Mary Overlie's demeanor is quiet and thoughtful. She speaks calmly, her words carefully chosen, analyzing ideas. The brown hair is always pulled back from the face, the face is always free of makeup; the body is long and lean, the ideal dancer's body, and her gestures tend to be spare. If the impression she gives is of almost shy reserve, it reflects only part of the personality.

Born in Bozeman, Montana in 1946, Overlie stayed there until she was 17. For a short time following her graduation from high school, she tried to be a sign painter but “couldn't focus on it.” That interest has been refined and converted to an interest in calligraphy. In fact, she often uses the word “calligraphy” to describe the patterns and shapes made by the body in space.

Between 1909 and 1913 the German section of the Theosophical Society held annual conventions in Munich. Part of the festival was the production of plays that were pertinent to spiritual science. It was Rudolf Steiner who gave the impulse for dramatic performances. His four “Mystery Dramas” were written for the Theosophical conventions. He wrote plays only when he knew that they were about to go Into rehearsal in Munich, and each was in production for about two months. In those days there was not yet any special training for the amateur performers in the plays, save in rehearsal periods. Each play was revived each year between 1910 and 1913 so that by 1913 all four plays were performed for the Society's two-week meeting.

—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.”

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.

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.”

The term “Anthropocene” is obfuscatory, and as an analytic framework it has a serious blind spot: the conflicts stemming from the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of the “Age of Man,” which are the very eco-conflicts on which artists in our field should focus. We should be talking about the “Capitalocene,” a term that locates climate change within the history of capitalism and colonialism, and suggests stories that deserve time on our stages.

Ermione, the title of my play, was also the name of the monkey who performed with me in it. It was originally the name of a mythical character, the daughter of Helen and Menelaos; more recently, It was used by Gabriele D'Annunzio in his poem “The Rain in the Pine Forest.” In my play, the monkey corresponded to D'Annunzio's “nymph with the sylvan face” who accompanied him through the metaphorical wood of life.

The text of Ermione was comprised of poetry that I had written from the age of sixteen to thirty; the action consisted of experimenting with ideas for a eventual reading of it. The first thing I wanted to test was the actual selection of verses. I read from a notebook, then provided a running commentary in order to create a distance between the time when the poems were written and the time when they were read. By so doing, I was able, at the same time, to minimize this distance by connecting the old poems to a “live” situation, thus making the link between poetry and life explicit. Next, I wanted to test the actions—the theatrical renderings of the poetry that corresponded to the different stages of life.

Nikolai Foregger (1892-1939), christened Nicholas Baron Foregger von Greiffenturn, the sole descendant of an aristocratic Russo-German family, was one of the most extreme exponents of mechanization and abstraction in the Soviet theatre and dance during its first decade. Foregger belonged to that unique generation of Russian writers, artists, directors, and dance-masters who, born in the 1890's, quickly reached their artistic maturity in the early Twenties. Writers and artists like Mayakovsky, Sergei Tretyakov, Isaac Babel, Varvara Stepanova, and Alexander Rodchenko are among the best known of that era. In the fields of theatre and dance, there were Foregger Eisenstein, Sergei Radlov, Boris Tikhonovich, Boris Ferdinandov, the FEKS group Vera Maya, and Kasyan Goleizovsky. Together, despite acknowledged differences in motivation and style, these young artists accepted the critical appellative Constructivist to describe their art.

With the exception of Eisenstein (see T61) and Meyerhold, who was judged according to other standards, the scenic work of the Constructivists is not well known although at the time of the Constructivist period (1920-1924), many of their productions and techniques were considered more radical than Meyerhold's and in fact prefigured many of his own post-revolutionary innovations, such as Biomechanics and mobile decor.

In July, 1975, the Pip Simmons Theatre Group performed for the first time in London since disbanding in April, 1973. As with previous works by this group, some critics and spectators were offended. The last two plays Simmons had created in England were Do It!, based on Jerry Rubin's book, and The George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show, staged shortly after Jackson had been killed and played by white performers in blackface. By affecting a fashion of dress and a vocabulary of four-letter words without actually being involved, these productions affronted those English liberals who romanticized the American Yippie and Black movements. Nazi concentration camps are the subject of the latest production, which appropriately opened in the The Netherlands of Anne Frank in the spring of 1975. The play commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the closing of the camps.

