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 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.

Whoever coined the expression “cultural explosion” to describe America's flirtation with the arts must have taken a decibel count first. For whether we are experiencing a true artistic renaissance, or, as the recent Twentieth Century Fund study suggests, merely witnessing a modest expansion of arts activity, one thing is certain—whatever is happening is not happening quietly.

When a community, an organization, or even a small group of individuals decides to build a new theatre or arts center, the announcements stream forth, press conferences are called, and words flow endlessly from mayors, civic leaders, businessmen, and occasionally from arts professionals. On December 11, 1966, for example, three lengthy articles about arts centers appeared in the New York Times.

Among the cultural odds and ends that supply the architectural imagination are prevailing conceptions of the human body—its functions, perfectibility, and possibilities for pleasure and pain. Though architects of various periods have employed ideal proportions of the human body in conscious decisions about the structural proportions of monuments and buildings, this is not the only way, nor the most interesting way, in which the human body informs architecture. What is also meant by the body's relationship to architecture is the memory of body states that architecture evokes in the observer. These body states are recalled in the form of their psychological derivatives: moods, affects, and emotions. These derivatives initiate and qualify our aesthetic judgments about architecture.

Theatre, at mid-twentieth century, finds itself in a position of “change or die.” The rapid development of television and cinema have been to it what photography was to representational painting: they can do many of the same things better and more simply. The only means of survival clearly lies in making the very most of the unique quality of theatre—the relationship between a live audience and live performers.

Traditional theatre, with its reliance on “real” props and staging, contributes to audience-performer separation by constantly defining physical limits of size, scale, and distance. The theatre of the future will have to provide an environment which permits the spectator to do more than merely look. He should experience a direct and, as nearly as possible, total involvement, both individually and in relation to the actors.

People gather in two different basic ways. Fixed focus. Multiple focus. In the fixed focus relationship the audience and the performers are locked together within a clearly defined limit, like TV in a bar, the math professor at the blackboard, or a cock fight. The event is fixed between limits. The TV camera moves to keep the football “on camera.” The professor will not write on the floor. The cocks will not be let out of the pit. The Stratford, Ontario theatre, the San Francisco Opera House, the Washington Arena Stage, and your local Loew's are all fixed focus.