Enforced restriction of movement and social distancing regulations during the pandemic pushed a Nigerian-based church with global membership to innovate liveness without co-presence. The church purportedly transcended time-space limits in miracle performances during their Distance Is Not a Barrier digital sessions.

In October, 1971, Moshe Feldenkrais came to the United States to give seminars in body training at the Esalen Institute, at Carnegie Mellon, and at the School of the Arts at New York University. The interest shown in his work by these institutions reflects an important change of emphasis in the area of movement training for actors.

The choice, put simply, is between training the body to perform skillfully as a well-exercised, aesthetically pleasing physical instrument, and freeing the body of its habitual tensions and programmed patterns of behavior so that it can respond uninhibitedly to impulse, and genuinely reflect individual imagination and emotion.

There is a trend away from the use of the formal disciplines of ballet, modern dance and classical mime as exercises. Actors are turning to Yoga classes, are being Rolf’d, are taking Alexander classes and T’ai Chi.

The bourgeoisie has been in control of the theatre for about 150 years now First of all, it controls it by the price of land, which rose so sharply in the 19th century that, as you know, the workers left the city, resulting in buildings and entire quarters belonging to the bourgeois the theatres are almost all located in the center of the city. The bourgeoisie controls the theatre by the price of tickets which rose steadily in order to make the theatre a profit making enterprise. In France it also controls it by centralization, so that in just those cities where contact with a varied audience would be possible, plays do not come or come much later on tour. Finally, it controls it through the critics. It is an error to contrast the newspaper critic with the public. The critic is the mirror of his public. If he writes nonsense, it is because the public which reads the news paper will speak nonsense too therefore, it would be futile to oppose one to the other.

Between September 1922 and March 1924, Bertolt Brecht worked in Munich on the original productions of three of his four plays, Drums in the Night, In the Jungle (later called Jungle and finally, In the Jungle of Cities), and Edward II. During this brief span of a year and a half, Brecht also made a short film, Mysteries of a Barber Shop, with many of the same actors from the three play productions. Unlike Brecht's later theatre work, which is thoroughly documented with many photographs and extensive production notes, these earliest productions remain relatively obscure. In an attempt to add to the information we do have, interviews were conducted with the three surviving actors in those first productions of Brecht's work: Hans Schweikart, who played a significant supporting role in Edward II; Blandine Ebinger, who played the comic-romantic lead in Mysteries of a Barber Shop (as well as several leading roles in other Brecht productions outside of Munich), and Erwin Faber, whose portrayals of lead roles in each of the four productions forms a veritable through-line of Brecht's professional work in his Munich years.

When I am asked: “Why do you write plays?” I always feel very embarrassed, and am at a loss for an answer. It seems to me sometimes that I started to write for the theatre because I hated it. I read literary works and essays, or went to the movies with pleasure. From time to time I listened to music, or visited art galleries; but for all practical purposes I never went to the theatre.

When, quite by chance, I saw a play, it was in order to accompany someone, or because I had not been able to refuse an invitation, because I had been obliged to go.

I derived no pleasure from it, and did not participate in it. The playing of the actors disturbed me: I was embarrassed for them. The situations seemed arbitrary to me. There was something false in it all, I thought.

I am going to describe a workshop technique that makes the abstractions of conceptual thought available as physical experiences, and in so doing, makes abstraction itself—usually thought of as a danger to theatre work—available to theatre, both as a subject matter and as an untapped source of performance energies.

There is a tendency, in most branches of contemporary thought, to use metaphors of space for all sorts of concepts and relationships that are not in themselves spatial. Literary critics locate the nuances of a word in “semantic space.” Psychiatrists refer to the “therapeutic space” in which they encounter their patients. Anthropologists imagine networks of kin-relationships spread out in “social space.” Musicologists speak of a “harmonic space” within which tones and timbres are distributed.

The middle-class hero, product of Western culture, still dreams of seeing his moral sense triumphant over all rebellions. This mediocrity has a bête noire—free art. He thinks that he, personally, is being attacked by the transformations which young artists claim to be bringing into his life as well as to their own.

In the years 1918, 1919, and 1920, the Berlin Dada movement, mounting less than thirty productions, exerted a formidable, if indirect, influence over the development of the German theatre. This influence would later lead to the dismantling of Expressionism as the dominant theatrical force in Central Europe. Retooling the theories and performance techniques that they inherited from the Futurists and the Zurich Dadas to their own specifications, the Berlin Dadas introduced the use of pure—onomatopoetic or vowel—sound and abstract movement, improvisation, simultaneous and illogical actions, verbal and physical assault on the spectator, antiillusionist scenic design, and the incorporation of popular entertainments, such as cabaret acts and cinema, into German performance.

There were nine of Brecht’s plays in the Moscow repertoires during the 1966-67 season — has any city in the world equalled this? Acceptance of Brecht was long in coming, however. There were some early Brecht productions in Moscow: The Threepenny Opera, directed by TaiVov at the Kamerni Theatre in January 1930; selections from Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, staged at the Lenin Komsomol in September 1941. Then nothing, until 1958. Brecht's plays were neither socialistic nor realistic enough for the Stalinist era.

After World War II, United States businessmen found it cheaper to run their own factories in Brazil, rather than ship goods from the U.S. They could profit from a low standard wage, and the factories would be closer to both the markets and the raw materials needed: steel, minerals, oil, etc. So it was decided to make São Paulo the largest industrial city in South America. U.S. money started pouring in, U.S. companies were granted enormous loans from Brazilian banks at low interest, and São Paulo soon became a prosperous city.

The nouveau-riche bourgeoisie, created by this boom, invited important European theatre companies and artists to perform in São Paulo. Brazilian artists began to imitate them and imported directors, mainly from Italy, to build and train theatre companies in São Paulo. As a result, actors began to resemble Italian actors and playwrights European playwrights.

—And we?
—I beg your pardon?
—Where do we come in?
—Come in? On our hands and knees.
Samuel Beckett, playwright

According to statistics published in the New York Times and Fortune, more than $3 billion was spent last year on “everything from Bach and the Beatles to Shakespeare, Shaw, the opera … Peter, Paul, and Mary … Monet and Melville.” Consumer spending in the arts jumped 130% between 1953 and 1960—about “twice as fast as spending on all recreation and better than six times as fast as outlays for spectator sports.”

Feelings kicked up thinking about relationships among (student) radicalism, (Freudian) sexual theory, and (new) theatre are tangled. I want to map those feelings—which I think are not peculiar to me. They are tied to a revulsion against the mass media, which—as Kelly Morris puts it—play Sioux to youthful Custers. Identifying “what's new,” journalists draw the innovators out, encourage (even demand) exaggerated claims and premature conclusions, encircle nascent ideas with stolid values, and annihilate experiments by marketing distorted replicas. The “news” is a deadly enemy of what is new, and premature identification may ruin for a lifetime authentic identity.

My first thoughts revealed that I was not very precise or concrete about politics. I turned up some hard prejudices against student radicals. I believed student leaders to be deeper into revolutionary rhetoric than radical action. I dismissed many actions on American campuses as either “escalated panty raids” or “senseless disruption.”

At least as far back as Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals(1872) scientists have studied analogic (as distinct from digital) modes of communication. Clearly all artists other than writers are technicians of the analogic.