The Black Arts Movement is radically opposed to any concept of the artist that alienates him from his community. Black Art is the aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept. As such, it envisions an art that speaks directly to the needs and aspirations of Black America. In order to perform this task, the Black Arts Movement proposes a radical reordering of the western cultural aesthetic. It proposes a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology. The Black Arts and the Black Power concept both relate broadly to the Afro-American's desire for self-determination and nationhood. Both concepts are nationalistic. One is concerned with the relationship between art and politics; the other with the art of politics.

The plays of Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamov, and Eugène Ionesco have been performed with astonishing success in France, Germany, Scandinavia, and the English-speaking countries. This reception is all the more puzzling when one considers that the audiences concerned were amused by and applauded these plays fully aware that they could not understand what they meant or what their authors were driving at.

At first sight these plays do, indeed, confront their public with a bewildering experience, a veritable barrage of wildly irrational, often nonsensical goings-on that seem to go counter to all accepted standards of stage convention. In these plays, some of which are labeled “anti-plays,” neither the time nor the place of the action are ever clearly stated. (At the beginning of Ionesco's The Bald Soprano the clock strikes seventeen.) The characters hardly have any individuality and often even lack a name; moreover, halfway through the action they tend to change their nature completely.

Acting means to feign, to simulate, to represent, to impersonate. As Happenings demonstrated, not all performing is acting. Although acting was sometimes used, the performers in Happenings generally tended to “be” nobody or nothing other than themselves; nor did they represent, or pretend to be in, a time or place different than that of the spectator. They walked, ran, said words, sang, washed dishes, swept, operated machines and stage devices, and so forth, but they did not feign or impersonate.

In most cases, acting and not-acting are relatively easy to recognize and identify. In a performance, we usually know when a person is acting and when he is not. But there is a scale or continuum of behavior involved, and the differences between acting and not-acting may be quite small. In such cases categorization may not be easy. Perhaps some would say it is unimportant, but, in fact, it is precisely these borderline cases that can provide insights into acting theory and into the nature of the art.

According to Jorge Luis Borges, Abulgualid Mohammed Ibn Ahmed Ibn Mohammahd Ibn Rushd, better known as Averroes, was thinking—something like one thousand years ago, more or less—about a difficult question concerning Aristotle's Poetics. As you probably know, Averroes was a specialist on Aristotle, mainly on the Poetics. As a matter of fact, Western civilization had lost this book and had rediscovered it only through the mediation of Arab philosophers. Averroes did not know about theatre. Because of the Muslim taboo on representation, he had never seen a theatrical performance. At least, Borges, in his short story The Quest of Averroes, imagines our philosopher wondering about two incomprehensible words he had found in Aristotle, namely “tragedy” and “comedy.” A nice problem, since Aristotle's Poetics is nothing else but a complex definition of those two words, or at least of the first of them.

The theatrical event includes audience, performers, text (in most cases), sensory stimuli, architectural enclosure (or lack of it), production equipment, technicians, and house personnel (when used). It ranges from nonmatrixed performance to highly formalized traditional theatre: from chance events and intermedia to “the production of plays.” A continuum of theatrical events blends one form into the next:

It is because I wish to include this entire range in my definition of theatre that traditional distinctions between art and life no longer function at the root of aesthetics. All along the continuum there are overlaps; and within it—say between a traditional production of Hamlet and the March on the Pentagon or Allan Kaprow's Self-Service—there are contradictions.

While spending some time during the winter of 1801 in M., one evening in the public gardens I chanced upon Herr C, who had been recently engaged as the leading dancer at the opera house and who had found exceptional success with the public there.

I mentioned how surprised I had been to notice him on several occasions attending a marionette theatre that had been set up in the local market place, which entertained the masses with short dramatic burlesques interspersed with song and dance.

He assured me that the performance of these puppets was a source of great pleasure to him, and he made it quite clear that a dancer who wished to improve himself could learn a great deal from observing them.

Because his remarks were obviously not to be taken lightly, I sat down with him so that we might discuss his reasons for such a remarkable statement.

One of the forms of theatre to emerge after the October, 1917, revolution in Russia was monumental open air spectacles involving thousands of performers and tens of thousands of spectators. These mass spectacles were characterized by collective authorship (script and raise en scène), military-like organization, and the participation of different segments of society: workers; soldiers of the Red Army; drama students and artists of different orientations, including those of the avant-garde.

Thematically, mass spectacles were connected with the events of the Revolution and the civil war. They were not isolated performances but were a part of a more complex event, such as the celebration of the anniversary of the Revolution, May First, the Third International, or any other holiday of the Red calendar. The mass spectacles were not only conscious attempts to create a new distinctly proletarian theatre but also an attempt to establish a new social ritual by collectively reenacting and celebrating the events of the revolution.

