Some obsessions stay with you for a reason. On its surface, Bertha, the Sewing Machine Girl; or, Death at the Wheel, a ludicrously named melodrama peopled with exaggerated heroines and villains, offers an example of the noncanonical, everyday fare that audiences consumed in playhouses throughout the 19th century. But the deeper I dug, the more questions I uncovered.

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.

Kate Manheim spent most of her life in France, coming to the United States in the fall of 1969 and to New York City in March, 1970. Because she speaks two languages without an accent, one of her first jobs in this country was at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she taught private lessons in both French and English. In the fall of 1971, shortly after she began working at the Anthology Film Archives, she met playwright/director Richard Foreman [T58, T62]. Foreman was already in rehearsal for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's fourth production entitled HċOhTiEṅL (or) Hotel China. Since one of the actresses had dropped out of the play, he went to the Anthology looking for a volunteer replacement. After walking back and forth several times through the office where Manheim was working. Foreman finally approached her and asked shyly, “Would you mind being an angel in my play?” She replied simply, “No, I wouldn't mind.”

SAHOO: I am now sixty years old; I started dancing at the age of four. I belong to the tradition. My father and grandfather were dancers. I belong to the Kansari caste, which is engaged In the practice of these dances; its main vocation is the making of household utensils. My family also made works of art in gold and other material. In our country often a particular caste or community is involved in the practice of a particular craft or a form of dance and theatre. Arts are community based and family based. The techniques are passed from father to son, from one generation to the other. Since the transmission of the techniques is oral, this pattern works more effectively than any other.

The scenic experiment Silence of the World brought together indigenous leader Ailton Krenak and performer Andreia Duarte. The show deeply explored the perception of time in mythology as a space for reinventing the world and evoked the recognition of humans as just another planetary species alongside so-called nonhumans: animals, rivers, mountains, plants, and everything that exists. Silence of the World drew attention to indigenous peoples who connect with the living organism that is the planet.

Israeli soldiers dancing to global pop hits in the Occupied Palestinian Territories look like they are having fun, and there is always something entertainingly contradictory in watching army bodies circumventing the military codes. But the choreographic analysis of three viral videos from the 2010s reveals how dancing serves the Israel Defense Forces’ territorializing and necropower strategy.

To get at the nature of farce we go back to beginnings, in either time or structure. Russian folk drama from the seventeenth into the twentieth century, for example, recapitulates much of what we know or infer about rude origins. Here, as Berkov remarks, necessity creates and fixes a manner. Out-of-door performance calls for exaggerated tones, sweeping gestures, loud singing and furious dancing, features which persist when public square and puppet stage, but not groundlings, are left behind. An impudent tone, imposed by the turbulent crowd, provokes performers into the picaresque asides, the jibes and the cheeky stepping out of role which, all the way down from remote beginnings in Attica to Hellzapoppin in New York, have raised their roars of laughter. Brutally enlarged, this is the way of folk game and folk tale, and should remind us, once for all, of the indissoluble bond by which farce is tied to folklore in general; and of what it owes to the point of view and the aesthetics of the folk.

In a famous speech about actors in 1928, Max Reinhardt called the art of theatre “the oldest, most powerful, most immediate of the arts, combining the many in one.” The statement may appear exaggerated, but it is only a weak echo of statements which great minds in the past have been inspired to make. Voltaire called the theatre “the noblest and most useful thing invented by the human mind,” and Victor Hugo designated the drama, in his well-known manifesto, the preface to Cromwell, as “complete poetry,” the “ocean” into which all the other streams of poetry flow. But I do not intend to speak of the theatre in general, only of the art of acting; partly because it seems to me that problems in the art of acting have had a profound effect upon the current as well as the eternal state of the art of theatre (does not the contemporary drama and film owe much to actors?), and partly because this distinctive art form has virtually never been the subject for scholarly analysis.

Bertolt Brecht's Baden play for learning—Das Badener Lehrstück vom Einverständnis—is so named for having been first performed at the Baden-Baden music festival in 1929, and because it falls among his early Marxist plays with an explicitly didactic function. Einverständnis means agreement or acceptance. The piece was given at Baden-Baden accompanied by a score written by Hindemith, and in a shorter form than the version published in Brecht's Stücke. Hermann Scherchen conducted. The premier created a great scandal, marked especially by the exit of Gerhart Hauptmann in the middle of the Clown Scene.

I believe that of Brecht's plays this is the most unclear in conception and yet the most revelatory of the author's personal conflicts in relation to his thought and politics. It also happens to contain one of the most viciously funny scenes ever written. I want to set forth in this essay some tentative ideas regarding the play.

This. This is. This is a. This is a simple. This is a simple additive. This is a simple additive process. Obviously patterns of this sort can also be employed with visual or musical elements, but since we are dealing here with typeface on paper, it seems most appropriate to begin with words.

Then there are. Rotations then there. Are rotations then. There are rotations. Or at least “rotations” is the term I like to use for patterns of this sort. We could also consider this a type of phasing. Since there are four words but only three are permitted in each sentence, the word pattern falls out of phase with the syntactical pattern and the two do not come back in sync until the word pattern has been repeated three times and the syntactical pattern four times. Again, this is a device that can be easily applied to nonverbal materials.

