Black theatre ain't no easy thing. That's the first problem. Mainly because it means a whole group of black people coming together for a long time to decide on what a black theatre is and then to get one going. And to keep it going. Now I'm not trying to come down on any of the myriad number of small groups that are no longer with us today, but let's face it, the reality of black theatre has got to be more than a gleam in some director's eye.

It's people. Simple as that. It can't be the sets, because street theatre takes place virtually without any. It can't be the plays because some of the new rituals have a decidedly impromptu and spontaneous nature. It can't be the foundation grants—if it were that, we'd really be in trouble! It's people.

In many ways, the theatre of the Blue Blouse (Sinaiaia Bluza) was typical of Russian performance in the post-Revolutionary period. Using whatever materials were available, it attempted to create a new type of performance. Overtly political, it employed avantgarde as well as popular techniques. Energetically (and successfully) striving to reach a mass audience, it was created by both theatrical specialists and previously untrained personnel. Socially, if not artistically, Blue Blouse could almost be considered a “movement”: At its height, it probably involved more than 100,000 people. Before it was officially disbanded in 1928, the Blue Blouse had achieved an international reputation and was being emulated in other countries. Today it is almost forgotten.

My involvement in theatre has been with the body in motion. However changed or reduced the motion might have been or however elaborate the means used might have been, the focus was this movement. In retrospect this seems a constant value which was preserved. From the beginning I wanted to avoid the pulled-up, turned-out, anti-gravitational qualities that not only give a body definition and role as “dancer” but qualify and delimit the movement available to it. The challenge was to find alternative movement.

I was not the first to attempt such alternatives. Simone Whitman, together with others, had already explored the possibilities inherent in a situation of “rules” or game-like structures which required the performer to respond to cues which might, for example, indicate changes in height or spatial position.

In a Tunisian production of L'Ecole des Femmes, Arnolphe wore a red tarboosh with a green band around it. The green band meant he had made a pilgrimage to Mecca. Arnolphe was full of dignity and refinement, rarely flew into a rage, and only on one or two occasions leveled at his servants a long black stick with a bent silver handle. For the most part he was smiling, ironical, had an air of superiority, was certain of his absolute rights. He was a merchant—an honest and experienced merchant. Agnes was his property: he had bought her as a child, was maintaining her and bringing her up to be his wife. She should be obedient. She must not know too much.

My “Composition 1960 #9” consists of a straight line drawn on a piece of paper. It is to be performed and comes with no instructions. The night I met Jackson Mac Low we went down to my apartment and he read some of his poems for us. Later, when he was going to go home, he said he'd write out directions to get to his place so we could come and visit him sometime. He happened to pick up “Composition 1960 # 9 “ and said, “Can I write it here?” I said, “No, wait, that's a piece. Don't write on that.” He said, “Whadaya mean a piece? That's just a line.”

Eat, an Environment by Allan Kaprow, was presented during the mornings and afternoons of the two last weekends in January, 1964. Prospective visitors made reservations through the Smolin Gallery and were given directions on getting to the caves in the Bronx in which the Environment was created. Only twenty reservations were made for each one-hour period in an attempt—almost always successful—to forestall overcrowding and keep free circulation in the space.

After entering an old building that fronted low cliffs, the visitor walked through several corridors and doorways and finally came to the Environment. The rock from which the caves were carved had been somewhat incompletely covered with white paint—the place had once been used by the Ebling Brewery—and age and seeping water had created a sense of decay. Black charred wooden beams stood propped against the walls in several places.

Slaughtered goats are scattered everywhere, lying in pools of blood outside the temple compound. Decapitated chickens have been thrown together in large separate piles. The god Karin Camundi's mask lies discarded atop one of the mounds of carcasses, soaked with blood and feathers. The paint is soiled and the image of the god has begun to blur. There are no drums, no firecrackers. It is predawn, and the only light is a faint blue glow. Some of the sacrificial goats hanging from trees are being skinned and prepared for selling. The temple grounds are empty after the previous night's festivities, when hundreds of anxious spectators crowded together, pressing to catch a glimpse of their god gulping down blood of the sacrificial animals. The flies come with the day. This is the aftermath of one of the bloodiest performances of teyyam kettu—a highly structured ritual folk performance in the Cannanore District, Kerala State, Southwestern India.

It is imperative that we quickly find some way for the level of world understanding to rise to a new human scale. This scale is the world. The risks are the life or death of this world. Man is running the machines of his own invention, while the machine that is man runs the risk of running wild.

At the start of the sixteenth century, Duarte Barbosa, one of the earliest Portugese to arrive in Kerala, a state in southwest India, provides a description of Kalarippayatt (meaning “place of exercise,” referring to the technical system of training In its entirety. Kalari by itself means gymnasium or fencing school.) which although quaint is nevertheless still an apt account of this indigenous martial art system:

In Chicago during the summer of 1961, I offered part of a paper on “Dramatic Form and Human Motivation.” I began with the theory of classical form (as the arousing and fulfillment of expectations) which I had originally developed in Counter-Statement. Form as so conceived was reduced to three principles: progressive, repetitive, and conventional.

“Progressive” form was said to involve the use of situations which led the audience to anticipate or desire certain developments. “Repetitive” form involves the ways in which a work embodies a fixed character or identity, the ways in which a work, however disjunct, manifests some kinds of internal self-consistency. “Conventional” form (or “categorical expectancy”) involves the kinds of expectation which an audience brings to the theatre as an established institution.

My purpose here is to do a little superstitious rapping in the hope of persuading into existence something a little different in the kind of criticism we normally bring to bear upon Greek tragedy. If this seems pretentious, blame the subject in part: Greek tragedy requires, I think, a formidable apparition by way of an adequate criticism and certainly a larger one than I can summon up, though also a larger one than presently attends the scene. What I want to do is to outline the nature of the job to be done, as I see it, and to discuss what seems to me inadequate in both the traditional and contemporary ways of writing about Greek tragedy.

Between 1928 and 1948 in Czechoslovakia, a prolific group of linguists and theoreticians of literature, theatre and music, known as the Prague school, worked out the first systematic structuralist-semiotic approach to the study of art. (The semiotics of art—the study of art as a system of signs—was actually established by Jan Mukařovský's programmatic statement “Art as a Semiotic Fact” at the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy in Prague in 1934.) Concentrating primarily on the problems of poetry and literature, structuralists gradually expanded their interest to include theatre, film, visual arts, and music as well as the problems of general theory and esthetics.

The Grand Union was formed in the Fall of 1970. Founding members of this anarchistic democratic theatre collective were: Becky Arnold, Trisha Brown, Dong, Douglas Dunn, David Gordon, Nancy Green, Barbara Lloyd, Steve Paxton and Yvonne Rainer. Characteristic of the Union, there are nine different answers to how and when it began. The lives of the members have been intertwined for anywhere from five to ten years. In 1970, the members of Yvonne Rainer's Continuous Project Altered Daily (CPAD) conceived of an organization in which they might share choreography. Three other choreographer/performers of similar mind were invited to join. This was the beginning of the organization but not of the concept.

By the “approach” to the drama of the Golden Age I mean a guide to its understanding. I have thought that some remarks on this subject might be useful because the drama has not yet been satisfactorily handled in any histories of Spanish literature. This is mainly due, I believe, to the fact that our conceptions of what a play is and how it should be approached are derived from our inherited notions of the classical and Shakespearian dramas, and from the realistic theatre of more modern times, whereas Spanish literature offers us a form of drama that is in many respects different from any of these.

The Spanish drama of this period is not, of course, uniform in technique; there are very great differences between the last plays of Calderón and the first of Lope.