The work is ongoing. It is still, in Johnston's phrase, about “any old people,” but it is no longer focused on personal incidents within pedestrian forms. Personal incidents happen now in the context of a duet system that has been named Contact Improvisation.

Each party of the duet freely improvises with an aim to working along the easiest pathways available to their mutually moving, masses. These pathways are best perceived when the muscular tone is lightly stretched to extend the limbs, although not to a degree that obscures the sensations of momentum and inertia. Within this flexible framework, the shape, speed, orientation, and personal details of the relationship are left to the dancers who, however, hold to the ideal of active, reflexive, harmonic, spontaneous, mutual forms. The ideal creates the attitude, which is manifest in the quality of energy-use.

This system is based in the senses of touch and balance.

The phenomena called either/all “drama,” “theatre,” “performance” occur among all the world's peoples and date back as far as historians, archeologists, and anthropologists can go. Evidence indicates that dancing, singing, wearing masks and/ or costumes, impersonating either other men, animals, or supernaturals, acting out stories, presenting time at time, isolating and preparing special places and/or times for these presentations, and individual or group preparations or rehearsals are coexistent with the human condition. Of countless examples from paleolithic times none is more interesting than the cave at Tuc d'Audoubert:

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.

The big question is whether there is an unbridgeable division, even opposition, between the two arts. Is there something genuinely “theatrical,” different in kind from what is genuinely “cinematic”?

Almost all opinion holds that there is. A commonplace of discussion has it that film and theatre are distinct and even antithetical arts, each giving rise to its own standards of judgment and canons of form. Thus Erwin Panofsky argues, in his celebrated essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures” (1934, rewritten in 1946), that one of the criteria for evaluating a movie is its freedom from the impurities of theatricality. To talk about film, one must first define “the basic nature of the medium.” Those who think prescriptively about the nature of live drama, less confident in the future of their art than the cinéphiles in theirs, rarely take a comparably exclusivist line.

Ramlila is a cycle play lasting ten to thirty-two days performed annually outdoors in the Hindi speaking region of north India. Its season is around the Dasarha holidays in September-October. The performance is based on Tulsidas’ late 16th-century epic poem Ramacaritamanas (RCM), a Hindi version of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana. Although thousands of Ramlilas are performed, we shall describe only one—the 31-day cycle of Ramnagar across the Ganga River from Varanasi (Benares or Kasi). Due to the patronage of the Maharaja of Benares who resides in Ramnagar this Ramlila is the most extensive, best performed, and draws the largest audiences of any. It developed its present shape during the early and mid 19th-century. The whole subject of Ramlila is vast, touching on themes of pilgrimage, bhakti (devotional worship), Hindu ideas of reincarnation, the nature of a mixed oral-literate culture of immense sophistication, relationship between government, Maharaja, and ordinary people.

There have been few attempts to seriously examine the architecture and design of traditional popular entertainments. For the most part, popular forms have not been thought to involve a high level of design or systematic organization of performance space. Yet, over the years, there. has emerged a distinctive scenography of popular entertainment. It has borrowed from conventional theatre, festivals, and folk performance. Essentially, however, it constitutes a highly independent scenographic strain While interest in that strain continues to grow, the scenography itself is rapidly disappearing. Increasingly, traditional popular forms are influenced by the scenography of the newest popular entertainments, television and film. The scenographic base of these new forms is quite different from that of traditional amusements: film and television are naturalist in their orientation. They are concerned more with presenting a seemingly coherent reality than with creation of spectacle and fantasy for their own sake—and the naive art of traditional popular forms is gradually giving way to the orderly and precise scenography of mass culture.

Since the turn of the century, most art forms have vastly expanded their materials and scope. Totally abstract or non-objective painting and sculpture, unheard of in 1900, is practiced by many major artists today. Composers tend to discard traditional Western scales and harmonies, and atonal music is relatively common. Poetry has abandoned rhyme, meter, and syntax. Almost alone among the arts, theatre has lagged. But during the last few years there have been a number of performances that begin to bring theatre into some relation with the other arts. These works, as well as productions in other performance-oriented fields, force us to examine theatre in a new light and raise questions about the meaning of the word “theatre” itself.

In discussing this new theatre, new terms are needed. A few have already been provided by public usage, although they need clarification and standardization. Others will have to be created. Accurate nomenclature is important—not for the sake of limitation but to facilitate easy, accurate, and creative exchange among those concerned with the work and its concepts.