At the heart of Euripides’ masterpiece, The Bacchae, is a communal sacrifice. The city of Thebes is sacrificed to Dionysus to satisfy his capricious ego. In supporting this thesis I will contest several widely held theories about the play: (1) that Dionysus represents Fate or any of its equivalents; (2) that the god is a life force or some other pantheistic “god of ecstacy in religion”; or (3) that the play gathers its primary force from the encounter between Dionysus and Pentheus.

My reading of The Bacchae is an internal one: I want to see what the play will yield on only its own terms. I realize, of course, that political and social ideas both press in on the play and, if we seek them, emanate from it. These ideas are, I believe, extra-dramatic: they radiate from the script, enriching it and partially explaining its genesis, but they are not present as a dramatic immediacy.

During the first World War, in Paris Jacques Copeau developed the idea of a severe and simple form of theatre, neither classical nor topical, but versatile through the economy of its means. In 1919 he remodelled the stage of the Vieux-Columbier in accordance with his new ideas, and over the next two years he founded a school for the training of actors, the École du Vieux Columbier. Both in design and in acting, Copeau wanted to make large statements with simple gestures. The pursuit of simplicity made him eliminate distractions, to create the still ground against which a movement or a form could be seen. His bare architectural stage was meant to magnify the evanescent statements of the drama. “I want the stage to be naked and neutral,” he wrote, “in order that every delicacy may appear there, in order that every fault may stand out; in order that the dramatic work may have a chance in this neutral atmosphere to fashion that individual garment which it knows how to put on.”

Acting has been variously defined as impersonating, imitating, interpreting, creating, feeling, radiating, being, behaving, or believing. Acting has even been defined as acting. In his book, The Actor's Ways and Means, Michael Redgrave states:

Established actors, needing no definition, may accept any misty generalization if they are not sure what it is they are doing. The student actor needs a definition to guide him in understanding the process at any specific moment in the performance. The least common denominator in the actor's performance is a single unit. This unit is compounded of a stimulus and a response.

The Performing Garage: a beautiful cube of space, sprinkled with high platforms & towers made of raw two by-fours which but for their air of negligence would announce an acrobatic show. Individual gymnastics, each gymnast sole, randomly distributed. Their relentless contortions get them into a sweat—physical translations of introspection. Here & there a little acrobatics, action.

From this laborious anarchy the play powerfully emerges on a natural free rhythm. Couples form, the chance proximities of gymnasts turn into the interaction of performers. The timing of several trigger actions cuing others. Progressively assembling the play has been left up to the individual performers. Barely audible, mumbled chanted lines from a translation of Euripides sound out here & there, are repeated, taken over by others. Though they belong to parts they are not the property of any individual actor. The lines are metric, their delivery is amateurish & affected—false speech.

Sumurun, a wordless play in nine scenes directed by Max Reinhardt, was conceived as an experiment. It opened at Reinhardt's 300-seat Kammerspiele Theatre on April 22, 1910. Because of its opening night success it was moved to the 1000-seat house next door, the Deutsches Theatre, where it entered the repertory in May 1910. In 1911 the pantomime was presented in Vienna and twice in London. On January 16, 1912, it opened in New York. After 62 performances at the Casino Theatre it toured Chicago in March and Boston in April, again in Shubert houses, and left for a Paris engagement. In 1913 Sumurun returned to the London Coliseum for another short run, less enthusiastically received, and was presented, not to Reinhardt's satisfaction, on the relief stage of the Munich Art Theatre.

We attempt to create a sound—a sound which grows and turns into a cry. We try to find the energy which produces this action and to become aware of it.

I see the sound as an image. I see what is enclosed in it—a column of air trying to break open. In the effort to produce the cry I attempt to replace heaviness with spontaneous vitality. The cry becomes either an expression of freedom and awakening or a sign of imprisonment; it all depends on how the sound is controlled and directed from inside.

At the beginning of this research real calm is required. One must accept the risk of passing beyond one's accustomed realm of habitual expression. One must try to discover an image, to nourish this image with something concrete, a taste, a smell.

Many Indian traditional theatre performances are connected with different Hindu religious cults and deities and performed by devotees. Drawing upon a common body of religious literature—the Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana—these theatres enact the individual episodes especially meaningful to a given deity, cult, and, sometimes, region. Since they are most often performed within a religious context, they require ritual cleanliness and other devotional observances. These, the most overtly religious actions, may occur at the opening or closing or may suffuse the entire performance, in which case the performance itself is a votive offering.

The main rituals connected with Indian traditional theatre begin in the dressing room hours before a performance. Thus, Kathakali actors begin their makeup procedures with a silent prayer for success.