Final Reading/Resource List

Assignment
*Brief review for class next Tuesday. Prepare a comment or question to bring to class. If you are stuck, try considering the following: what strategies and materials are employed, what is the role of the artist’s body in their performances, what subjects do the performances explore?
*Full Reading response due on Feb. 12th. I would like you to read all of the resources I have carefully chosen and give me general feedback. You obviously shouldn't write a response to every artist. Follow the guidelines of previous readings by remarking on what you liked, didn't like or found helpful to your own practice.

The following notes have been synthesized from our class reading American Avant-Garde Theater: A History by Arnold Aronson.

A. 1960's Collectives and Ritual

1. Desire to return to nature, not just literally, but to make theater more natural “more like life”. Theater as a means of reinventing and shifting spectators' and communities' consciousness.
2. Unconventional use of language: more fragmented and metaphoric than narrative. Similar to romantic and symbolist poetry that tried to express an “inner truth”. There was a shift away from conventional narrative story-telling to an emphasis on using the vocabulary of the actors' bodies, movement and sound.
3. Belief in creating communities through theatrical ceremony and quasi-religious ritual that would help rectify the world's ills and lead to a shift in consciousness.
   
4. The model of ensemble theater eventually lost out due to practicality and social-political changes. Maintaing a troupe of actors became harder in NY, many artists wanted to return to narrative theater as a way to tell stories or convey ideas, and American “community” was splintered by racial tensions and Vietnam

Open Theater "The Serpent" Part 2


Performance Group "Dionysus in 69"

Created by Richard Schechner: “Environmental Theater”-setting actively or implicitly surrounds the spectators. Once immersed, spectators may engage with the presence of the actors. This was an attempt at making spectators believe they were equal to the performers.

Difficulty scripting the audience: Schechner structured Dionysus to allow for audience participation. However, there was tension between the actors and director. The actors weren't pleased when the audience would either refuse to participate or take over the play. It was challenging to “script” audience participation. Theater is by definition a “presentation” to an audience and actors inevitably approach the material with a longer investment and more knowledge than the audience. In real religious and social rituals, participants have knowledge of how to behave or specific “roles” and therefore know the script and how to interact.

Richard Foreman

Contemporary work: "Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land"
Founder of the Ontological-Hysterical Theater @ St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery.
Calls his works “total theater”.

B. Performance Art, Action Art, Body Art

1. Hard to define and classify. Artists often had diverse ways of referring to their performance work. Many were self-created and often solo acts of performance that were rooted in the visual arts world.
2. In some senses emerged in the 70s (the “me” generation) as an expression of “looking inward” as the ideals of the 60s and the emphasis on community action began to erode. Shift in focus to the individual and absorption with self-fulfillment: introspective theater.
3. The action was the art object; art was constructed in the behavior of the artist and viewers
4. Performance Art often deals with a single or over-riding concept or idea that makes the audience question their relationship to the performer or material. It may take the form of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical monologues like Spalding Gray's which focused on blurring life and theater. Often, characters are the performer's alter-egos or drawn straight from life and the imagination. Many performance artists enact or embody conceptual ideas.

Spalding Gray

Early member of Performance Group and Co-founder of Wooster Group. Noted for autobiographical texts in performance. His writings/performances endeavored to bring life more into theater. His texts were used as found material and molded by his partner Ellen LeCompte for ensemble performances by the early Wooster Group. Both Gray and LeCompte were inspired by Meredith Monk.
*Wooster Group on TV link meant to be included with our section on them.

C. Sample Artists

1. Drag Performance by Ethyl Eichelberger
2. Penny Arcade
3. Chris Burden "Shoot" & short description
4. Vito Acconci "Undertone 1972" & "Seed Bed" at Lolvantgarde
5. Stuart Sherman performs as part of "Robert Beck is Alive and Well and Living in NYC"
6. Suzanne Lacy's directed ensemble performance “The Crystal Quilt”
7. Marina Abramovic & her "Rhytm 0"
8. Janine Antoni "Touch" & "Lick and Lather"
9. Matthew Barney "The Order from Cremaster"
10. Butoh Performance at Tokyo Gallery
11. Circus Amok
12. Coco Fusco "I Like Girls in Uniform"
13. Gilbert & George "Bend it"
14. Bruce Nauman "Clown Torture"
15. Yasumasa Morimura
16. Carolee Schneemann "Meat Joy" & "Site" with Robert Morris
    
17. Stelarc
18. Yoko Ono "Cut Piece" & "Voice Piece for Soprano"
19. anything Laurie Anderson...