The Renaissance Pleasure Faire, a “living history environment,” has been an annual event in California since 1963, beginning in Los Angeles, where it is held in April and May, and then traveling to Marin County where since 1967 it has been open in August and September.

The Marin Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which lasts six weekends, as does its Los Angeles counterpart, has sprawled over a mile and a half of the Oak Forest near Novato, which is near San Rafael. “Renaissance,” in this case, means medieval and Elizabethan England with a convenient recognition of falafel, Turkish coffee, and Italian delicacies, which may or may not have been known to the British during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Peg Long, the fair's entertainment coordinator, auditions potential Pleasure Faire performers two or three months before each event. Once chosen, they participate in a month-long series of preparatory workshops on diction, scenarios, historical background, and the general ambience of the Pleasure Faire.

Webster defines “analysis” as “a separating or breaking up of any whole into its parts so as to find out their nature, proportion, function, relationship, etc.” “Theory” is defined as “an idea or mental plan of the way to do something.” Thus intellectual analysis involves the creation of a system of ideas by which an existing phenomenon can be “separated” or “broken up” mentally; theory provides an intellectual base for the creation of phenomena. Theatrical analysis examines existing or historical performance; theatrical theory provokes and originates performance.

Since both the analysis and theory of theatre involve more or less coherent systems of ideas, analysis and theory might be thought to be identical or interchangeable. Analytical systems might be expected to be useful for creating performance; theoretical systems might be supposed to function as well for analysis as they do for creation.

It is as the creator and director of her own highly innovative works that Meredith Monk is perhaps best known. Since graduating in 1964 from Sarah Lawrence College, she has channeled her energies into deVising performance pieces that fuse, in varying balances, a “triangle” of dance, theatre, and music into a single unified whole. Monk has described her works in such terms as “a live movie,” “a theatre cantata,” an “opera epic.” She is interested in the way that the forms of dance, music, and theatre work against and with each other “and then the form that comes out of these crossings. That's why I have different names for different pieces. Because I'm always surprised at what the balance comes out to be myself. And then after it's finished, I sort of have to figure out what it is.”

For the last two years the San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop has concentrated on the workshop process rather than on public performance. This change of emphasis is closely connected to Anna Halprin's concern with therapy (a means and an end in itself) as the focal point of artistic activity rather than with the esthetic or formal elements of dance or theatre.

In a broad sense, the theatre experience—through empathy, for example—can be considered in terms of therapy. In the same way, therapy, especially group therapy, has “theatrical elements,” such as role-playing, acting-out emotions, self-revealing monologs, etc. But usually theatre and therapy, in their conventional contexts, remain two separate areas with only minimal overlapping.

Anna Halprin bridges the gap between therapy and theatre first by being a performer (a dancer with a long history of innovative approach to dance) and a dance therapist; and secondly by devising workshops in which the function of theatre and therapy are identical.

The world premiere of Robert Wilson's latest work, Einstein On the Beach, took place July 25 under the auspices of the Festival d'Avignon before beginning a tour that included performances at the Festival d'Automne, Paris. According to Wilson, what distinguishes this piece from his others is, in the first place, his strong collaboration with other artists, specifically with musician Phil Glass and with choreographer Andrew de Groat. In the second place, there is his fusion of rich visual imagery, characteristic of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin [T62], with formal and rigid structure, characteristic of A Letter for Queen Victoria. What triggered that fusion was the subject itself, Albert Einstein, a mathematician but at the same time a dreamer; for Wilson, he was one of the three most influential figures of our time (the other two: Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin).

It is dawn in early June. The wind is cool. The Mississippi slips quietly by the enormous silver arch that marks the “gateway to the west” at St. Louis, Missouri. A blue van pulling an orange trailer drives up, then a yellow truck. Ten people climb sleepily out of the vehicles and begin to unload: First, a number of oil drums, carefully caulked to be air-tight, then tongue-in-groove flooring, and, last, twelve seventeen foot two-by-fours with bolt holes drilled in them. They are the parts of Otrabanda Company's unmotored raft, ready to be assembled and provide transportation for the company on its annual tour down the Mississippi. They will stop in river towns along the way, put up their red and yellow striped circus tent, and perform a show, at the “world's most popular price, absolutely free.” There are ten members of the company.

Sue Sheehy was a waitress in a small restaurant when Robert Wilson created Deafman Glance at the University of Iowa in 1970. She had lived in Iowa all her life and had never seriously considered leaving it until she met Wilson. “Robert Wilson and John D'Arcangelo came into the restaurant where I was working,” she recalls, “and Bob said, ‘I want that girl to be in my play.’” Up to that time, she had never given much thought to becoming an actress. “Sure, they've got theatre groups in Iowa,” she says, “but you have to know somebody in order to do it, or have a background… It never really turned me on. I was always told I could never do it, there was no sense in trying.”

