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.

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.

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.

It is not unprecedented for street magicians to annex a given area of the city and make it their own. “The magician of the Chateau d'Eau,” who performed in Paris during the 1820's, could always be found in front of a certain fountain. The spot that Jeff Sheridan has chosen as his is the Walter Scott statue in Central Park.

Sheridan's form of conjuring is traditional but in many ways his execution of it is not. He works as minimally as possible, using few props, rejecting a costume for the simplicity of a black turtleneck sweater and trousers.

The American stage has been called style-less. It has been criticized for not maturing realism but being trapped by it. And, of course, the blame has been laid at method's door. This is unfair. We can just as well blame our “cool” society for its inhibited, self-conscious exhibitionism. Method incorporates style, and sincere and creative use employs it richly. In movement this is precisely mime's concern.

If every actor could perform as a total performer, executing illusions that could create place, time and properties then we could free the stage from its constipated d6cor and reaffirm the essence of theatre—a vital human performing for a live audience.

In Jean Genet's The Screens the revolt of the Algerian Arabs against their French colonizers is not characterized by the emancipation of human beings. Although the colonizers are described as oppressors inflated with their own power, the misery and the intolerable condition of the oppressed are not denounced in order to promote the liberation of the colonized people. On the contrary, these misfortunes are exalted so that the humiliated individual has the opportunity to make his misery the occasion for an inner experience based on the absolute contrast and conflict between his values and those of the Other—an unceasing contestation through which Saïd achieves a sovereignty which no action founded on the hope of a more just world could yield. For hope can take root only in this world, and the hope of claiming one's rights is lost in the desire to become the Other. The subjective, ascetic, and tragic experience of Saïd has indeed no political value.

There seem to be four major theatrical traditions in Southeast Asia: the Eastern, strongly influenced by Chinese theatre and found in the coastal region of Vietnam; the Southern, previously Hindu-Buddhist and now Moslem, covering parts of Indonesia and Malaysia; the Central, Hindu-Buddhist, found in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia; and the Western, more strictly Buddhist than the Central tradition and found chiefly in Burma and Ceylon. The traditional theatres of the Southern, Central, and Western areas share many features: they are commonly nightlong performances, done outdoors on a temporary bamboo stage, accompanied by a mainly percussive orchestra; they use either live actors or puppets; and dialogue and action are usually improvised around Indian epics and religious stories.

Yet there are important differences even within the geographical areas. For example, in the South, shadow puppets are comparatively small, with articulated arms, and operated by a single puppeteer, or dalang. In the Central area, puppets are large, not articulated, and operated by a number of dancers; the dalang sits at the side of the screen narrating the story.

Lorenzaccio, published in 1834, was revised by Alfred de Musset for the 1853 edition. This final text is reproduced by Paul Dimoff in his La Genèse de Lorenzaccio (1936) together with those passages of Benedetto Varchi's Storia fiorentina which were used by Georges Sand for her Une conspiration en 1537 as well as by Musset, who amply availed himself not only of Varchi's chronicles but also of Sand's brief play.

The play has five acts, each of which is divided into six to eleven scenes. Very seldom do the individual scenes of any act occur in the same setting. This complete disregard for the unity of place produces the effect of a constantly changing panorama of early sixteenth-century Florence, wherein glimpses of the seemingly unrelated actions of a great number of characters gradually merge into an integrated impression which creates a mood, an atmosphere. The technique anticipates the more recent impressionistic concern for apparently fleeting or accidental phenomena.

The members of the People Show do not call their presentations “plays.” Nor do they consider themselves to be actors. A show does not begin with a script; there is little or no story or narrative. Between shows, the performers lead very separate lives, but they constantly collect material and ideas for new pieces. When they come together to create a new show, each person contributes his own ideas and helps decide on an over-all structure. They choose their own costumes and create their own characters.

The fact that they are all the “authors” of a show and that the characters they play are created from their own imaginations gives the People Show an unusual energy and freedom. Although the structure and images usually remain the same in each repetition, the performers are free to improvise and experiment, using each other, props, and other elements as cues and motifs.

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.

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 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.