I remember thinking it strange, when I first started working in the Southern Student Movement in 1962, that there were so many people who, like me, thought of themselves as poets. I wrote a letter (to someone) describing them as poets who had come to the conclusion that the most profound poetry is the poetry of action and movement. When the problem becomes unspeakable then there is simply nothing to say—something must be done.

I was in the third wave of “students” who swept through the South with a dream in the early ‘60's. Sit-ins in ‘60, Freedom Rides in ‘61, and in ‘62 the forces gathered around the right to vote. After each wave there was a period of uncertainty while the new motion was in the making. That was a time to survey the damage and chaos which often seem to follow in the wake of dreams.

The title Room 106 refers to the large lecture hall on the seventh floor of Saint Francis College, Brooklyn, New York, in which the piece was presented. Although the following description is intended partly as a guide for anyone wishing to recreate the work, the title and almost everything else in such a re-creation—the dialogue, the structure, possibly even the physical set-up —would change. As was indicated when such a re-creation was presented in Argentina, based only on a vocal description, the “integrity” of the piece lies not in the particular words and images used in the original performance, but in the concept and the manner in which the material is generated.

Simultaneity in Simultaneity, presented in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 24 October, 1966, by Marta Minujin was probably the first performance piece in history to make use of several coordinated mass media. In part of the work, each “spectator” was alone in his own home: relatively few perceived every dimension of the performance, but aspects of it were available to anyone with a radio or television set.

The piece which eventually became Simultaneity in Simultaneity was originally conceived as part of an intercontinental presentation. At the same time that Minujin's work was being done in Argentina, Allan Kaprow in the United States and Wolf Vostell in Germany were to do performances. The three had talked of making use of the telstar communications satellite to transmit video material from one part of the performance to another, of flying performers from one country to another so that they could appear in person in more than one “section,” etc. This original plan was not carried through when both Kaprow and Vostell failed to realize their segments, but it determined some of Minujin's imagery, and, eventually, provoked an interesting juxtapositioning of “truth” and “falsity” in art.

Self-Service, a piece without spectators, was performed in the summer of 1967 in Boston, New York, and Los Angeles. It spanned four months, June through September. Thirty-one activities were selected from a much larger number. Their time and locality distribution were determined by chance methods. Participants selected events from those offered for their city; each had to pick at least one, although doing many or all was preferable. Details of time and place were flexible within each month; choices made from month to month overlapped, some actions recurring.

This script is essentially a description and text of three performances given as part of the “Angry Arts Against the War in Vietnam Week” in New York City (January 29-February 5, 1961). The playing area was a former courtroom in the Old Courthouse on 2nd Street and Second Avenue. The piece can be done, however, in a conventional theatre as well as a created environment—and was done so, at the Gate Theatre on Second Avenue, a few days before the first performance at the Courthouse.

Mallarme attempted to write an absolute book, the quintessence of all literature and all reality—the Total Book. The world exists to arrive at a book, he said. This book would be proclaimed by a sacred ceremony of predetermined detail, a proof as well as a communion.

The form of The Book can be described briefly: four books, which can be ordered as two pairs, make up The Book. Each book is subdivided into five volumes (not only interchangeable within each book, but also from book to book). Thus, Mallarme envisions the mixing and exchange of the volumes of one book with those of another.

A black who works in the theatre, who cannot survive without it, can easily go out of his mind trying to write about it. It is even more difficult if he is a black writer writing in a white publication for a white majority. The white majority— who have unlimited access to the mass media—always expects a black writer to prove something about the black state of mind, something most blacks know exist, and that whites know exist—after four major riots. Yet these same1 whites are trying to deny that knowledge by pretending integration is just around the corner.

The Playhouse of the Ridiculous has been for a year or two now the first and only good theatre in New York since the Living Theatre was exiled by the Federal authorities. Assorted egomanias and mad squabbles explode such groups, which do not exist except by the cunning tyranny of egomaniacs and the ties of personal animosity. The great thing about the Playhouse of the Ridiculous is they don't go in for art.