After The Dybbuk, The Golem was Habima's most acclaimed production. It opened on March 15, 1925, when Habima was still a studio of the Moscow Art Theatre, and since then it has run for 340 performances on three continents. In 1926, the company toured Europe and the United States, performing The Golem with two other plays. When the company visited Palestine in 1928, the play was revived, and later, in 1948, it was staged in America again. In New York, it was chosen—on the basis of box office demand—as an extra bill for the final week of Habima's season at the Broadway Theatre. In 1954, The Golem represented Israel in the First International Theatre Festival in Paris.

The production excelled in its acting, being a perfect example of the unique expressionistic style that made the Habima players so famous in The Dybbuk.

Since her first performance work in 1974, Laurie Anderson has found herself concerned with a basic esthetic dilemma that has troubled a number of other performance artists: how to create an intensely personal art that is not just simple autobiography. How can the performer/author bring raw, unmediated materials from his/her life and structure them to strike a balance between his/her own needs and those of the audience? For Anderson, the resolution is not only intellectual but technical; it is one that leads to a new performance style.

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.

Two jokes; a dream. “A man came to the circus manager and asked him if he needed a bird imitator. ‘No,’ answered the circus manager. Then the man flew away through the window.” This and a second joke are told twice—in the first and in the last part—in Pina Bausch's Arien (Aries). “Berlin. A man asks a cabdriver: ‘Can you tell me how I can get to the Philharmonic?’ The cabdriver answers. ‘Sure, man, that's very easy: practice, practice, practice.’” “They practiced and could fly for two hours,” someone noted after an Arien performance. In Pina Bausch's Macbeth paraphrase there is the same dream. “How will you live?” Lady Macduff asks her son. “As the birds do.” It is cited twice.

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.

A Bike for a Year and Bars, both recent productions by the young actors of the Haifa Theatre Project Group, raised a two fold debate with both the public and theatre critics. One issue involved the artistic qualities of the shows as they reached the stage; the other concerned the social settings against which they were produced—for both productions were the results of special experiments in theatrical activity.

The initiator of the Haifa Theatre Project Group was Nola Chilton, a newcomer to Israel from the United States. A former Lee Strasberg student and now a member of a kibbutz, she is a resident director with the Haifa Municipal Theatre. Her most successful work there was based on a collectively compiled social research which evolved, over a prolonged period of study and experiment, into a stage-documentary.

Elaine Summers has two identities: a respected choreographer coming out of the Judson Dance Theatre and a highly influential teacher of Kinetic Awareness, a system permitting an extraordinary range and ease of movement that has been studied by many people in the performing arts.

Summers began her dance training by studying ballet as a child. She attended the Massachusetts College of Art and, because degrees in dance were not offered at that time, studied to become an art teacher. She attributes her interest in the breakdown of forms into their component parts to her Bauhaus-oriented art training. During her sophomore year, she studied briefly with Martha Graham and Merce Cunningham in New York. After graduating, she taught art for three years and then went to St. Louis where she taught dance to the mentally ill. In 1952 she came to New York to study dance at Juilliard.

The Khan Theatre Company was formed in 1972 in Jerusalem by Michael Alfreds, an English Jewish theatre director and teacher. Alfreds has worked in Israel since 1968 staging several successful plays such as The Mandrake by Machiavelli and The Donkeys by Plautus in the Haifa Municipal Theatre. Despite his success he still had difficulty working in the more well established theatres. Therefore, he accepted an invitation from the Jerusalem Municipality and formed a group of six young actors who were tired of seeking a comfortable milieu. They moved to Jerusalem and found their home in a renovated ruined Turkish inn—a 750-year-old khan. With government and municipal aid they formed the Khan Theatre Company to be the only repertory theatre in Jerusalem.

Among the multitude of writings about actors and acting which appeared in the 18th century all over Europe, Johann Jacob Engel's Ideen zu einer Mimik (1785-1786) merits special attention, at once as a pioneering attempt at a semiotics of acting and as a valuable source of information about the actual practice of contemporary actors and actresses. It takes the form of 44 letters (numbers 1-27 making up Volume I, numbers 28-44 Volume II). Despite its easy and apparently casual style, it is in fact a quite systematic analysis, even if it repeatedly disclaims the ambition to be exhaustive. It is difficult to account for the long neglect the work has suffered. When it first appeared, its importance was evidently recognized, since it was promptly translated into other languages, but it seems to have been soon forgotten.

By the time the word Expressionism became widely used in Germany in the years 1910-1911, it had already acquired magical properties. It denoted a kind of primitive, anti-rational, anti-classical, non-French creation; various graphic artists, writers, philosophers and dancers from Central Europe began to label their work “Expressionist.” Without a center or an adjudicating leader, without any authoritative pronouncements or clearly stated manifestos, a trend, rather than a movement, was growing up around this term. In one Berlin art gallery, Sturm, founded by Herwarth Walden and promoted in its influential periodical, Der Sturm, pieces from nearly every contemporary European avant-garde movement—French Cubism, Italian Futurism, and others—were gathered together under the single heading of Expressionism.

