An unusually rich variety of forms of performance linked to seasonal, religious, and rural celebrations still survive in certain Polish villages, especially in the southern region. These performances are not staged for tourists as “folk theater” but are part of an authentic, on-going peasant tradition. They survive in surprising strength. Their existence does not seem to be well known among Poland's urban populace, perhaps due in part to the centuries-old schism between peasant and non-peasant classes in Polish culture.

Two examples of such performance are the King Herod Play, a short folk piece about the fall of King Herod performed by village school boys from door to door on Christmas Eve, and the mountain “Vagabonds”—groups of miners and farmers who dress up as gypsies, goats, horses, shepherds, Jews, Death, clowns, old men, devils and so forth, and run rhythmically through their village at New Year's, pausing occasionally to engage onlookers in improvised scenes, to play pranks, and to act out pantomime scenarios of probably pre-Christian origin.

The people involved in these events do not label their activity “theatre.” Nor do they use a theatre vocabulary to describe what they do.

We have moved into the position now of where we are more concerned with being directly a part of the political activity of our time than we are with being a part of the theatrical activity of our time.” So said Julian Beck of The Living Theater. He was speaking in the somewhat derelict three-story brownstone near the Brooklyn Academy of Music that has been the home of the twenty-member collective for the last couple of years. Judith Malina, Beck's wife and co-founder of the theatre, explained that on January 1st of this year The Living had begun another rehearsal phase in its development of The Legacy of Cain, a cycle of some 150 plays to be performed not in theatres but throughout a city.

The Legacy of Cain is a unique theatrical/political piece. The Living collective has been working on the development of the cycle for four-and-a-half years, and it is estimated that it is at least three or four years from culmination.

A special category of theatrical activity includes types of performance that appear to be unrelated, or only indirectly related, to each other and to drama proper. Ropewalking, conjuring, juggling, sword-swallowing, and other such acts associated with the wandering mountebank, the fairground, circus ring, side-show, and music hall represent particularized skills developed as a means of popular entertainment. One link with drama is an origin of clowning and comic performance amid activity of this type. Tumblers figure prominently in the Chinese theatre, and the Italian commedia dell'arte was probably created by acrobats. The techniques of the stage magician contributed to the illusionism of nineteenth-century drama, and trained animal acts were employed in its hippodrome-like spectacle. Performances of this kind, such as acrobatics or magic acts, when practiced as popular entertainments, seem to relate to the esthetics of drama only through the use of skill and through a common theatricality; they seem independent of considerations of narrative form or of the representation or enactment of another reality.

It is true, as Ruth Finnegan has observed, that “with a few possible exceptions, there is no tradition in Africa of artistic performances which includes all the elements which might be demanded in a strict definition of drama—or at least not with the emphases to which we are accustomed (Finnegan, 516).” Drama in the accepted sense of the term, as a situational interaction expressed in dialog between characters, is found in a number of rudimentary forms, in simple comedies, and in puppet plays. However, several African performance modes that verge upon drama may be considered as types or aspects of theatre. To be sure, a concept of theatre might well include dance and almost anything “dramatic” done before an audience. But since there is little sense in applying the term indiscriminately, as certain studies of African theatre have tended to do, it would seem best to focus on what might be called theatre only in its relationship to the concept and definition of drama.

There have been few attempts to seriously examine the architecture and design of traditional popular entertainments. For the most part, popular forms have not been thought to involve a high level of design or systematic organization of performance space. Yet, over the years, there. has emerged a distinctive scenography of popular entertainment. It has borrowed from conventional theatre, festivals, and folk performance. Essentially, however, it constitutes a highly independent scenographic strain While interest in that strain continues to grow, the scenography itself is rapidly disappearing. Increasingly, traditional popular forms are influenced by the scenography of the newest popular entertainments, television and film. The scenographic base of these new forms is quite different from that of traditional amusements: film and television are naturalist in their orientation. They are concerned more with presenting a seemingly coherent reality than with creation of spectacle and fantasy for their own sake—and the naive art of traditional popular forms is gradually giving way to the orderly and precise scenography of mass culture.

In order to deal with an artist's rehearsal techniques, it is necessary to discuss a particular system or process; in Richard Foreman's work process is important. Foreman has been producing his plays for five years and, although there have been changes, his esthetic and style have remained distinctively constant; partially because he is concerned with the problem and process of making art. He wants the spectator to notice not only the “art that is made” but also that “art is being made.”

To the theatre historian, the year 1830 means Hugo and the premiere of Hernani. For the great majority of the theatre public of the period, however, Hugo was a name scarcely known and the battle of Hernani was a minor passing scandal. Neither the new romantic experiments nor the declining neoclassic tradition they were attempting to replace represented theatre to this public. For them, theatre was the rope-dancing of Mme. Saqui, the pantomimes of Déburau, Kiony the elephant performing in plays written especially for him, the view of Timbuktu at the Cosmorama, the spectacular melodramas of Bouchardy, or the full-scale Napoleonic battle recreated at the Cirque-Olympique.

This astonishingly varied popular theatre was the direct descendant of the fair theatres, which had challenged the entertainment monopoly of the state-supported theatres, with varying degrees of success, for two hundred years. Then, primarily because of the rapidly changing political situation, the great fairs had disappeared. The Foire Saint-Germain, destroyed by fire in 1762, was never rebuilt.

Indian traditional theatre, like all Asian theatre, is a participative theatre, aiming at the closest possible relationship between the actor and the audience; it is this objective that determines in many ways the principles and practices of the scenography.

Most of the traditional theatre performances are open-air events, organized on the level ground, a platform stage, or as a mobile processional spectacle. They are presented in fields after the harvest, streets, open spaces outside town (often permanently designated for performances), fairs, markets, and—especially for the Ramayana and the Krishna legend shows—temple gardens, riverbanks, market squares, and courtyards. The idea of dramatic performs being an open-air street show is so basic that the very name of some of these presentation denotes this. The therrukkuthu of Tamilnadu is one such form: Terru means “street” and kultu means “play.” Another form is Veethinatakam: Veethi means “street”; natakam is “play.” The performances are social events not separated from the community activity.

Until 1965, when Imamu Amiri Baraka and others founded The Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, there was not a black theatre but an “American theatre of Negro participation” (the phrase is Clayton Riley’s, I think). The Negro Digest’s commemoration of black theatre in a 1968 issue was titled “Black Theatre: From Shakespeare to LeRoi Jones.” It contained a photographic galaxy of the “stars” of black theatre: actors, actresses, and other performers predominated over playwrights and directors. The point, of course, is that the major playwrights, producers, and directors in this black theatre were white. In practically all the histories of black theatre (except Loften Mitchell’s Black Drama), one finds that the black actors and performers played merely supporting roles to the true white heroes of this black theatre.