What we want to show is not only the structure we have come to but the conceiving process in the structure, what led to it and what leads back to its sources, in the world, in us, in the friction between us, the work, each other, the rage, the work, each playing upon each other, receding, the world, our gravity; a memory trace in a spoor of association, the thinking through. There is always the haunted and critical moment when what we're after seems almost not-there, the moment of Appropriation, the stepping back: “Is this not something more than fantasy?” Act? how? why? where? what for? for whom? and to what End? Why are we doing this in the first place? and can we? and since there is always the likelihood that nobody is listening or, if listening, cares what it means, what difference does it make? It may be that we are all listening to different voices, this candle, that flame; not for love or money the same light: Even before detente, one loved the Russians.

We attempt to create a sound—a sound which grows and turns into a cry. We try to find the energy which produces this action and to become aware of it.

I see the sound as an image. I see what is enclosed in it—a column of air trying to break open. In the effort to produce the cry I attempt to replace heaviness with spontaneous vitality. The cry becomes either an expression of freedom and awakening or a sign of imprisonment; it all depends on how the sound is controlled and directed from inside.

At the beginning of this research real calm is required. One must accept the risk of passing beyond one's accustomed realm of habitual expression. One must try to discover an image, to nourish this image with something concrete, a taste, a smell.

Over the past twenty years there have been a number of scattered but promising experiments with visual scripts. (By “visual script” I mean a non-representational graphic pattern which an actor is handed and asked to find some way of performing.) In his 1958-9 Graphis project (T30), Dick Higgins provided actors with “scripts” that consisted of words spread out irregularly over a page with lines drawn between them. Performing the script was defined as physicalizing the process of moving from one word to another over the routes of semantic association suggested by the connecting lines. (For example, getting from “lock” to “locksmith” entailed a detour through “macaroni”….) More recently, in 1971, the Anna Halprin Company tried using a “graphic score” devised by John Muto as the basis for a piece called Animal Ritual (T59).

Webster defines “analysis” as “a separating or breaking up of any whole into its parts so as to find out their nature, proportion, function, relationship, etc.” “Theory” is defined as “an idea or mental plan of the way to do something.” Thus intellectual analysis involves the creation of a system of ideas by which an existing phenomenon can be “separated” or “broken up” mentally; theory provides an intellectual base for the creation of phenomena. Theatrical analysis examines existing or historical performance; theatrical theory provokes and originates performance.

Since both the analysis and theory of theatre involve more or less coherent systems of ideas, analysis and theory might be thought to be identical or interchangeable. Analytical systems might be expected to be useful for creating performance; theoretical systems might be supposed to function as well for analysis as they do for creation.

The world premiere of Robert Wilson's latest work, Einstein On the Beach, took place July 25 under the auspices of the Festival d'Avignon before beginning a tour that included performances at the Festival d'Automne, Paris. According to Wilson, what distinguishes this piece from his others is, in the first place, his strong collaboration with other artists, specifically with musician Phil Glass and with choreographer Andrew de Groat. In the second place, there is his fusion of rich visual imagery, characteristic of The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin [T62], with formal and rigid structure, characteristic of A Letter for Queen Victoria. What triggered that fusion was the subject itself, Albert Einstein, a mathematician but at the same time a dreamer; for Wilson, he was one of the three most influential figures of our time (the other two: Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin).

Between 1928 and 1948 in Czechoslovakia, a prolific group of linguists and theoreticians of literature, theatre and music, known as the Prague school, worked out the first systematic structuralist-semiotic approach to the study of art. (The semiotics of art—the study of art as a system of signs—was actually established by Jan Mukařovský's programmatic statement “Art as a Semiotic Fact” at the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy in Prague in 1934.) Concentrating primarily on the problems of poetry and literature, structuralists gradually expanded their interest to include theatre, film, visual arts, and music as well as the problems of general theory and esthetics.

Emil Frantisek Burian. who was to become the leading avant-garde director in the Czech theatre of the 1930s, was born in 1904 (d. 1959), the son of Emil Burian, a leading baritone of Prague's National Theatre Opera, and his wife Vlasta (née Hatláková), a teacher of singing. His uncle was Karel Burian, a concert tenor. The musical environment established by his family was sustained in Burian's musical education: he graduated from the Prague Conservatory and subsequently completed master's study in composition in Prague under the Czech composer J. B. Foerster. Burian eventually composed seven operas, numerous ballets and chamber works, and most of the music for his theatre productions.

If the roots of Burian's general creativity may be found in music, the roots of his philosophy may be found in Marxism: while still a student, in 1923, Burian became a member of the Czech Communist party.