Memé Perlini is the producer and artistic director of “La Maschera” of Rome. His fourth spectacle, Otello (Othello) billed as “after Shakespeare,” was presented in May, 1975, at the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. The piece was originally created at the Venice Biennale where it was performed in a sixteenth century church for 2,300 spectators in November, 1974.

In Nancy, Otello was presented in a large gymnasium-like exhibition hall. The audience seating section was placed at one end of the rectangular space and consisted of tiered bleachers with a seating capacity of approximately 2,000 people. The spectators entered the building from behind the bleachers and immediately encountered hundreds of white paper plates spread neatly across the floor. Walking on the plates, around the bleachers, the spectators confronted the space. Creating a polka-dot pattern, the plates covered the entire floor area except that used for performing.

The events of May, 1968, in France spurred a re-examination of the relationship between art and politics, of the function of the artist and the role of theatre in our society. After May, 1968, with its attacks on institutions for distributing a culture that is not a “culture in action sprung from life,” theatre artists sought a way to work outside the established structure, which they felt was separate from life and whose rigidity demanded a particular kind of production and hindered experimentation.

The desires to become more directly involved with life; to place the accent on the process of creation rather than on the final product; to establish a new kind of relationship with the spectators, considered on many different levels as“potential creators”; to insist on the actor's creativity; to rethink the role of the director as well as the role of the playwright resulted in new forms of political-popular theatre in France.

When the appearance of work changes radically, one generally can also assume that the underlying concerns governing the work have shifted. While the hypothesis of that statement definitely applies to my work, the conclusion does not, and I find myself reflecting on aspects of continuity rather than discontinuity, particularly with regard to the involvement of the spectator.

In 1964, one of my dances took place on a street in lower Manhattan. It was observable to an audience from the windows of a loft located on the opposite side of the street. The dance was entirely based on its found surroundings, and performers, myself and one other, essentially blended in with the other activity that was going on in the street. From time to time, however during the six-minute duration of the dance, we were engaged in pointing out various details and/or irregularities in the facades of the buildings: lettering and labels, the assorted content of displays in the store fronts (sheets, pillow cases, etc.).

Sakonnet Point, an hour-long piece “composed and directed” by Spalding Gray and Elizabeth LeCompte, was presented at the Performing Garage in New York City in early June, 1975. It formed the third part of an evening of three plays presented by members of The Performance Group. (Later in the summer it was presented alone in a converted church at Westerly, Rhode Island, and again in October at the Garage.) Sakonnet Point (the title is taken from the name of a town in Rhode Island where Gray spent his summers as a child) is a very personal, contemplative piece, attempting to evoke dreamlike moods through images presented in soft, dim lighting.

The Théâtre du Soleil, the gaudy and tumultuous star in a rising constellation of French leftist theatre troupes, emerged early this spring from eighteen months of work to offer a devoted public some contemporary reflections. The Golden Age, First Draft, staged by director Ariane Mnouchkine in three warehouses of an abandoned arsenal in the woods of Vincennes on the eastern outskirts of Paris, has succeeded in moving the group in an entirely different direction from their previous work, such as the unanimously acclaimed 1789 (see T52). But the current production, unlike its predecessors, is not offered as a finished product or as a concept fully realized. It is rather a public beginning, a point of departure.

Mnouchkine's troupe began attracting wide attention in 1967 with a production of Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. It has grown increasingly popular with an innovative, pre-Brook production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was performed in a circus hall; with its step into nonliterary, collective creation titled The Clowns; and with the satirically caricatured historical spectacles 1789 and 1793.

Two women in white. The feet of one, red. The feet of the other, green. They begin to circle counter or clockwise and keeping opposite each other establish a circle whose radius is the span of the outstretched arm of either, reached toward the outstretched arm of the other, hands meeting palm to palm. Their stride is smooth and medium fast. Again and again their arms are lifted to check the measure, and dropped to let the elements settle into a constant dynamic equilibrium, as their bodies incline slightly toward the apex.

Consider the seven circles of the Star of David; one in the center surrounded by six others, all of the same size. Superimpose on these two more, forming a figure eight whose halves join on the center of the central of the seven circles.

After a time of circling together, one of the women steps along the radius, straight to the circle's center, which she then takes for a point along the circumference of another circle.

The expressionistic images that Jozef Szajna employs in his production of Replika have their roots in the World War II concentration camps of Poland, where the Polish director was sent when he was seventeen. This past spring he brought his production to the Slavic Cultural Center in Port Jefferson, Long Island, New York, from his Teatr Studio in Warsaw. It played March 12 through April 2. Szajna commented that “the concentration camps were my university.” After he was freed, he continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw where he began “to re-examine what we call acting in the theatre.” He soon found that the theatre itself had become another concentration camp. “It was the pop art that was created by the Fascists: hair, shoes, limbs, dolls, naked people.”

