The French theatre group ATEM (Atelier Théâtre et Musique) was formed by composer Georges Aperghis in the fall of 1975 to begin explorations that would lead to a series of productions in which commonplace gestures and sounds are scored according to musical principles. The group has developed what Aperghis calls a “grammar” consisting of “systems” that provide a means of structuring fragments of everyday life, setting them off in such a way that the spectator perceives them afresh rather than ignoring them as commonplace.

Five actor-musicians, together with Aperghis, comprise the entire group, taking on all of the research, administrative, technical, and performance responsibilities. They are subsidized in part by the city of Bagnolet, a bedroom suburb of Paris with a population of 36,000, and have attempted to relate their work to everyday life in the community.

From the mid-1960's on, Jack Smith—best-known as the director of Flaming Creatures (1962-63), a key work In the American avant-garde film—has astonished New York audiences with a series of highly influential performance pieces. Although Smith's theatre, which is even more fugitive and underground than his film production, has attracted little critical writing, it has made itself felt in the work of artists as otherwise disparate as Ronald Tavel, John Vaccaro, Richard Foreman and Robert Wilson. At the same time, Smith's refusal to separate his persona from his art presaged the gallery-based “performance artists” of the mid-1970's. His presentations include the ongoing slide-show (known variously as Spiritual Oasis of Lucky Landlord Paradise, Fear Ritual of Shark Museum, Horror of the Rented World), which has in some ways superceded his 16mm film work, and a number of individual plays. Both modes are original and important contributions to American art.

The traditional performing arts of Japan (the various Gaku, Noh, Bunraku, and Kabuki) are built on a set of contrasts between understatement and exaggeration; between distance and immediacy. Both setting and performance exploit such negatives as stillness, distance, absence and separation, but these occur against a background of opulence ranging from the elaborate Noh costumes to the technical magic of the Kabuki stage, and the lifelike movements of the Bunraku puppets. Although contrasts pre-dominate, mergings also occur in these theatre forms. Multiple evocations of the sacred appear in even the most secular of texts. One theatre genre evokes the others just as all the arts in Japan interpenetrate one another to a high degree. A constant feature of Japanese theatre is the consistent, if paradoxical, presence of the not-there which infuses the text and action to create a rich fabric of suggested meaning. It is this fact that connects Japanese classical theatre to modern experimental theatre in the West.

Sakonnet Point, Rumstick Road, and Nayatt School were first presented by the Performance Group at the Performing Garage in New York City in the spring of 1975, 1977, and 1978 respectively. They opened again as a trilogy of theatre pieces in December of 1978 under the collective title of Three Places in Rhode Island. Each production came about as a result of concentrated preparations that were begun the fall prior to their opening, and they demonstrate a final result that only a generous amount of time and effort could have produced. The process involved not only Spalding Gray and Elizabeth Le Compte, the chief collaborators, but also Ron Vawter, Libby Howes, Bruce Porter, Bruce Rayvid, Gabrielle Lansner, and a variety of other participants. In form and style, the pieces differ widely, but all three concentrate on a single subject: the development of a character named Spalding Gray as a person and as an artist.

In theatre, a heightened perception and experience of structure is possible in three kinds of work. The first is theatre based on strong codified conventions, as in Oriental theatre and a large part of Western folk theatre. In viewing Kabuki or No productions my awareness of structure is heightened not only because of the great variety and distribution of theatrical signs and their apparent systematic codification but also because, as a foreigner to Japanese culture and theatre, my attitude during the production is one of deciphering.

What follows is a detailed account of a single performance of topeng pajegan performed by I Nyoman Kakul In the village of Tusan, Ball, on Feb. 6, 1975. Topeng is a popular form of masked theatre in Bali, and topeng pajegan an old and particularly demanding version of that form, in which one man portrays all of the characters—dancing, telling stories, making Jokes, and performing rituals.

When we met in January 1975, Kakul checked a calendar, found it to be a particularly propitious hour to begin study, gave me my first lesson, and invited me to live in his family compound for the next several months while I studied masked dance.

The now-expatriate Hungarian theatre company Squat performed a new work called The Skanzen Killers in January, 1972, in Kassak, a suburb of Budapest. After one performance at the town culture house, the group's license to perform was withdrawn by government authorities on the grounds that the play was “obscene” and “apt to be misinterpreted from a political point of view.” For the next four years Squat went underground.

