Giuliano Vasilicò began his theatrical career in 1968 when he returned to Italy from Sweden, where he had spent eight years studying literature and the arts, though without any specific concern for the theatre. His sister, Lucia Vasilicò, had been working in Rome as an actress in experimental theatre and films with, among others, Fellini and Warhol. With her and Ingrid Enbom, who had come with him from Sweden, he began to articulate his ideas and formulate plans for theatrical activity. He and Enbom joined Giancarlo Nanni's group as actors in the production of Escurial by Michel de Ghelderode. Their association with Nanni, however, lasted only a few months. Vasilicò was impatient to verify his own ability as a playwright.

He subsequently staged two of his own plays: Psychopolitical Mission in 1969 and Occupation in 1970.

The group Mabou Mines is named after a small town in Nova Scotia. The members are Lee Breuer, Ruth Maleczech, David Warrilow, JoAnne Akalaitis, Frederick Neumann, William Raymond and Terry O'Reilly. The Shaggy Dog Animation is the third piece by Lee Breuer in a series of animation plays that began in early 1970 with The Red Horse Animation; The B. Beaver Animation followed some years later.

The term “animation” is used both in its original definition “to make alive,” as well as in relation to the animated cartoon. In The Shaggy Dog Animation, the actors come “alive” primarily through being hooked up to the sound system. This means that they are not controlling the final sound output. Volume, amplification and distortion are controlled by an Eden Harmonizer. Thus the actors can refrain from projecting their voices. The employment of a puppet manipulated by several actors is another example of “making alive.”

European theatrical thinking of the last fifty years is dominated by the urge to make theatre theatrical. This urge was a reaction against the text-dominated theatre of the preceding era. Artaud, with his program of the Theatre of Cruelty, became the most radical speaker of this thinking and a trendsetter.

Artaud's contemporary, Brecht, coming from a country where a literary theatre was at home and institutionalized (Bildungstheater), demanded an intensification of its literary, “scripted” character. Brecht's postuiation of the “Literarisierung des Theaters” found the most radical application in his theory of a Lehrstück. As a matter of fact, in a way typical of Brecht's subversive strategies, it meant a sublation of the traditional notion of a literary bourgeois theatre. Nevertheless, his postuiation pronounces a program opposed to Artaud: theatre does not need to be theatrical

In Brecht's concept of a Lehrstück, it meant an elimination of an audience and a new genus proximum for theatre: learning instead of spectating or, more precisely, collective text reading.

After having worked with Giancarlo Nanni as a scenographer, Memè Perlini began his career as a director in 1973 with a signal work in the history of Italian experimental theatre: Pirandello, Chi? (Who's Pirandello?). The production is based entirely on the relationship between light and objects. It does not interpret a script. On the dark stage, the actors move as though in a performance for themselves, hidden from the spectators, revealed only by flashes of light. It is a darkness full of phantoms—like the unconscious of the representation, like the deep structure from which emerges traces of violent struggle.

In the dark theatrical space, Perlini, from the front of the stage, works with small projectors on the magma of unknown actions. He cuts out square and rectangular pieces of light—very precise areas in which he captures details, parts of bodies, parts of objects.

In the tradition of Artaud's commitment to a theatre “whose only value is in its excruciating, magical relation to reality and danger,” and in the tradition, too, of his complaint that “no matter how loudly we clamor for magic in our lives, we are really afraid of pursuing an existence entirely under its influence and sign,” thrives an arts collaborative whose works of “performance art” cross industrial castoffs of urban technology (such as tin can poptops, recycled Yellow Pages, vinyl, spark plugs, and barbed wire) with ceremonies and icons now lost to secular culture (images drawn from Indian, African, and Catholic rituals, including body paint, masks, feathers, animal sacrifices, skeletal relics, and crucifixes). The group's purpose is articulated time and again by its members as an attempt to create, in the words of Mary Klaus, its newest member, “a magic moment.”

Apocalypsis Cum Figuris marked the last theatrical performance of the Polish Theatre Lab. Although this spectacle is still performed periodically by the group, its members are primarily concerned with different projects. Initially these projects were termed “paratheatre.” The name was transformed gradually and moved outside the realm of legitimate theatre. Grotowski started to use the term Active Culture. Very recently, a new term emerged out of this innovative group of artists: Theatre of Roots (or Roots of Theatre). What exactly this new term brings with it is still to be discovered.

The following is a description of a Theatre of Roots workshop led by Ryszard Cieslak of the Polish Theatre Lab and co-led by myself. It was a ten-day workshop that included twenty participants (an even number of men and women) and took place in and around Penn State University.

Altro was founded in 1972 in Rome by Achille Perilli, an artist, with the two fundamental and complementary ideas of collective work and intercode creation. Perilli, who originally worked as an artistic collaborator with only one actor, was subsequently joined by Lucia LaTour, an architect who does most of the choreography; Walter Branchi, a composer; and Bruno Magno, a photographer and lighting technician. Luciano Martinis and Gianni Trozzi have been working with the group from the beginning.

The idea of intercode creation has often extended beyond theatrical performance to workshop activities, political seminars, photographic exhibitions, concert series, and a lecture on linguistics. Of nine projects to date, only five have been performances; and some of those performances have included related “side shows.”

Some bizarre elements used in recent English performances are so startling or threatening or shocking to audience sensibilities that the dramatic illusion is broken. The spectator becomes aware of himself as being in the same time and space as the element rather than relating to it as if it were only fictional. In such instances the viewer responds as he would to other real-world events.