Being a part of Deafman Glance, therefore, was a new and fascinating experience. The play itself was unlike any she had seen before.

In 1974, Barry Farber, a nationally syndicated broadcaster, placed a full-page ad in Penthouse magazine. The ad, entitled “What Turns You On?”, was an appeal to those who had been having unusual forms of sexual relations and to those who had been suppressing their sexual fantasies (resulting in abstention from all sexual activity) to write letters detailing those fantasies to The Project. The Project was founded by Farber as a sexual minority research and education center, as well as a therapy workshop for fantasists.

A performance was created from the letters received in response to the ad. Seven fantasies (six of the seven fantasists selected were male) were reconstructed precisely according to the letters. In some cases, the fantasist was invited to direct her/his particular segment.

The performance, Another Way To Love, is staged in a large loft in New York City at 127 Grand Street.

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.

In 1971 Priscilla Smith, Andrei Serban, Elizabeth Swadosand the other members of what was then the La Mama Repertory Company (now the Great Jones Repertory Project) engaged in a series of workshops, the end-product of which was Medea rendered in the original Greek and Latin.

On opening night of The Threepenny Opera at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre, director Richard Foreman sent Elizabeth Wilson a note:

The recent Lincoln Center production of The Threepenny Opera functioned not only as the meeting place of an avant-garde director and professionalactors, most of them strangers to the experimental theatre scene in New York; it also brought together two disparate theatre schools: one totally evolving around the actor's performance, the other regarding him as but another element of the production.

The primary focus of both theatre and therapy is the same: human behavior. Dramatic action generally stems from a movement toward or an avoidance of change in behavior—the same process that characterizes a dynamic therapy. The actor and the director confront human action in the text of the drama. In the development of a score for performance, they adapt immediate and ongoing behavior to this action. Behavior is suggested, represented, experienced; the entire range of human response is available as a source for creation and discovery in performance. The function of criticism and acting training is to provide systems to analyze patterns of action—in the text and in the related experience of the performer. Traditional analysis has nearly always been external, treating behavior as an artifact that can be schematized, predicted, fixed, kept in a limbo between past and present.

Emil Frantisek Burian. who was to become the leading avant-garde director in the Czech theatre of the 1930s, was born in 1904 (d. 1959), the son of Emil Burian, a leading baritone of Prague's National Theatre Opera, and his wife Vlasta (née Hatláková), a teacher of singing. His uncle was Karel Burian, a concert tenor. The musical environment established by his family was sustained in Burian's musical education: he graduated from the Prague Conservatory and subsequently completed master's study in composition in Prague under the Czech composer J. B. Foerster. Burian eventually composed seven operas, numerous ballets and chamber works, and most of the music for his theatre productions.

If the roots of Burian's general creativity may be found in music, the roots of his philosophy may be found in Marxism: while still a student, in 1923, Burian became a member of the Czech Communist party.

It is not unprecedented for street magicians to annex a given area of the city and make it their own. “The magician of the Chateau d'Eau,” who performed in Paris during the 1820's, could always be found in front of a certain fountain. The spot that Jeff Sheridan has chosen as his is the Walter Scott statue in Central Park.

Sheridan's form of conjuring is traditional but in many ways his execution of it is not. He works as minimally as possible, using few props, rejecting a costume for the simplicity of a black turtleneck sweater and trousers.

Tom Murlin and Johanna Went, under the names of Murlin and Johanna, have performed street theatre across the United States since the spring of 1975. Much of their work consists of improvisation based on an object, an idea, or a suggestion that either performer may introduce before or during a performance. None of the pieces that evolve are rehearsed or plot-structured. No meaning is intended, although some spectators have claimed that they have derived meaning from Para-troupe pieces.

Murlin and Johanna's touring has taken them to many cities in California, Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, and Canada. They also have performed indoors at the Crippled Children's Hospital in New Orleans, the University of Toronto Convocation Hall, St. Francis College's Founders Hall in Brooklyn, Theatre Genesis in New York City, and the LaMama Theatre of Hollywood.

Murlin, a 37-year-old former attorney, became involved in street theatre after abandoning his practice in Los Angeles in the mid-1960's to write plays for experimental theatres in New York City.

Zen has been called “the religion of no religion.” It is a branch of Buddhism, both having originated in a single event: the enlightenment of Guatama Siddhartha who, after meditating for six years, is said to have awakened, as if from a dream, to become The Enlightened One, the Buddha. It is significant that the seed of Zen Buddhism was neither a set of scriptures nor a messianic creed, but the dedication of a single man to gain greater perception into his own nature and the nature of reality through meditation. The practice of meditation is at the heart of Zen, and the word “Zen,” derived from the Chinese “Ch'uan,” means “meditation.” Predicated on practice rather than belief, without sacred scriptures, fixed canon, or Divine being, Zen is “no religion.” It is rather a type of training intended to promote a special presence, a particular quality of consciousness with which to meet the world.

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.