Much has been written about Brecht in this country, some—though not enough—of his theoretical writings have been translated, and most of his plays have been published in English. From all of this, people quite naturally get the idea that Brecht was primarily a poet and playwright. But, although this is true, in order to understand Brecht the playwright one ought to know Brecht as a man of practical theatre—as a director. Brecht's influence on the theatre of his time stems mainly from the productions he created at the Berliner Ensemble; Germany's theatre has changed totally since he did his exemplary work during the early and mid-fifties in East Berlin. The new movement in England— The Royal Court, Peter Brook and Peter Hall, Kenneth Tynan, to mention a few names only—would probably have been vastly different if the Berliner Ensemble had not presented his work in London in 1956, and again in the sixties, and Giorgio Strehler in Italy and Roger Planchon in France have been deeply influenced by what, and how, Brecht created in Berlin. Though Brecht had worked for the theatre nearly all his life, as a critic first, then as a playwright and director, it was not until 1949 that he found a permanent place for his experiments, a company, and later a building, which he could form into the ideal instrument for his ideas, a theatre which was a laboratory, a place for investigation, analysis, and construction of models.

In the preface to his most famous theoretical essay, the Little Organon for the Theatre, Brecht in part retracted his early vituperations against aesthetics, which in the 1920's had led him to ask (as the title of an article of his goes): “Shouldn't we liquidate aesthetics?” With the growing maturity and complexity of his poetry and plays, the feedback from practice to theory which was a permanent feature of Brecht's work led him to recognize that those vituperations —which he never wholly abandoned —were directed at the bourgeois German aesthetics of his epoch, at “the heirlooms of a depraved and parasitic class” (SzT VII.8), and not at a philosophical and sociological discipline dealing with the pleasing and the beautiful (mainly in art), as such or as a whole. For, by the end of the 193O's, Brecht had in his lyrics and dramas, as well as in his theoretical writing, recognized that his own work was also pleasurable —if pleasure were no longer opposed to learning.

The production of the first German Expressionist play, Murderer, the Women's Hope (Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen), broke upon the staid Vienna art scene with the force of scandal in 1909. (Although Kokoschka is credited with having written and performed Murderer, The Women's Hope in 1907 and 1908, his own accounts of the improvised rehearsal for the July 4, 1909 production at the Kunstschau make it doubtful that an earlier script or production could have existed.) Oskar Kokoschka angered the public and most of the critics with his play, which they considered dangerous to the public morals and offensive to esthetics. Reviewers called him a “degenerate artist,” “bourgeoise-baiter (Bürgerschreck),” “corrupter of youth,” and “common criminal.” The savage attacks in the press caused, the Minister of Education to suggest that the twenty-two year old artist and teacher end his association with the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts.

The events of May, 1968, in France spurred a re-examination of the relationship between art and politics, of the function of the artist and the role of theatre in our society. After May, 1968, with its attacks on institutions for distributing a culture that is not a “culture in action sprung from life,” theatre artists sought a way to work outside the established structure, which they felt was separate from life and whose rigidity demanded a particular kind of production and hindered experimentation.

The desires to become more directly involved with life; to place the accent on the process of creation rather than on the final product; to establish a new kind of relationship with the spectators, considered on many different levels as“potential creators”; to insist on the actor's creativity; to rethink the role of the director as well as the role of the playwright resulted in new forms of political-popular theatre in France.

One of the persisting functions of art, even of iconoclastic art, is the restoration of morality. Art continues to find eloquence for our suffering, heraldry for our strife, lyricism for our passion. And one of its ways of doing this is by reminding us that while we exist in society, we are also participants in culture. Beyond the immediacies of our everyday lives, we have a kinship with generations.

If it can be said that certain times are better and others worse for art, then these times seem very bad indeed. Cultural exponents of contemporary society have been especially scarce. I have in mind the past twenty years. Picasso's Guernica, a bit of fiction, some poetry by Randall Jarrell are among the last works of art which managed to salvage any dignity from society's military impulses.

Hector Rodriquez, at age thirteen, was considered a “hopeless incorrigible” by his teachers at a “600 School” for problem children in New York City. Rodriquez could not read or write, nor did he show the slightest inclination for mathematics or science. He spent his days playing hooky on Lower East Side street corners, or else he would go up to Times Square to hustle money.

Rodriquez seemed destined to lead the life of the hundreds of other players, pushers, pimps, and prostitutes that infest the Times Square area until he met Miguel Pinero, an award-winning Nuyorican (shorthand for New York and Puerto Rican) playwright—himself a former child of the barrio.

“My brother Louie and I were arguing, and this other dude comes up and punches me in the eye, and I start to cry, and this other dude comes up and says he's Miguel Pinero, and he buys us some hot chocolate and asks if I'd like to be in a play written by him, and I says ‘sure,’ and next thing you know I'm working onstage in Sideshow,” said Rodriquez.