Victory Over the Sun was a very important performance in the early history of the avant-garde. Produced in December, 1913, in St. Petersburg, Russia, it was primarily the work of the three men pictured above: the composer Mikhail Matyushin (seated left), the designer Kazimir Malevich (seated right) and the playwright Alexei (Alexander) Kruchenykh (lying down). (Note the setting, which appears to consist of unmatched drop and wings hung upside down. It is not known whether this arrangement was actually used in Victory Over the Sun, but in the sixth scene of the opera, there is the unusual stage direction: “[the Fat Man] peeps inside the watch: the tower the sky the streets are upside down—as in a mirror.”

One significant aspect of the production is that it was to this work that Malevich attributed the origin of Suprematism. Apparently he painted at least one extremely simplified non-objective backdrop for the performance: his sketch for the black and white square divided diagonally is reproduced at the right.

In German one says a child is “strange” with adults it does not know, or does not know well: the child may speak little or not at all, will probably stand sucking a finger. But when children are strange in this way they are still at home within themselves, not alienated from their own lives. An adult in a wholly strange environment also may still be at home within himself; indeed, he may depend more on himself, the less a strange environment welcomes him. Alienation from oneself is something quite different, and estrangement is different again (which is what we will have to show in a roundabout way).

It is easy to hear where some sounds come from. The word entfremden (“to alienate”) is an old one, originally used in business. Abalienare in Latin means to rid oneself of a thing, to sell something.

Many think that because participation is new to them, it is new to the theatre. These same people automatically participate in responsive readings at church, flag saluting, standing for the national anthem at sporting matches, cheering, and agreeing to umpire a few innings of sandlot baseball. In fact, participation in theatrical events is a very old, widespread practice. It has been limited in our culture for several hundred years for a variety of reasons. Chief among these is “professionalism.” Because trained, skilled performers have come to be expected, there are those who grow uneasy contemplating direct interaction between performers and the unskilled audience. The audience, by and large, expects a show to begin and end on time, to be “finished” and “packaged” like other products of the Ameriaan culture. Therefore, many in the theatre are loath to risk a process that may upend these anticipations, such as accepting a rough or long performance, or not being sure how something is going to work.

The Ma'yong theatre of Malaysia, though little known outside the province of Kelantan where it once flourished, is a rare example of a court entertainment which changed into a popular performance within the relatively brief period of about fifty years. Ma'yong, now performed only two or three times a year by wives of rice farmers in the remote villages of Kelantan, carries little evidence of its court origins; however, the magical propitiatory function which seems to have been associated with it from the beginning is still recognized. Furthermore, Ma'yong is unique in that all the leading roles, both male and female, are taken by women, while only the parts of the servant-clowns, or peran (generally two in a given play), are played by men. This introduction to Ma'yong is based on a three-month expedition I made in 1968 to record this theatre and its music on video tape.

Last night we put the James Joyce Memorial Liquid Theatre to rest. It was two years and five months old and it went out very quietly. Too quietly. Just like real life, hmmmm?

Of course it will be back, here and there, now and then. We can bring it back, raise it out of its ashes full formed. But then it will be a re-creation of something done once truly without fiction or pretense. The audience last night saw the last real event. They also witnessed The Company Theatre saying goodbye to a life-style.

I am full of sentiment on the day after the death of my old friend.

But it was a party. It began with a blind walk through a maze and culminated in a kind of ecstasy when the audience and The Company in a giant huddle sent their massed voice through the ceiling to the sky with the high decibel music and danced and shouted and hugged their way to exhaustion.

Norman Taffel's Little Trips was presented at 70 Grand Street in New York City on the ground floor of a loft building. Passing through a narrow hallway, one entered a small room where some people sat on cots and benches; others stood. Everyone was asked to pay a contribution. At approximately 9 p.m., a young girl in leotard and tights (or a boy in dungarees, depending on who was playing the role that evening) entered from the adjoining room and addressed the waiting audience. “Good evening. Would you please come inside.” (Note: The dialogue quoted in this description is only approximate, since the exact words changed at each performance. This description is written about performances when the Guide was played by a girl; performances did not change significantly when a boy played the part.)

The audience followed her through the door into a large, well-lit room. The high ceiling was supported by three pillars making a line across the center of the space.

Many Indian traditional theatre performances are connected with different Hindu religious cults and deities and performed by devotees. Drawing upon a common body of religious literature—the Puranas, the Mahabharata, and the Ramayana—these theatres enact the individual episodes especially meaningful to a given deity, cult, and, sometimes, region. Since they are most often performed within a religious context, they require ritual cleanliness and other devotional observances. These, the most overtly religious actions, may occur at the opening or closing or may suffuse the entire performance, in which case the performance itself is a votive offering.

The main rituals connected with Indian traditional theatre begin in the dressing room hours before a performance. Thus, Kathakali actors begin their makeup procedures with a silent prayer for success.

The premise for developing Little Trips was an actress “tripping out” while working with an audience. Her age: 19. The stress of performing and the acid would combine and cause her to stop the ritual “montage” based on “the life of Cassandra, prophetess of the Trojan War.” What fascinated me was the dissolution of hard, ritualistic theatre into something loose and spontaneous, with people really responding to each other in the immediacy of the present moment.

In Dionysus in 69, the actors acted at the audience. The two times that I saw it, the audience participation was an effect. There was no real place for the audience within the structure of the play. What is the point of getting an audience to participate if the actor cannot or will not incorporate the audience's response? If the actor never lets this response affect his next action?

Saw a folk opera last night. The form is called Chavittu Natakam, and this particular one is about St. George and the dragon. They give absolutely no attention to production,finesse. They miss cues, they look around “out of character,” the curtain keeps sticking, the two light men run up from the pit where they have been operating the spotlights seemingly at random and carry a banner across the stage, then scamper back down. A photographer walks right onto the stage to take his pictures. Mr. Vasudevan, the PR man for the Kathakali, sat next to me. The only thing that seemed to disturb him was when the lighting guys carried their banner wearing dhotis and Western shirts.

It seems more like European opera than Kathakali. It is done indoors in the auditorium of a music academy. Proscenium stage, but no consideration for the formality of a proscenium situation.

Theatre of Fact, like a fast sock in the jaw from, the thirties, has forced its way onto the American stage again. But unlike its noisy brawling predecessor, the Living Newspaper, which was fathered by the Federal Theatre out of the fertile discontent of the depression, this present brand of Theatre of Fact has lowered its voice and grown more decorous. It has entered the courtroom.

Two German playwrights have had a prime influence in the use of court records as dramatic material. Heinar Kipphardt's In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer and Peter Weiss’ The Investigation, produced first in Germany and then here in the United States in the mid-sixties, effected radical departures in dramatic form insofar as they relied almost entirely on the sheer weight of fact and the dialectic of courtroom argument to provide the movement and emotion expected of an evening in the theatre.