happening

Black Experimental Theater

Theater of Oppressed

Living Theater

Pedagogy of the Oppressed

Arte Util

Tania Bruguera

Mihcael Chekov

P27
The actor must apprehend all those Atmospheres with which he has come in contact. Atmospheres for the artist are comparable to the different keys in music. They are a concrete means of expression. The performer must listen to them just as he listens to music.

P28
and the Atmosphere is an irresistible bond between actor and audience, a medium with which the audience can inspire the actors by sending them waves of confidence, understanding, and love. They will respond thus if they are not compelled to look into empty psychological space.

ATMOSPHERE INSPIRES THE ACTOR The actor will also receive the necessary inspiration for his acting from the Atmosphere directly. Just as in everyday life one speaks, moves, and acts differently when surrounded by different Atmospheres, so on the stage the actor will realize that the Atmosphere urges him to new nuances in his speech, movements, actions, and feelings.

P29
The space, the air around the actor, will always be filled with life, and this life-which is the Atmosphere-will also keep him alive as long as he maintains contact with

Paulo Freire

Augusto Boal

Games for Actors Non-actors

Belfast

Rietveld Workshop

Abdias do Nascimento

MST
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra

www.declaration13may.com

For Antigone in the Amazon, Milo Rau and his team traveled to the Brazilian state of Pará, where the forests burn due to the expanding soy monocultures and where nature gets devoured by capitalism. On an occupied piece of land, in collaboration with MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra), the world’s largest landless workers’ movement, they create an allegorical play about the violent devastations and displacements caused by the modern state, which places private property above the traditional right to land.

"Much is monstrous, but nothing is more monstrous than man." So goes one of the most famous phrases from Sophocles' classical Greek tragedy Antigone. "Man cuts down the forests in search of gold and other minerals, he takes the energy from the rivers with dams, forces the children of the forests to forget their native soil, and labels the places where their ancestors lived as his property." These are some of man's monstrous deeds that are already sung in the prologue of the Amazon tragedy by the chorus, which consists of members of the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), the movement of landless farmers.

The Western myth of conquest and progress through civilisation is linked to the story of the destruction of nature, of violence, the decimation of peoples and destruction of cultures.

Kay Sara uses her body as a political instrument in her performances.

Antigone Brecht Living Theatre

Research

Workshop

DL: the first thing that came to my mind was ISOLATION,
one form of oppression for me is to ISOLATE PEOPLE
Pretending that Greg is not here is a form of oppression
When people pretend that you’re not there
They don’t acknowledge you
They don’t recognize you
Different forms of isolation that could be proactively positive
or negative
Representations of someone
People who are oppressed can get used to being isolated
Or how can they start internally isolating themselves
and contribute towards their own isolation because that’s
what they’re used to

The Living Theatre in New York City is the oldest experimental theatre group in the
USA; when they founded it in 1947, actress Judith Malina and painter/poet Julian
Beck were very influenced by Antonin Artaud’s seminal anthology The Theatre and
its Double. In the 1950s The Living Theatre became a major influence in the
development of “off-Broadway” theatre; in 1959 it premiered Jack Gelber’s drama
of jazz music and drug addiction, The Connection. The Living Theatre has always
worked, and played, with the “fourth wall” between actors and audience, and over
the years it has built a unique reputation for being collective, experimental, anticommercial,
even confrontational; during the 1960s, its openness to nudity and
transgressive language and concepts resulted in its members being arrested and
imprisoned at various times in New York, Brazil, and throughout Europe. The
sample of pre-rehearsal discussion for Paradise Now, a semi-improvisational
performance inviting audience participation, is a kind of improvised performance in
itself, introduced by Malina and Beck as other voices join to colour, diversify, and
problematise the discussion topics. It is a celebration of artistic work as a
collaborative process.
p116. The Improvisation Studies Reader: Spontaneous Acts

The Living Theatre

During the course of the rehearsals for Paradise Now, Judith and I and many other
members of the company kept notebooks recording more or less what was said and tracing the development of the ideas of and for the play. The notebooks then served as a
gathering place for these ideas, a storeroom which we visited repeatedly and from which
we drew supplies in constructing the play. The following seven entries record the first
two pre-rehearsal discussions between Judith and me, and the first five general discussions,
what we call the first five rehearsals, with the entire company. The first five of
about 100. Discussions such as these have become an integral part of our working
method and were the source material out of which Mysteries, Frankenstein, Paradise
Now, and the mise-en-scène for Antigone were created.