Between the time of The Skanzen Killers and the group's problem-ridden emigration to France in 1976, the fifth floor apartment of Squat members Peter Halasz and Anna Koos in Kassak became an outlaw theatre. Here more than a dozen complete experimental theatre pieces were developed and presented in private performances for friends, theatre aficionados, artists in various fields, and political sympathizers. The group also performed privately in an unused country chapel and in a sand pit on an uninhabited island.

“Have you been to the Theatre on Chekhov Street?” was a question often heard in Moscow in the mid-seventies whenever people interested in theatre got together. Actually, to call it a “theatre” was something of an exaggeration. What it really amounted to was a room in one of those old communal apartments still left in the center of town, the kind that has a shared kitchen and bathroom, and sometimes as many as a half dozen doorbells outside the door. The brainchild of Igor Vasilyev, a young actor and director at the Moscow Art Theatre, the Chekhov Street group operated on and off for about seven years. (To my knowledge they have since disbanded, though not for the first time.)

In recent years, theatre groups such as Vasilyev's have been springing up like proverbial mushrooms after an autumn rain, especially in theatre-starved Moscow and Leningrad.

My first moment of theatre, the moment most powerful for me and my first step away from life in the direction of art, occurred in 1961 the first time I was in front of an audience. The play was The Curious Savage. (Ironically enough, it was a romantic play about an insane asylum and its inmates of which I was one.) It was our senior play at a small boarding school I was attending in Maine.

This. This is. This is a. This is a simple. This is a simple additive. This is a simple additive process. Obviously patterns of this sort can also be employed with visual or musical elements, but since we are dealing here with typeface on paper, it seems most appropriate to begin with words.

Then there are. Rotations then there. Are rotations then. There are rotations. Or at least “rotations” is the term I like to use for patterns of this sort. We could also consider this a type of phasing. Since there are four words but only three are permitted in each sentence, the word pattern falls out of phase with the syntactical pattern and the two do not come back in sync until the word pattern has been repeated three times and the syntactical pattern four times. Again, this is a device that can be easily applied to nonverbal materials.

Since 1973 the California artist Linda Montano has used her own life—past and present—as material for her performances. After her estranged husband died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in August 1977, her work focused on reactions to his death.

Some of her earlier performances consisted of her usual activities being observed by others, in 1973, when she lived in San Francisco, she sent announcements to her friends saying that she would stay home for a week and would be available. She photographed everyone who visited during the week and documented food intake, telephone calls, and dreams. In other events she lived-in at several galleries and on the beach for three days at a time. In one of these events, she was blindfolded; in another she listened to her heart murmur with a stethescope. These living events are “framed“ for the viewer by being removed from their usual context.

David Gordon's dance piece, What Happened, opened at the American Theatre Lab, in September, 1978.

The stage is well-lighted when seven women enter. Some of the women are wearing white walking shorts with kneesocks, others are in white pants, and all are wearing white tops. Across the width and depth of the stage dancers take random positions, paces away from one another. They face the audience, looking straight ahead, arms at their sides—a group of women simply being themselves.

A car being started is heard; the car moves away, then there is a crash, followed by police and ambulance sirens. When the sound of sirens dies in the distance, the women begin speaking and moving, the stage is awash in words and gestures.

Over the sweeping view of the stage the dancers turn and pivot, some take steps, all of them talk, gesture, but none leave the given spheres in which they began.

Frogs flourish in the wet rlcefields of Bali. Their sounds and rhythms are mimicked with vivid comic precision by clowns in the temple dramas. Continuity between performance and everyday events is a powerful element in Balinese community life. The links are reflected in numerous forms other than dancing frogs, but it was the frogs I noticed first.

I arrived in Bali for a year of theatre research not knowing how I would proceed. Having been a circus clown in the U.S. I was attracted by the comic characters in the Balinese temple dramas. Eventually I moved into a small village, attended numerous performances, and became a regular follower of Topeng masked dancer Made Dlimat.

Although I did not know it at the time, my presence as a spectator of Balinese temple dramas was the first step along the way to my becoming part of the performance.