Performance events are carriers of Native American cultural traditions and values. From the earliest European contact into this century, missionary and government efforts have been directed at eliminating performance in order to destroy Indian cultures and effect assimilation of Native peoples into Western customs and religions. From the first Spanish contact in the sixteenth century, efforts to Christianize Indians have forced alterations in or destruction of traditional performances. In 1646, the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony drew up rules prohibiting curing ceremonies among the Indians they converted.

But the major efforts at purging Indians of their traditional ways were carried out in the nineteenth century, when by 1887 all of the extant tribes except the Papago had been brought under the reservation system. The agents, in virtual dictatorial control of the reservations, were to a large extent military men, and they in turn were influenced by missionaries as well as non-Indians who wanted land and mineral and water rights.

Ask anyone—almost anyone—about Chinese theatre in America and you'll get fast directions to Chinatown, be it New York, San Francisco or Los Angeles, and assurances that there you can see the real thing. What they mean are the numerous productions of Peking Opera, or sometimes Cantonese Opera, that take place every year.

But walk the streets of any Chinatown; push your way through dense crowds; meet the kids split between life at school and at home; come to know the garment workers in the sweatshops on the second floor above the restaurants, grocery stores and souvenir shops; hang around the steaming restaurant kitchens for awhile, and you'll be forced to wonder what all this has to do with those elaborate stories of princesses, kings and courtiers, sung in dialects that almost no one can follow without assistance, of a past time that has become a never-never land.

Flanked by apartment houses on 156th Street between Broadway and Riverside Drive, Our Lady of Esperanza Church serves Hispanic immigrants to New York City. The incongruous Classical Revival facade of the church evokes its aristocratic origins:

“The last example of a 300-year-old tradition” is what the handbill says, referring to a performance of the famous “Papa” Manteo Sicilian marionettes at the Loreto Playhouse on Bleecker Street in New York City.

Certainly, the Sicilian marionettes are special. First, they are rod puppets-not terribly common, although this kind of puppet existed in Roman times. A rod “control” is pushed through a hole in the head and hooked into an iron eye loop in the torso; another rod controls the right arm, which is the sword arm. Normally, the puppeteer uses the left hand to control the head and the right hand to control the arm. There is no leg control and the legs, therefore, swing free, moving by their own weight. This gives a realistic look to the walk, a kind of a stiff-legged stride which Bil Baird describes in The Art of the Puppet as being famous all over Sicily: “Students stiffen up and fall into the ‘Orlando’ walk just for fun…”

The Renaissance Pleasure Faire, a “living history environment,” has been an annual event in California since 1963, beginning in Los Angeles, where it is held in April and May, and then traveling to Marin County where since 1967 it has been open in August and September.

The Marin Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which lasts six weekends, as does its Los Angeles counterpart, has sprawled over a mile and a half of the Oak Forest near Novato, which is near San Rafael. “Renaissance,” in this case, means medieval and Elizabethan England with a convenient recognition of falafel, Turkish coffee, and Italian delicacies, which may or may not have been known to the British during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

Peg Long, the fair's entertainment coordinator, auditions potential Pleasure Faire performers two or three months before each event. Once chosen, they participate in a month-long series of preparatory workshops on diction, scenarios, historical background, and the general ambience of the Pleasure Faire.

It is dawn in early June. The wind is cool. The Mississippi slips quietly by the enormous silver arch that marks the “gateway to the west” at St. Louis, Missouri. A blue van pulling an orange trailer drives up, then a yellow truck. Ten people climb sleepily out of the vehicles and begin to unload: First, a number of oil drums, carefully caulked to be air-tight, then tongue-in-groove flooring, and, last, twelve seventeen foot two-by-fours with bolt holes drilled in them. They are the parts of Otrabanda Company's unmotored raft, ready to be assembled and provide transportation for the company on its annual tour down the Mississippi. They will stop in river towns along the way, put up their red and yellow striped circus tent, and perform a show, at the “world's most popular price, absolutely free.” There are ten members of the company.

It is not unprecedented for street magicians to annex a given area of the city and make it their own. “The magician of the Chateau d'Eau,” who performed in Paris during the 1820's, could always be found in front of a certain fountain. The spot that Jeff Sheridan has chosen as his is the Walter Scott statue in Central Park.

Sheridan's form of conjuring is traditional but in many ways his execution of it is not. He works as minimally as possible, using few props, rejecting a costume for the simplicity of a black turtleneck sweater and trousers.

Tom Murlin and Johanna Went, under the names of Murlin and Johanna, have performed street theatre across the United States since the spring of 1975. Much of their work consists of improvisation based on an object, an idea, or a suggestion that either performer may introduce before or during a performance. None of the pieces that evolve are rehearsed or plot-structured. No meaning is intended, although some spectators have claimed that they have derived meaning from Para-troupe pieces.

