It is almost a truism to say that religious rituals are often dramatic in form: individuals take on roles different from their everyday ones and relate to each other (interact) in a special area clearly marked out from secular and mundane reality. Many rituals entail an actor, a role, a dramatic part or enactment and a stage or special area where the performance occurs. In most cases, however, the content of the drama is a part of the religious tradition of the group and in this sense is not a secular “play” precisely because it is ritual before it is drama. T.S. Eliot makes this distinction between art and religious sacraments (in “A Dialogue on Dramatic Poetry,” Selected Essays,London, 1951).

Ritual drama-is both ritual and drama. Actors impersonate sacred beings and heroes from mythology. Often the drama itself is an enactment of the myth.

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.

JoAnne Akalaitis’ vital statistics are representative of other Mabou Mines members. Change the sex and weight, and her profile could well be used by other company members: they are middle-aged; all but one are parents (there are eight children with the company); they are actors who live on Manhattan's lower east side. However typical this may be for membership within the company, it is atypical of other avant-garde theatre groups, who tend to be in their twenties or early thirties and childless.

Another unique fact is the stability and duration of their professional and personal relationships. Akalaitis, Ruth Maleczech, Lee Breuer and William Raymond first met and worked together in 1962, David Warrilow and Frederick Neumann joined them in 1965. When they, along with Philip Glass, officially formed Mabou Mines in 1969, they had an extensive shared history of friendship and work on which to base the professional and business association.

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.

The use of the arts as a therapeutic tool is widespread today. Hospitals all over the country employ music, dance, and art therapies, as well as “psychodramatists” as an adjunct to more traditional methods of treatment. In addition, a small number of institutions have recently begun programs of “theatre therapy” in which patients work collectively on a performance under the supervision of trained theatre practitioners.

Psychodrama, the oldest of the therapies utilizing theatrical techniques, and the only one to possess an articulated theoretical framework, was first practiced in Vienna in 1920. Dr. J.L. Moreno, who originated the concept, writes that psychodrama developed out of what he called the “impromptu play,” which he first used with children in 1911:

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.

The eight-week run of Georg Büchner's Woyzeck at the New York Shakespeare Festival Public Theatre in March and April saw his first major acting since his days with The Living Theatre.

In the ten years (1963-1973) that Chaikin served as director in The Open Theatre, the company he founded, he rarely acted. He had very little interest in performing, and yet “I still defined myself not as a director, but much more as an actor. I still do.”

Chaikin is still uncertain as to why he was drawn to acting, except perhaps as an escape, a way to “get out of this crummy Brooklyn context that was my life, whereas the theatre and the radio and the movies seemed like they were these other orbits of existence.” Determinism also played a role, since Chaikin did—and still does to a certain extent—view acting as a chosen lifestyle, a way to “pick the kind of life you'd want to work in.” Acting provided a tremendous sense of freedom.

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.

While theatre groups have been entertaining and conducting workshops in prisons for many years, it is only since 1973 that studies have been made to assess the therapeutic value of theatre programs connected to prison systems. Hard evidence is being amassed that theatre workshops for prisoners and ex-offenders significantly reduce the rate of re-arrest among participants—more so than any other of the many remotivational programs in the correctional systems across the country. Nationally, 85 percent of those released from prison are re-arrested within a year, most within the first four months. The rate of re-arrest among participants in theatre workshops in the New York/New Jersey area is currently 10 to 15 percent.

During this past December and January, The Performance Group undertook a rather rigorous performing schedule, doing their four-hour Mother Courage [T66] at 7 PM followed by a midnight show of The MacIntost Project [T70] in the theatre's upstairs space. Joan MacIntosh played the lead role in both productions. (Marilyn actually used two casts playing simultaneously in a mirror image production; Elizabeth LeCompte also played the part of The Star.) At one point MacIntost told Richard Schechner, her husband and a director of the Group, that she had decided that Mother Courage dies and goes to heaven where she becomes Marilyn Monroe.

Since the members of the Group all participate in cleaning the theatre, setting props, and about an hour and a half of pre-show notes and warm-up exercises, this meant being at the theatre from 4:30 PM to 2:30 or 3 AM besides whatever other rehearsals, classes, and day-today chores were involved.

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…”

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).

Kate Manheim spent most of her life in France, coming to the United States in the fall of 1969 and to New York City in March, 1970. Because she speaks two languages without an accent, one of her first jobs in this country was at the Berlitz School of Languages, where she taught private lessons in both French and English. In the fall of 1971, shortly after she began working at the Anthology Film Archives, she met playwright/director Richard Foreman [T58, T62]. Foreman was already in rehearsal for his Ontological-Hysteric Theatre's fourth production entitled HċOhTiEṅL (or) Hotel China. Since one of the actresses had dropped out of the play, he went to the Anthology looking for a volunteer replacement. After walking back and forth several times through the office where Manheim was working. Foreman finally approached her and asked shyly, “Would you mind being an angel in my play?” She replied simply, “No, I wouldn't mind.”

Hector Rodriquez, at age thirteen, was considered a “hopeless incorrigible” by his teachers at a “600 School” for problem children in New York City. Rodriquez could not read or write, nor did he show the slightest inclination for mathematics or science. He spent his days playing hooky on Lower East Side street corners, or else he would go up to Times Square to hustle money.

Rodriquez seemed destined to lead the life of the hundreds of other players, pushers, pimps, and prostitutes that infest the Times Square area until he met Miguel Pinero, an award-winning Nuyorican (shorthand for New York and Puerto Rican) playwright—himself a former child of the barrio.

“My brother Louie and I were arguing, and this other dude comes up and punches me in the eye, and I start to cry, and this other dude comes up and says he's Miguel Pinero, and he buys us some hot chocolate and asks if I'd like to be in a play written by him, and I says ‘sure,’ and next thing you know I'm working onstage in Sideshow,” said Rodriquez.