JULIAN BECK

- The work is to make everyone artists, into their rightful state as creative beings.

- To change the audience.

- We must give and take.

- To inspire the audience. A celebration.

- We have to stop thinking of the audience as Argives, as people beneath us to be taught. They are with us, are us.

- What’s important is the form of communication. As with language, we can
store and eternalize knowledge. Now we need another form of post-lingual
communication.

Goals of The Living Theater

This form reflects
their adaptation of Brechtian principles within a Chicano cultural context, and also
reveals similarities with the Joker system developed by Brasilian post-Brechtian Augusto
Boal, who has also worked closely with the Chicano theatre movement

Chicanas’ Experience in Collective Theatre

Augusto Boal

Joker System

the new theatre
movement in Cuba and Latin America

The members remarked on the difference between the definition of collective that they have been trying to work with – where everything is done collectively, including writing and directing – and the kinds of collectives they have come in contact with in Latin America.
p133

The Cubans, for example, tend to delegate certain functions according to people’s strengths. After collecting data on the chosen topic directly from their target community, one person will write the script, after the topic has been discussed and/or improvised by the collective. This text is then submitted to extensive collective improvisation and continually rescripted to accommodate audience reactions.

Creating Collectively

Allocating tasks, remaking collectively

As Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano describes, Chicana theatrical artists face resistance not
only from the hegemonic theatrical culture from which they are consistently marginalised,
but even from within the culture they attempt to nurture and to celebrate.
Dr Yarbro-Bejarano was the inaugural Director of the Chicana and Chicano Studies
Program in Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity. For
several decades now, she has been involved with the critique of dominant heteronormative
discourses in Chicana/o Studies, as well as the analysis of cultural
representations of Chicana/o queer sexualities, subjectivities, bodies, and desires.
Since 1994 she has been developing the digital archive Chicana Art, a database of
images and information, featuring women artists, for research and teaching.
Dr Yarbro-Bejarano is the author of the books Feminism and the Honor Plays of
Lope de Vega (1994) and The Wounded Heart: Writing on Cherríe Moraga (2001). She
was a crucial part of the organisation of the international conference Feminicide =
Sanctioned Murder: Gender, Race and Violence in Global Context in May 2007,
which examined the extreme gender violence that has assumed epidemic proportions
in such countries as Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Argentina.
Key words: race; ethnicity; theatre; gender
p124, The Improvisation Studies

San Francisco Mime Troupe

Teatro de la Esperanza

The San Francisco Mime Troupe is a theatre of political satire which performs free shows in various parks in the San Francisco Bay Area and around California. The Troupe does not, however, perform silent mime, but each year creates an original musical comedy that combines aspects of Commedia dell'Arte, melodrama, and broad farce with topical political themes

The San Francisco Mime Troupe, which has a long history of political theatre work, is
currently engaged in the struggle to maintain a progressive orientation in their plays given
the varying levels of political consciousness of the different members of the company. The
pressure of creating new shows for the free theatre in the parks during the summer, and the indoor performances and touring during the year has led to the unfortunate situation in which the play is often still being written while the actors are in rehearsal, seriously
reducing the opportunity to research and discuss the politics of the piece as a collective. It
is embarrassing for some that not all members of the group can field questions about the
political issue dramatised by the play. The lack of ideological cohesiveness in the group has
led to what some see as a softening of the politics in their work. The theme of factory
shutdowns in their recent work, Steeltown, suggests a continuing commitment to exploring
pressing political problems. The San Francisco Mime Troupe is, nevertheless, one of the few multi-racial and multi-ethnic collectives, and has been so since the early ‘70s. An Asian-American has recently joined the black, Chicano and white members of the group as musician and actor. Wilma Bonet is the only Latina in the Mime Troupe, hired to replace the Chicana actress, María Acosta Colón, who decided to develop her skills in administrative work within the group.
p126, The Imporvisation Studies

As the only Latina, Bonet has the sense of representing her community in the group.
She serves as a moderator for all Latin roles, making sure they are not stereotypes. With
the Chicanos in the group, she has been instrumental in bringing about open discussions of racism within the collective, including problems in the area of casting and relationships
between white and non-white members.
p126, The Imporvisation Studies