Katsuhiro Oida, better known as “Yoshi,” and six of his countrymen, each skilled in a different Japanese discipline, performed their synthesis of those disciplines, Hannya Shingyo (Beyond Wisdom), on the Anspacher stage at the Public Theater in New York. There were two weekend performances, September 27 and 28, after five days of workshops (the first four workshops devoted to a particular discipline and conducted by the expert of that discipline, assisted by the six other members of the company). The next weekend, October 3 and 4, 1975, there were two more performances, preceded by a repeat of the first four days of the workshops.

The disciplines selected represent those elements from ancient Japanese life that are now inseparably the basis of modern Japanese thought: Shintoism, Buddhism, Budo (the martial arts), and—less a part of modern thought and more a literal expression of ancient life—the Noh theatre.

In July, 1975, the Pip Simmons Theatre Group performed for the first time in London since disbanding in April, 1973. As with previous works by this group, some critics and spectators were offended. The last two plays Simmons had created in England were Do It!, based on Jerry Rubin's book, and The George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show, staged shortly after Jackson had been killed and played by white performers in blackface. By affecting a fashion of dress and a vocabulary of four-letter words without actually being involved, these productions affronted those English liberals who romanticized the American Yippie and Black movements. Nazi concentration camps are the subject of the latest production, which appropriately opened in the The Netherlands of Anne Frank in the spring of 1975. The play commemorates the thirtieth anniversary of the closing of the camps.

For the Shaliko Company, rehearsals for The Measures Taken, which began in January, 1974, became a way of “studying the paradoxes of radical commitment.” Leonard Shapiro, the director, commented that “Patty Hearst was kidnapped at about the same time we started to work on the play, and that certainly influenced the way we worked at it.” The Brechtian Lehrstück, he felt, was directly related to the problem of political terrorism. “In 1930,” Shapiro explained, “everything was falling apart in Germany. The need to pull together behind the Communist Party seemed like the only thing that could have saved the country from Hitler.” The problem illustrated by the play about the political necessity of killing a comrade was at that time related to the problem of obedience to the party.

The work is ongoing. It is still, in Johnston's phrase, about “any old people,” but it is no longer focused on personal incidents within pedestrian forms. Personal incidents happen now in the context of a duet system that has been named Contact Improvisation.

Each party of the duet freely improvises with an aim to working along the easiest pathways available to their mutually moving, masses. These pathways are best perceived when the muscular tone is lightly stretched to extend the limbs, although not to a degree that obscures the sensations of momentum and inertia. Within this flexible framework, the shape, speed, orientation, and personal details of the relationship are left to the dancers who, however, hold to the ideal of active, reflexive, harmonic, spontaneous, mutual forms. The ideal creates the attitude, which is manifest in the quality of energy-use.

This system is based in the senses of touch and balance.

Modern dance makes more choreographers, I believe, than ballet does. A conventional modern dance company is a very small group working with the specific ideas of a single artist. There are a limited number of these situations and an extraordinary number of dancers in training. It is not always difference in ideology or the compulsive need to explore a single vision that produces a new modern dance choreographer. It is simply expedient to create a personal marketplace in which to exhibit one's wares. The leniency with which modern dance has come to treat the eccentricities of body structure and performance as opposed to continued restrictions in ballets, allows for great variety in style and stature. But the small company, with its specific vision, often does not. So, choreography, for some of us, is self-defense.

When I began performing publicly in other peoples’ work, I had a fairly goodlooking body, (though not a very flexible one), good height, good balance, and no training.

On Sunday, April 2, 1972, The Washington Postpublished an article entitled “ ‘Dismal Fare’ For a Theatre Festival.” The article referred to the productions of the American College Theater Festival, then the only genuine showcase in the nation for the work of the educational theater. Though out of context, a phrase from this inflammatory statement is pertinent here: “… our college drama departments are far worse off than we thought, emasculated by academism and timidity, unable or unwilling to immerse themselves in the meaningful theater movements of our time….”

The day before “Dismal Fare” was published, a proposal for the establishment of another festival was formally announced. The new event was intended exclusively to promote and produce experiments in theatre production among students in American colleges and universities.

There were other reasons, too, why The Performance Group elected to stage Brecht's Mother Courage, which opened in late February, 1975, at the Performing Garage on Wooster Street in New York City after almost a year in rehearsal. The women in the group — Elizabeth Le Compte, Joan Macintosh, and Leeny Sack — had called for a play with large roles for women since the group's last production, Sam Shepard's The Tooth of Crime, had revolved around male rock ‘n’ roll recording artists. So, after Richard Schechner, a co-director of the group, brought the play by the garage and there was a reading in which members simultaneously used three translations — Manheim, Bentley, and Hays — because there were not enough copies of one version available, the group unaminously settled on Mother Courage and the Manheim translation, which they felt was the most “modern.”