Since the turn of the century, most art forms have vastly expanded their materials and scope. Totally abstract or non-objective painting and sculpture, unheard of in 1900, is practiced by many major artists today. Composers tend to discard traditional Western scales and harmonies, and atonal music is relatively common. Poetry has abandoned rhyme, meter, and syntax. Almost alone among the arts, theatre has lagged. But during the last few years there have been a number of performances that begin to bring theatre into some relation with the other arts. These works, as well as productions in other performance-oriented fields, force us to examine theatre in a new light and raise questions about the meaning of the word “theatre” itself.

In discussing this new theatre, new terms are needed. A few have already been provided by public usage, although they need clarification and standardization. Others will have to be created. Accurate nomenclature is important—not for the sake of limitation but to facilitate easy, accurate, and creative exchange among those concerned with the work and its concepts.

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.

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.”

During May 1963, the Smolin Gallery sponsored a month-long program of Happenings, Events, music, dance, chance theatre, etc. called the Yam Festival (“Yam” is “May” spelled backward). One of the many performances listed on the published calendar was The First and Second Wilderness, subtitled A Civil War Game. It was presented for one evening only—May 27.

When the spectator climbed four flights of stairs to the loft where the piece was being done, he found himself in a clean, freshly painted room about ninety feet long and twenty feet wide. Near the center of the space, the squares of a large game board had been laid out on the floor with tape. The usual rectangular grid pattern was extended by pyramids of squares at each end which ended in single squares marked “Washington” and “Richmond.” Blue and grey cardboard soldiers about two feet tall stood near the opposite ends of the board.

I began with an idea about a piece that had to do with the making of a theatre work, with itself as its own subject. It seemed to me that one of the first theatrical things is when the sun goes down, night falls the stars come out, and people imagine what the constellations are.

Out of this came The Night Time Sky, performed in May, 1965.

The audience arrive a few at a time and walk down a tunnel towards the place. They hear steel drum band music, crowd noises, and steamship whistles: boat-leaving sounds. At the end of the tunnel is a movie projected on a white cloth, of passenger liners leaving. As an audience member approaches this, his shadow is cast on the screen. His shadow is momentarily in the movie, participating in the boat leaving. All this is seen on both sides of the screen.

Creation of Washes followed the procedure established in previous pieces:

1. A period of about two weeks, of priming myself with possibilities—practical and impractical—for a pool piece, recording these in a book, and writing a number of script drafts.

2. Familiarizing myself with the particular place. In this case by signing up for massage etc., at Al Roon's. Noticing the importance of sound in the hall, the impossibility of any rapid action. Details of the normal activity of the Health Club.

3. Recruiting the cast from volunteers, some new and some familiar from past performances. Setting up schedule of rehearsals. First meeting.

4. Purchase of objects and costumes. In this case mostly from Canal Street stores, Avenue C used clothing stores, several “thrift” shops, swimming pool suppliers, and sporting goods stores.

5. First three rehearsals, combining prepared ideas, actual place, individuals in cast, and objects and costumes. Confusion and numerous trials and errors.

The Graphis series is the result of a feeling that conventional theatre notation in which one action follows another leaves untried an enormous variety of techniques that could enrich our experience. This feeling was of course one of the causes of my “millieu play” form of which The Tart is an example. With the Graphises I was trying to set up a form that was unsemantic, even choreographic, in conception if not in execution.

Experimental music has frequently used extraordinary notations. Stockhausen, Graettinger, and Cage have found notations which expand musical vocabularies. So I started out with drawn notations such as, “The higher up on this page this line goes, reading from left to right, the louder you speak. Where there are two lines to be read vertically you choose.” What I did not specify was what was to be said. I thought people would quote the newspapers.

The thing about The Tart is that I wanted to be specific and unabstract. Most experimental theatre has been done by painters who think abstractly. But I was a musician in rebellion against my medium; I didn't come to Happenings from the visual arts. I felt that the painters were too elegant and iconoclastic. What was missing was danger. So I wrote The Tart to express a sociological concept through choreography. It was not successful; neither was it intended to be. As it has no psychological empathy, The Tart does not permit the audience to view it as a play or ballet. But my hope was that audiences would sympathize with the performers (not the characters) in their social contexts and that the lines would be more tragic than funny.

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.

Eight men sit in armchairs arranged in a circle at a comfortable distance for speaking. Each man's wife sits on the right arm of his chair in a casual, intimate way. Within the circle, on small, separate tables are: 1. a large, portable transistor radio; 2. a small, portable television set; and 3. a portable record player with a popular record. The radio and television set are pre-tuned to broadcast immediately when they are turned on. One of the men has a small transistor radio in his pocket. Each of the women carries a small, white paper bag full of grains of rice.

Each performer's part is a list of eighty-one consecutive “moments.” There is no time schedule for these moments; they follow one another at any pace the performers as a group establish, and this pace can change continuously throughout the performance.