a converted church at Westerly, Rhode Island, and again in October at the Garage.) Sakonnet Point (the title is taken from the name of a town in Rhode Island where Gray spent his summers as a child) is a very personal, contemplative piece, attempting to evoke dreamlike moods through images presented in soft, dim lighting.