For the last 15 years Vanessa James has been creating her sumptuous stage environments out of materials such as garbage bags, plastic wrap, scrapped plastics, synthetic fabric, foam rubber, mirrors, corrugated cardboard and acrylic paint. She culls her “stuffs” from corporations like Mobile Oil and International Paper, as well as the waste bins of commercial studios where she works during the day. By night she creates her art works for the stage. They have been part of more than 50 productions in the United States and England, and have been exhibited at galleries in New York, Cambridge, Salt Lake City and Bristol, as well as Studio 54, the Port Authority Bus Terminal and the George Washington Bridge. Her creations combine the remote, formal beauty of previous centuries with the products of contemporary industry.

During the mid-1970s the impetus for founding a Jewish Theatre Association stemmed from the energy and commitment of two individuals. Although living over a thousand miles apart and of different professional backgrounds, Norman Fedder and Steve Reisner each simultaneously began exploring his Jewish heritage through theatre. Increasingly fascinated and moved by these experiences, each felt the need to form a theatre organization specifically devoted to the Jewish experience.

In 1972, Norman Fedder, the head of the Playwrights Workshop at Kansas State University, directed a student's play based on the life of Jeremiah. As Fedder recalls, the discussion with the audience which followed “was one of the most exciting experiences I ever had in the theatre.” As a result of this performance, Fedder, a dramatist with many community productions to his credit, was commissioned to write and direct other works with religious themes for several churches and synagogues.

From the moment a Linda Mussman performance begins, it is apparent that she and her actors intend to use the theatre's basic tools—language and movement—in highly unconventional ways. Sentences begin, but splinter or dissolve into fragments before they are finished. Words are stretched and distorted and twisted out of shape. Phrases drone like incantations till their meanings dissolve. The actors move in quick athletic bursts, or haltingly like wind-up toys, or in formal patterns like dancers. They freeze unexpectedly with a face or hand or foot isolated in a pool of light. Whether it is Mussman's own playfully abstract poetry as in her “triptych” Room/Raum, Door and Window (1978-79), the flowing rhetoric of Georg Buchner's Danton's Death (1980), or the delicate narrative of a Japanese fantasy play, The Bandit Princess (1978), the language of the piece is fragmented, its delivery restructured, and it is associated with oddly stylized movement.

The early years of Mary Wigman's career as a dancer involved a search for a new dance form. She found no medium for communication in the dance styles of the early 20th century. The prevailing techniques of ballet and popular stage dancing concerned themselves with unreality and illusion. Isadora Duncan was startling the world by dancing barefoot to the music of the great composers, but her inspiration derived from a bygone era. Mary Wigman's dance was a deeply personal message of its time, and neither the form, the music nor the subject matter of any existing dance style could completely and satisfactorily express this message.

Wigman returned to the fundamentals of dance as she examined the expressivity of movement and the function of movement in space with an awareness that was remarkable for its time.

The Thingspiel movement developed as a result of the “new world epoch” begun by Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Party when they came to power in 1933. During the first years of the Third Reich, the party leaders effected a reorganization of German life, a reorganization that was to be consistent with the philosophy and the world view, the Weltanschauung, of National Socialism. The theatre, the drama, and all the arts were not exempt from this program. Significant changes were demanded on two fronts: The “outmoded” and “inferior” genres in existence prior to 1933 were discouraged or prohibited and in their place, a new order of German art was to be founded. In the dramatic arts, the Thingspiel was the example of this new artistic order, receiving major state support and encouragement. The Thingspiel was to become the National Drama of Nazi Germany.

On March 4, 1953, Brecht noted in his journal: “Our performances in Berlin achieve hardly any response anymore. In the pre1ss, reviews appear months after opening night and they contain nothing except a few meager sociological analyses….The efforts won't be quite meaningless only if the mode of acting can be revived at some later time, i.e. if its teaching potential will once be realized.” Brecht's Berliner Ensemble had been working for four years and had mounted ten productions, among them Mother Courage; Puntila; The Motherand The Tutor, but Brecht voiced his deep disappointment about the lack of impact he sensed. Many of us who were active in the Berlin theatre in those days wouldn't have been in complete agreement with his pessimistic statement.

Anita Enters came to New York City from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, late in 1919 to begin study at the Art Students League. (According to personal correspondence and various newspaper interviews, her given name is Angna, although she was addressed by her family, her early friends, and her husband by the nickname Anita.) She was probably 18 years old at the time, although her birth date is usually given as April 28, 1907. If the description of her life before arriving in New York, as told in her fictionalized biography Silly Girl, is only partially true, it is certain that she was a precocious, withdrawn, independent child.

After the first quarter at the Art Students League, she became discouraged with her artwork and did not register for the next quarter's classes.

Anne Bogart creates and directs experimental theatre pieces. She combines her regard for the individual esthetics of the actors with her own strong structural vision to produce eclectic and unique plays. Her most recent works include Out of Sync, performed in March of this year; Hauptstadt, in May of 1979; and Inhabitat, a play in a house (February 1979 production).

Bogart was born in 1951 into a Navy family. As a child brought up in the military, the longest she stayed in one place was two and a half years in Tokyo between the ages of about six and eight. The frequent moves “from coast to coast and country to country” produced a stream of different schools—private, public, military and boarding. At 14, Bogart got involved in the backstage work of a school play.