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.

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.

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.

The Research University organized by Jerzy Grotowski from June 14th to July 7th, 1975, in Wroclaw. Poland, was a series of introductions to the Laboratory's paratheatcal activities that are part of the “Mountain with a Pillar of Flame” project. The vocabulary as well as the work of the Teatr Laboratorium has been evolving since the first public exposure in 1973. The entire series of events which took place: in Philadelphia and the University ot Pittsburgh at that time was called “The Grotowski Special Project” (and included performances of Apocalypm cum figuris. workshops, and a symposium) but the term “Special Project” referred only to a certain kind of activity. This activity has “paratheatrical” objectives, synonymous with those articulated in “Holiday/The Day That is Holy” (T-58), and which, according to Grotowski, is a new kind of performing art (in contradistinction to the art of performing in the theatre).

From the very beginning of the Futurist movement in Italy in 1909, Russian artists, poets, and critics were well informed about the movement's manifestos and general development. Strong schools of Futurist poetry and painting quickly came into being. By 1913, Russian Futurism was already in full force. In that year, on December 2 and 3, the first Futurist theatre productions took place: Vladimir Mayakovsky's Vladimir Mayakovsky and Alexander Kruchenykh's Victory Over the Sun (T52). However, Mayakovsky and Kruchenykh were not familiar with the first Futurist manifesto devoted to theatre: the Variety Theatre Manifesto (September 29, 1913). Their plays and productions were influenced by general Futurist principles, rather than a specific theatrical theory.

Sergei Radlov (1892-1958) is remembered today chiefly for his inventive Shakespearean productions of the Thirties, during the last period of theatrical experimentation in Stalinist Russia. Yet, Radlov was largely responsible for the growth of an entirely new performance mode in the Soviet theatre—Constructivism. During the years 1920-1922, Radlov's Petrograd group, Theatre of Popular Comedy, drawing its inspiration from Yuri Annenkov's production of The First Distiller (September 24, 1919), popularized many of the performance concepts of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's “Variety Theatre Manifesto.” Within a few months, however, Radlov began to introduce changes that would radically alter the development of Soviet theatre.

Like Annenkov, Radlov received his earliest training in the pre-Revolutionary studios of Nikolai Evreinov and Vsevolod Meyerhold. By the winter of 1918, after organizing the agitational group, The First Communal Troupe in Petrograd, Radlov mounted comic reconstructions of ancient Greek and Russian farces under the auspices of the Theatre Department of the Ministry of Education (TEO).