Commedia dell'arte

El Teatro Campesino

male-oriented

Luis Valdez

Collectives such as the Teatro de la Esperanza are understaffed and overcommitted,
simultaneously producing shows, touring, organising, attending festivals and building
networks with the popular political theatre in Latin America. Members of collectives can
hardly subsist on the extremely low wages paid by collectives, when wages are paid at all.
The collective structure often makes the decision process maddeningly slow. Equally
slow is the artistic process of collective creation, which, in some cases, leads to artistic
stagnation and makes the beginning of every tour extremely hectic as the group struggles
to finish the show before they hit the road.
p129, The Improvisation studies

At the same time, there are negative aspects to her experience in non-collective theatre. She must struggle with the added pressure of reviews
and the producer’s power – the producers can remove you from the show if they don’t like
your work. Rodríguez finds herself confronted by dilemmas expressed by many Latina and
Chicana actresses: enjoying the luxury of confining her participation to performing her
part and picking up her cheque, yet missing input into the creative process; wanting to
express herself politically and socially in her theatre work, yet playing stereotypes of
Latin women; wanting her own career, yet still being committed to the collective process
p131, The Improvisation studies

differences between working in a collective or a commercial theater

The Teatro Campesino is responsible for the creation of forms and images that have
influenced a whole theatre movement

Esperanza works within a Chicano theatre tradition, using
the same form and characters as the Teatro Campesino, but with political content and
more sensitivity to women’s issues.

Augusto Boal

After an initial phase of developing actos, the Teatro de la Esperanza created the
docudrama form that they used in their first three plays. This form combines drama and
documentation, framing the action with quotes and statistics, scene titles and musical
commentaries in the attempt to demystify certain aspects of theatre. This form reflects
their adaptation of Brechtian principles within a Chicano cultural context, and also
reveals similarities with the Joker system developed by Brasilian post-Brechtian Augusto
Boal, who has also worked closely with the Chicano theatre movement.
p132

Esperanza selected a corrido that tells the story of a woman who shoots a captain who
has raped her and killed her brother. Other sections celebrated the role of women in the
Nicaraguan revolution and dramatised Domitila’s famous speech at the Women’s
Conference in Mexico City.
p132

Mihcael Chekov

Spontaneous Combustion

The Sixties and Seventies

postmodern dance

“indeterminate choreography”
“open choreography”
(as opposed to determinate,
“closed” choreography),
“situation-response composition,”
“in situ composition.”

Sally Banes, p134, Improvisation Studies

the Contact Improvisation movement

began as a series of experiments for men in duets dancing together in ways that might avoid aggression and embrace tenderness.

by Steve Paxton

a gender-integrated form that allowed both men and women to investigate various means of moving in one-on-one or small group encounters: giving and taking weight, lifting, carrying, leading, following, wrestling, and partnering in myriad ways

nontheatrical settings, in “jams”, where dancers and non-dancers got to work out.

a casual way of presenting to the audience, nothing would change if they were not there

playfulness, freedom, spontaneity, authenticity, and community.

“When the psychology isn’t hassled or political or tied in knots. I like it when people can do things that surprise themselves,” Paxton continues. “Where it comes from is just human play, human exchange—and animal play. It’s like horseplay or kitten play or child’s play, as well.”

men could partner one another in gentle, nonmacho ways

Women could find strength, and men could find support.

including gender issues of equality, of
women’s strength, and of men’s sensitivity.

Contact Improvisationgained a reputation as a perhaps too gentle, passive, even boring way of dancing. Instead of focusing on the occasional unexpected lift or handstand, younger artists saw only dancers tangled together, endlessly rolling around on the floor. Moreover, they felt that Contact did not function primarily for the viewer, but for the participant, and therefore it could not always deliver a satisfying theatrical product.

not for the viewer
but for the participants

not satisfying
theatrical products

Contact Improvisation is an evolving system of movement initiated in 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton. The improvised dance form is based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia. The body, in order to open to these sensations, learns to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.

Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one's basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.