Murlin and Johanna's touring has taken them to many cities in California, Nevada, Texas, Louisiana, Maryland, and Canada. They also have performed indoors at the Crippled Children's Hospital in New Orleans, the University of Toronto Convocation Hall, St. Francis College's Founders Hall in Brooklyn, Theatre Genesis in New York City, and the LaMama Theatre of Hollywood.

Murlin, a 37-year-old former attorney, became involved in street theatre after abandoning his practice in Los Angeles in the mid-1960's to write plays for experimental theatres in New York City.

Walking from the Disneyland plaza into Tomorrowland, it is difficult to comprehend at first that the Carousel Theatre, partly visible behind the PeopleMover and the Mission to Mars, is a completely circular building. Once you arrive at the point where a view of the theatre is not blocked by any other structure, your proximity to the wall of the theatre reduces its curve and makes it appear straighter, just as proximity to the earth's surface causes it to seem flat. As a result it is mildly perplexing to pass the turnstiles, after depositing an 85-cent ticket, and follow the metal guide rails that lead to the outer wall of the theatre. However, it is at most a four-minute wait until the entire theatre turns itself and brings a door in front of the spot where you are standing. This door opens automatically, and you are permitted to enter a comfortable 240-seat auditorium just in time for the beginning of America Sings, regardless of what time it is.

The Marilyn Project, a new play by David Gaard, was being presented in a special performance for the Directors’ Unit of the Actors’ Studio. Richard Schechner, who had directed The Marilyn Project, was moving about watching the actors from various vantage points. He stopped to talk quietly and briefly with one of the spectators. “This,” he said as he moved away, “is my contribution to the Structuralist movement.”

In what sense could Gaard's script and Schechner's staging of it be called “structuralist”? Of course, the answer will depend on how we define the term. If structuralism in theatre means that particular emphasis has been given to the structure of the presentation or that something unusual has been done with the structure, The Marilyn Project fits the definition.

When the spectator climbed a long flight of stairs at the Performing Garage and entered the large rectangular room, he saw a single row of seats along three of the walls.

The Mabou Mines staged Samuel Beckett's short novel The Lost Ones at the Theatre for the New City in New York in October, 1975. The piece, lasting about 45 minutes, was part of an evening of three Beckett works, which included Play and Come and Go. Play, the first of the three works to be performed, was presented on a proscenium stage. Come and Go, the second piece, was performed in a balcony above the audience and was reflected by a mirror to appear as though it was taking place in an area beneath the stage, such as an orchestra pit. For The Lost Ones, directed by Lee Breuer, spectators were asked to remove their shoes and then were led to a small rectangular room off the main theatre area. Upon entering, they stepped on a thick, foam rubber flooring; this gave the feeling of sinking downward.

The dramaturg's profession, which began in eighteenth-century Germany, has only recently been instituted in the United States. During the past decade, new resident and ensemble theatres around the country have added to their staffs the first generation of American dramaturgs. Generally these dramaturgs hold the less Germanic title of Literary Manager or Literary Advisor; but like their European counterparts, they serve as criticsin-residence for non-commercial, subsidized theatre companies.

Delayed arrival of the profession is partially due to America's late development of permanent, non-commercial theatres. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Germany's first important dramaturg, began his career in 1767 when the nation's first permanent, subsidized repertory company hired him to write about its productions at Hamburg. Though the permanence of the Hamburg National Theatre is questionable—it lasted about two years—its plan to develop a repertory of new plays led the theatre to hire Lessing, a playwright/critic who both carefully evaluated new scripts and wrote them.

Just as the widely-heralded American Pageant Movement began to show a decline in both artistry and general interest, Percy MacKaye, the already well-known playwright and poet, staged the gigantic spectacle Caliban on May 25, 1916 at New York City's Lewisohn Stadium. Although not the largest production of the pre-World War I period—MacKaye's collaboration with Thomas Wood Stevens, St. Louis, a Civic Masque (1914) utilized the participation of more than 7,000 St. Louis citizen-actors and was seen by nearly 500,000 spectators during its five-day run—MacKaye's Caliban was thought to be the most lavish and grandiose, as well as best documented, pageant of its time.

Raymond Roussel's three Parisian productions of Impressions of Africa in the years 1911 and 1912 electrified many of the future Dadas and Surrealists, such as Guillaume Apollinaire and Francis Picabia, into what Duchamp called a “decisive shock.” Not only were Roussel's publicity and staging unusually lavish for an avant-garde production of its time, but the performance itself promoted an entirely new attitude toward the concept of primitive consciousness and machinery. As Duchamp wrote in 1950, “It is true that I am indebted to Raymond Roussel for having enabled me, from 1912, to think of something else instead of retinal painting.”