For the last decade, the most important workers in experimental theatre have been investigating certain aspects of performance: altered audience-presentation relationships, spontaneity and the physical resources of the actor, group creation, the release of “forbidden” political/sexual material, and so forth. Energetic forms of expressionism have been the main preoccupation. The Ontological-Hysteric Theatre of Richard Foreman is, despite its name, almost diametrically opposed to these tendencies. It uses the traditional viewing arrangement; it extremely reduces and limits the activity of the actor; it does not attempt didactic socio-political statements; and it is quite clear that Foreman is both the playwright and the director of his theatre.

Of course, these differences would not, in themselves, be enough to make Foreman's Ontological-Hysteric Theatre important. If, however, the value of experimental theatre is to mark out new areas of performance for investigation and to develop previously unused techniques, then Foreman's theatre can be seen to have great significance.

Robert Wilson first came to public notice when he staged The Life and Time of Sigmund Freud at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1970. He began to acquire his growing international reputation the following year when Deafman Glance transferred from Brooklyn to Paris, via the Nancy Festival. In Paris, he provoked as much adulation as dismissal, both public and critical. One convert to his theatrical style was Louis Aragon, who saw in Wilson the logical heir to the Surrealists. Aragon once belonged to the Surrealist movement but turned his back on it. It now seems he is willing to take it seriously once more, thanks to Wilson. If Wilson achieves nothing more, that alone would be worth the effort.

His Paris success at the Théâtre de Paris and a newly devised companion piece in a radically different manner called Prelude that was centrally staged in one of the auditoriums of the Espace Cardin earned Wilson an invitation to the Shiraz Festival in 1972 in Iran.

We had flown to Tehran and motored for two days across the vast country of Iran to arrive just in time for the royal opening of the Arts Festival in Persepolis, featuring the Kathakali Dance Theatre of India. The following day was hot and I was already tired, but I was there to see the Festival, and the next event was Robert Wilson's Overture to KA MOUNTAIN and CUARDenia Terrace, performed by the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds. My host in Iran had told me a great deal about the importance of Robert Wilson's work in the theatre. He said it was “significant,” “avantgarde,” and “new.” But I was not impressed. I had never heard of Robert Wilson.

I have spent some 45 years in the theatre as an actor and a director, and I like to think that I have not only seen everything that is new in the theatre, but I have also done what is new.

The Balcony opened at the Ruth Escobar Theatre in São Raulo, Brazil, on December 27, 1969; it was performed through 1971 and during most of 1972 and was seen by thousands of people. In this presentation of Jean Genet's play, which was directed by Victor Garcia and designed by Wladimir Pereira Cardoso, the theatre became the scenery itself—a sculpture inside of which the actors played, flying in the air.

Wladimir pereira Cardoso, 39, is a former student of Architecture and Fine Arts whose theatrical designs have won several national prizes (including one for The Monsters, directed by Jérôme Savary, who now leads The Grand Magic Circus). When Garcia arrived in Brazil to work for Ruth Escobar, he found Cardoso ready with sixteen sketches for the reformation of scenic space. They were deeply influenced by Walter Gropius’ conception of Total Theatre.

One of the most imaginative and innovative productions of recent London seasons was Arrabal's The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. It was staged by the National Theatre of Great Britain in the Spring of 1971. Arrabal set his microcosmic fantasy on an island inhabited by a solitary man who lives without any knowledge whatsoever of civilization or mankind. As the play begins, this creature stands midstage, terrified by the roar of an approaching jet aircraft. The intensity of the sound builds as the aircraft passes low overhead. A deafening crash follows. The creature, petrified with fear, falls to the floor and hides his head. At this point, the second of the play's two characters appears. He approaches and announces himself as the only survivor from the crash. The panic-stricken creature flees, uttering bird-like screams of terror.

Unlike many other dance events in which setting is background for choreography, Nikolais dancers are immediately involved in a visual matrix. The relationship of dance motion to the total environment is established largely through the use of light. A solo may be illuminated as a major protagonist in the dance event and then instantly be absorbed as a minor element in the matrix. A duet may be performed down center, but the concern with the total environment is always present.

Directly related to Nikolais’ treatment of the entire stage space are his view of man and his theory of decentralization. Alwin Nikolais sees man as a minute, though important, mechanism in the universe. Sometimes man has a major relationship to other elements; other times the relationship is a minor one in which he is obscured by the mechanistic workings of the universe. He is not dominant.

Red Grooms is an artist whose creative activities have been numerous and varied in arts peripheral to (but making use of) painting, such as film, sculpture and performance.

In 1963, Grooms began to have one-man shows regularly in New York. These took place at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery on 57th Street. At least two of his five art exhibits in this gallery included films—Fat Feet (1966) and Tappy Toes (1970). Prior to 1963, Grooms had “performed” an action-painting entitled “A Play Called Fire” (1958), a proto-Happening called The Burning Building (1959), and a Happening-like work dubbed The Magic Train Ride (1960).

While Grooms’ art includes a wide range of mediums, there appears to be no sharp stylistic differentiation between them. His paintings, films and performance pieces all exhibit a highly personal, if not idiosyncratic, way of working. Many of his friends appear as performers in his films and theatre pieces, and as cutouts in his constructions.

“Since Gordon Craig, every artist of the theatre has tried every way conceivable to bridge the gap between audience and stage,” wrote Blanding Sloan, artist, scene designer, and Eastern Regional Director of the Federal Theatre Project, in 1939. “The Infinidome is the answer, and makes possible the ultimate in theatre production and creation.” It was to be, as he put it, “the last word in modern theatre design, and the first step toward the theatre of the future.”

From the beginning of Sloan's career, a radical approach to design was an integral part of his work. In an article in Theatre Arts in 1918, a critic wrote that Sloan's sets revealed “a structural sculpturesque sense of the play of light and the third dimension. Like the other stage artists to whom the unities of the drama are something felt, and not a merchant phrase, Mr. Sloan has searched in vain for a definition, a word, that will explain rationally and coldly what he can consummate irrationally and artistically.

The perception of space as primarily visual and “pure” enters man's consciousness as a fairly late development. In the Western world the transition from the multi-sensuous space of the nonliterate societies to the visual space of our recent past occurs with the geometry of Euclid. But the purely visual perceptions of Western history can no longer function as the only clues in perceiving a discontinuous and multileveled environment. High-speed, space-time, simultaneity, and the rise of the pervasive, ephemeral technologies of light and electronics have elevated acoustical values in our society. Auditory phenomena emerge in our culture as perceptual agents for defining space. Sound is existential: it connotes existence and the presence of activity, something going on. The depth and dimension of sound unite people as nothing else does.

The return of acoustical values to Western society should be a signal to practitioners of theatre to become aware of the audience's newly tuned-in acoustical perceptions.