—early definition by Steve Paxton and others, 1970s,
from CQ Vol. 5:1, Fall 1979

https://contactquarterly.com/contact-improvisation/about/

‘tens:ding [bending over backwards]’ is a performative installation, seeking and offering a magnification of the dynamics, small beauties, interdependencies and struggles of a relationship between individuals. “How far do you contort yourself to accommodate for another?”

Connected through a mechanical structure, two performers find each other, sensing the other's body and movement in a state of distanced intimacy. The performers continuously attempt to find a balance between themselves, surrendering to themselves and the other, leaning on and trusting in each other. They save, move and hold one another, but at what cost for themselves? This dynamic creates a performance that explores the connected interrelations of equilibrium, the fear of taking yet also of losing control, and a struggle of intimacy. Inspired by Queer experiences of morphing, adapting and opening yourself in relation to others and the environment, this piece explores ways of contortion, suspension, altered states of body language and the lasting physical and emotional effects of relationships.

About Bjarte Wildeman
Bjarte Wildeman (1998, NL) creates performances and unconventional choreographies with the mechanisms which are found in, and define the body; and through which the body relates to the surroundings. He builds and uses choreographic and kinetic apparatuses to highlight and enable these movements. He is intrigued by bodily motion, the physical experience, altering these experiences and biohacking, and researches (mostly) through performance-installations.

He recently graduated from the ArtScience Interfaculty at the Royal Academy of Art and Conservatory The Hague. Through his work he aims at inter- and intra-individual sensation, physical awareness and understanding, and developing ways of understanding and altering kinetic experience. He is currently working with expansion through restriction, the cognitive effect of movement systems; Mutualistic and interdependent movements, and the kinetic relationship between the body, the apparatus/environment and sensemaking.

https://delftfringefestival.nl/programma/733347/%E2%80%98tens:ding-[bending-over-backwards]%E2%80%99

Grand Union

p136

If Contact Improvisation, with its (not always exclusive) focus on the duo, stripped away
everything but the bare bones of partnering, Grand Union maximized all sorts of group
situations and dynamics, as well as metatheatrical commentary, to proliferate both texts
and imagery in an open choreography of constant surprise.

Constant Surprise

Maximaised group dynamics

Open Choreography

focus on duo

The 80's and the 90's

in the 80's a Gesamtkunstwerk emerged—marketed now to attract larger audiences combining art,
music, theater, and dance spectators and involving several artistic contributors from different
artistic fields

—could not always risk the uncertainties
(both financial and artistic)
that
open choreography implies.

in the 90's the content of the dance tended toward an explicitly stated politics of identity,
in terms of gender, sexual preference, race, and ethnicity.

If many
dancers in the sixties saw situation-response composition as a way of accessing the
“authentic” self, postmodern culture in the eighties and nineties declared that there is no
singular, authentic self, but only a fragmented multiplicity of shifting identities. p138

Mostly white

more people of Color

Urban Bush Women

from the youtube interview with Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, the founder:

- the purpose is to create works of art that are relevant, that are challenging, that are inviting, all of that at the same time. We really want people to come out and dig into the work.
- so what do you want the people to learn at the end?
- I want people to have an experience and say I see myself in that experience, be able to think about it more, and maybe even dance it at home!

Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, artistic director of Urban Bush Women, declares that
“improvisation is a spiritual philosophy as well as a movement tool. It includes the Marxist concept of collectivity, the African notion of cooperative tribal action, the Native
American council.”

Quoted in Sally Banes, “Dancing in Leaner Times,” Dance Ink 2, no. 3 (Winter 1991–92), repr. in Sally Banes, Writing Dancing in the Age of Postmodernism (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 343.

Merce Cunningham
John Cage

Action Theatre (Ruth Zaporah)

Rachel Rosenthal

https://walkerart.org/collections/publications/side-by-side/how-grand-union-found-a-home-outside-of-soho-at-the-walker

