On Saturday morning, April 19, 1975, two skirmishes between American Colonials and British Regulars were reenacted at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts, marking the beginning of the nation's Bicentennial celebration.

The initial commemorative event was the confrontation between British troops and American Minutemen at, the Town Green in Lexington. Spectators began lining the Green at about 3:00 a.m. By 5:30 a.m. there were more than 30,000 people standing six to seven deep around the square. Hundreds watched from rooftops, porches, and trees. Shortly before dawn, three buses carried the 200 men who would portray the British troops to the east end of the town. The spectators met the troops with cheers and good nature d heckling.

At 5:40 the canon from nearby Buckman's Tavern fired, and the Lexington Militia ran onto the Green. The spectators responded with a loud cheer as the men emerged from their rallying point inside the tavern.

One of the forms of theatre to emerge after the October, 1917, revolution in Russia was monumental open air spectacles involving thousands of performers and tens of thousands of spectators. These mass spectacles were characterized by collective authorship (script and raise en scène), military-like organization, and the participation of different segments of society: workers; soldiers of the Red Army; drama students and artists of different orientations, including those of the avant-garde.

Thematically, mass spectacles were connected with the events of the Revolution and the civil war. They were not isolated performances but were a part of a more complex event, such as the celebration of the anniversary of the Revolution, May First, the Third International, or any other holiday of the Red calendar. The mass spectacles were not only conscious attempts to create a new distinctly proletarian theatre but also an attempt to establish a new social ritual by collectively reenacting and celebrating the events of the revolution.

The introduction of non-traditional materials in contemporary art has facilitated the emergence of air dancing—dances that are performed off the floor by means of support systems, such as scaffolding, ropes, rubber cords, wires, or a combination of these materials.

This article is not intended as a historical survey of air dancing. Rather, it represents a theoretical speculation on the esthetic options afforded by air dancing. For this purpose, I have contrasted two choreographers, Batya Zamir, who has only recently incorporated aerial elements in her work, and Stephanie Evanitsky, whose Multigravitational Experiment Group has been involved in air dancing since 1969. The choice of these artists has not been undertaken to evaluate what air dancing ought to be or who the best aerial dancers are. The aim is more limited. Zamir and the Multigravitational Group were chosen to clarify two opposing poles of artistic development in dancing.

The production of the first German Expressionist play, Murderer, the Women's Hope (Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen), broke upon the staid Vienna art scene with the force of scandal in 1909. (Although Kokoschka is credited with having written and performed Murderer, The Women's Hope in 1907 and 1908, his own accounts of the improvised rehearsal for the July 4, 1909 production at the Kunstschau make it doubtful that an earlier script or production could have existed.) Oskar Kokoschka angered the public and most of the critics with his play, which they considered dangerous to the public morals and offensive to esthetics. Reviewers called him a “degenerate artist,” “bourgeoise-baiter (Bürgerschreck),” “corrupter of youth,” and “common criminal.” The savage attacks in the press caused, the Minister of Education to suggest that the twenty-two year old artist and teacher end his association with the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts.

My thinking about the medium of performance began in the late Sixties. In saying that, I am pointing to a particular conceptual context that was fully developed when I began to work—one that concerned itself with discovering new forms of movement and totally new ways of structuring the temporal shape of an event. Yet, when I survey the seven years of my work against that background of performances in the Sixties, I realize that those specific concerns with movement and temporality are not my concerns. My own thinking and production has focused on issues of space—ways of dislocating it, attenuating it, flattening it, turning it inside out, always attempting to explore it without ever giving to myself or to others the permission to penetrate it. I have returned again and again to a specific set of formal/material metaphors with which to shape this space.

D.E. was a political review in three acts and fifteen episodes directed by Vsevolod Meyerhold and first produced in Leningrad on June 15, 1924, for delegates to the Fifth Congress of Comintern. It re-opened on July 3, 1924, in Moscow at the Meyerhold Theatre. Based primarily on Ilya Ehrenburg's novel, Trust D.E., it also drew heavily on Bernard Kellermann's The Tunnels and touched upon novels by Pierre Hamp and Upton Sinclair.

A 1927 program offers a synopsis of the play, as well as the order of the episodes. Two world powers, the falling bourgeoisie and the rising proletariat, are juxtaposed in short theatrical sketches. Three American millionaires—Jubs, Twist, and Hardayle, who are in search of new markets—accept a proposal by Jens Boot, an international adventurer, to form “D.E.,” an organization whose aim is to destroy Europe, without boycotting American products or disseminating Socialistic ideas. Their ultimate goal is to claim Europe as an American colony.

The political character of Theatre Center 68/71, a Japanese troupe based in Tokyo, is best understood as part of the historical space within which it operates. This space may be delineated in terms of three coordinates: the murderous disunity of the Japanese New Left, the popular evasion of historical accountability facilitated by the “split-level” nature of Japanese historical consciousness, and the need to enunciate revolution as a redemption of history, as a plausible goal in the Japanese intellectual and linguistic context.

At approximately six o'clock on the morning of March 14, a male caller identifying himself only as a member of the Revolutionary Marxist League (Kakumaru) telephoned the Police Press Club in Tokyo. “This morning at 3:22 we torpedoed Chūkaku's Honda at an apartment in Higashi Kawaguchi. This is in repayment for an attack on our comrade Namba Tsuyoshi and is intended to show what happens to people like Chūkaku, who become the willing pawns of bourgeois power.”