Traditionally, a theatre performance consists of an illusion created out of various actual materials including sound, paint, furniture, the bodies of performers, makeup, etc. Care is taken not to call attention to these materials because focus on them would break the fictional-world illusion. An attempt is made to assimilate into the illusion everything that falls within the space and time delineated by the work, although occasionally a mistake may cause the actual material to break out of the illusion—for example if an actor obviously forgets a line or a chair accidentally falls over. Such disruptions of the illusion are obstacles to the spectator's psychic absorption in the fictional world.

I am in a state of culture shock. When this way of naming my state occurred to me, I thought it metaphoric. Now I do not. I have decided that the Public Participatory Event (PPE) was a nascent community, a subculture appearing as an event. An event is more ephemeral than the network of structures we call a “culture,” but the event I concluded a few days ago leaves me more a stranger at home and work than I felt the first day I stepped foot in either. I have no choice but to reconceive the assumption which I have carried to much of my scholarly work in religious studies and anthropology, namely, that culture is a configuration largely of language, thought, and art. I am certain now that culture also resides quite literally in the bones; that is, in our patterns of moving, breathing, walking and so on.

The first point of gay analytical guidelines is personal: Is that character gay? Is that character like me?

The second point is political: Is that a good way to represent me? How does that reflect on me?

The third is esthetic: Do I like being represented that way?

The fourth is psychological: Is what I am seeing the work of the oppressors, or the work of oppressed brothers and sisters; i.e., is this how they think?

The fifth is philosophical: Why do people represent other people that way? What does it do? Is it good or bad to represent people that way? In what way is it good and/or bad? How could it be improved?

Ostal, the home environment as a workshop in madness, is a series of performance pieces produced by the Italian experimental group Cfr., directed by Aldo Rostagno. Ostal was performed by the group in New York for two weeks in April 1977.

Ostal [pr.: oo-stou’(t)] is a word of Languedocien, the dialectal variant of Old Provencal spoken in Southern France west of the Rhone. Ostal meant house, when the house was abode and temple at the same time, a sacred place where life was celebrated as a ritual—as opposed to the home of present days, a jungle of electrical appliances in which we cultivate our private neurosis.

The Cfr. (short for confrontation) was founded by Rostagno in 1975, after leaving the U.S. and returning to his native Italy.

There are at least two ways of approaching a literary work of art from the standpoint of psychology: first, by simply analyzing the characters through their words and actions as real people; and second, by treating the work as a dream turned inside out, in which each character is a facet, or refraction, of the dreamer's personality. The virtue of the second approach is that it objectifies the action to the degree that it is easier to treat the problem on a social rather than on an exclusively personal level. Outside of therapeutic analysis the aim of a psychological approach to art should not be to read the mind of the artist, but to read the work of art as a societal dream; not as personal pathology, but as social pathology.

The second approach is also more profitable in certain works that are manifestly dream-oriented on a societal level—such works, for example, as Faust II, Ibsen's late plays, Strindberg's expressionist works, and Albee's Tiny Alice.

The theatrical flashpoint In the 1920's was Berlin. The aftermath of war, revolution and putsch; the increasing polarization of society; inflation and depression, which revealed the flaws in industrial capitalism; the example of Russia, which under Lenin still provided an ideal of heroic political action—all formed a creative ferment that found expression on the German stage with its traditional claim to be a “moral tribunal.” The primary challenge was to develop ways of representing a new, distinctively twentiethcentury perception of reality. As Brecht put it:

What I am proposing here in relation to the The Shaggy Dog Animation is not, strictly speaking, a semiotic analysis. Rather, I would call it if the term was not even more intimidating, because it does not exist yet, trans-semiotic. Any other approach, including traditional semiotics, could make sense—lots of sense—but I am convinced that sense, good sense, normal neurotic sense, is precisely what Shaggy Dog is up against. So should I enforce conformity by means of an already existing theory or alter the approach itself in order to record the impact of a specific production? This obviously raises a somewhat ethical question about the function of criticism. Can we devise a battery of approaches independently of the pieces they are meant to elucidate? Is it advisable to try to establish a “library” of methods that could be used eventually by other critics no matter what type of production they might intend to study?

Lisi and Silvana Natoli founded the group Spazio Zero in 1973. Their work focuses on certain ethnic and historical aspects of Sicily, Sicily being, for them, a microcosm of the Third World. The title of their most recent production, To Salvatore Giuliano, is a dedication to a famous Sicilian criminal. Giuliano began as a rebel, then became the emblem of the revolt of the poor in southern Italy. The American invasion and the collapse of state authority after Italy's defeat in the second World War turned him toward politics. He championed an attempt at secession from Italy, masterminded by the Mafia, who expected to profit by Sicilian independence. The attempt failed, but Giuliano remained linked to the Mafia and was subsequently hired by them to massacre striking farm workers in Portella della Ginestra. The story is treated as a popular myth by Spazio Zero.

The following is an attempt to reconstruct the total course of a performance of Rasputin, with special consideration to the technical data. Rasputin is the single production of the Piscatorbühne for which such a reconstruction is possible with certainty, making use of available material which has been preserved. Serving as support are the sketches by Erwin Piscator from his book Das politische Theater; an essay by Julius Richter, the technical manager of the Piscatorbühne (Rasputin/Nach der Aufführung der Piscator-Bühne in: “Die Scene” 1928, Nr.2, p.40f); notes on the technical course of “Rasputin” made by the technical office of the Piscatorbühne (Rasputin. Notes on the technical operation. Theatermuseum Clara-Ziegler-Stiftung. München) and various reviews of the production.

At the beginning of the play, the hemisphere, with the playing areas set for the first part, is completely closed. At the sound of a gong, the stage, with closed dome, revolves a half turn to the left.