Stanislavski

Viola Spolin

Keith Johnstone

The Brig

The Living Theatre’s interest in creating somatically affective theatre is also
evidenced in its production of Kenneth Brown’s The Brig, an important avant-garde
theatrical event when it was fi rst staged at an off-Broadway theatre in the early 1960s.
The Brig was loosely based on the author’s autobiographical experiences in the Marine
Corps, and its subject matter ideally suited The Living Theatre’s commitment to Artaud’s
notion of the Theatre of Cruelty. Unlike most plays, The Brig was virtually devoid of
characterization and conventional dramatic confl ict. That is to say the play has no plot;
The Brig’s action revolves around the attempt to brutalize and punish the prisoners who
are being incarcerated in the brig, and the production focused on the attempt to dramatize
the prisoners’ visceral experience of pain and trauma. Julian Beck’s set design featured
a massive chain link fence that separated the performers from the audience. The set
emphasized total spatial control, an environment where every action of the prisoners
was regimented and carefully monitored. In this repressive milieu, even the attempt to
speak was regulated (“Sir, prisoner number three requests permission to speak, Sir”). The
narrative of the play featured no character development, only the dramatization of the act
of socially conditioning the prisoners.

On “The Living Theatre and Its Discontents: Excavating the Somatic Utopia of PARADISE NOW”
From In Ecumenica Vol. 2.1, Spring 2009
James Penner

Happenings

American

European

Jean-Jacques Lebel

1. Structure of Happenings

• Happenings are an open and fluid art form with no beginning, middle, or end.
• The scenic actions are not mapped out in any detail and therefore allow plenty of room for improvisation.
• They only happen once and cannot be repeated.

2. Audience Participation

• “the art of participation”,
• do not allow any voyeurism or exhibitionism,
• everybody involved acts out his or her relationship with their psycho-social environment,
• not designed to be contemplated by spectators but to force them into active intervention,
• not based on unilateral (one-sided) processes, but propose an exchange and collaboration,
• stir spectators out of their habitual passivity conditioned by the “alienating mechanism of an image industry”,
• establish relations between subjects,
• there is dialog and circulation of ideas instead of mono-directional exchanges.

3. Happenings and Life

• a means of breaking through the wall that separates art from life,
• not interpreting life, but offers a direct experience of life,
• allows participation in unfolding the reality of our existence,
• the participant finds “cosmogony in the action” (The astrophysical study of the origin and evolution of the universe).
• reinvents the world by coming into contact with it,
• it is not paintings of the struggles of life (portraying problems), it is waging the battle of overcoming art, leaving theatre behind and arriving at life,
• lead to a complete transformation of human beings by making them change “their old ways of seeing, of feeling, of being”.

4. Theatre of Rebellion

• a protest against the power of State authority,
• the politics of the ruling class,
• the controlling of our actions through the police,
• the controlling of our mind through the censors,
• a fighting method against “this exploiting society with its slave-owning mentality and its irremediable culture,
• a “combative art”,
• serves in “the struggle for liberty of expression on a political footing”,
• fight all forms of repression and coercion and “directly tackle political and sexual themes”,
• offer an alternative to “the adulterated chain-store eroticism” of today.

5. A New Form of Communication

• a new form for communicating people’s innermost feelings,
• the intensification of feeling,
• the play of instinct,
• a sense of festivity,
• social agitation,
• is above all a means of interior communication,
• and incidentally, a spectacle,
• bring us back into contact with our instincts, whose sexual basis has been sublimated for the sake of culture,
• give expression to our subconscious and turn dreams into actions,
• they produce “an intensely receptive state of mind” akin to hallucinatory experiences after taking LSD or similar drugs,
• create a mood in which each person dreams the dreams of the others; the Happening is the concretization of a collective dream and a vehicle of intercommunication”.

6. Against the Capitalist Art Market

• created to fight “this mercantile, state-controlled conception of culture,
• counter-image to the old “clown of the ruling class”: who has been “dispossessed of most of his intellectual resources, progressively depersonalized as he ‘gets on’ and ‘succeeds’ socially,” and who in the end finds himself “on his knees before Authority and the Stock Market”,

the theatrical intent was not to entertain the
audience, but to shock the audience with theatrical displays of physical brutality.

If the
audience reacted and was affected in some way, then the production was successful. In
this sense, The Living Theatre was assuming that the audience would be horrifi ed by
the raw depiction of brutality.

Yet, there was no way of gauging the audience’s actual
response to the production’s critique of violence and aggressive masculinity. One must
conclude that The Living Theatre merely assumed that its visceral brand of Artaudian
theatre would emotionally transform the audience.

the beginning of a didactic trajectory in the sense
that the production attempted to affect the audience viscerally and morally transform it.

non-political
apolitical

more political

Kaprow