1. See Leiter, Samuel L., Kabuki Encyclopedia: an English-Language Adaptation of Kabuki Jiten (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1979), p. 232–4.Google Scholar

2. Zarrilli is a scholar and practitioner of Kalarippayatt, a south Indian (Kerala) martial art connected to both Kathakali and Kutiattam. From his work in Kalarippayatt, Zarrilli has developed ideas detailing how ‘performance knowledge’ which resides in the body of the performer is transmitted. See especially his ‘Doing the Exercise': the In-body Transmission of Performance Knowledge in a Traditional Martial Art’, Asian Theatre Journal, I, 2, p. 191–206Google Scholar. Eugenio Barba in his International School of Theatre Anthropology has been investigating the same problem. See , Barba's ‘Theatre Anthropology’, Drama Review, XXVI, 2 (1982), p. 5–32Google Scholar. See also my ‘Performer Training Interculturally’, in Between Theater and Anthropology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), p. 213–60.Google Scholar

3. The only performance I've seen that is ‘satisfying’ in dealing with the Holocaust is Leeny Sack's one-performer piece, The Survivor and the Translator. Sack relates her own ‘translations’ – both literal and figurative – of her grandmother's recollections (in Polish, German, and English) of the Holocaust. The perspective is clearly Sack's own – and her need is that so widely felt by the children and grandchildren of survivors: to knit this intractable experience into the rest of their lives. Otherwise not enough ‘cultural time’ has elapsed to put the Holocaust into mythology (as the Egyptian enslavement, the Exodus, and the establishment of the first state of Israel has been mythologized in the Old Testament.) What we ‘have’ of the Holocaust today are survivors, testimonies, data, relics, historical interpretations, and art works. Histories, novels, poems, and short stories, from Raul Hilberg to Eli Weisel to D. W. Thomas, can be more direct than what seems to be possible in the theatre. There the subject can be approached only obliquely, as with Grotowski's Akropolis, Sack's Survivor/Translator, or The Diary of Anne Frank. Documentaries like The Investigation are less successful. Is it that the unsayable can be read but not heard/seen/enacted? Is this performative silence a necessary and proper respect, avoidance, or both? I really don't know.

4. See A Theory of Parody (New York and London: Methuen, 1985), p. 5–6.

5. In LSD the Wooster Group, directed by Elizabeth LeCompte, deconstructed, conflated, reduced to ‘pure’ sound, and parodied Miller's The Crucible. The author was not amused. He saw the production several times, shilly-shallied about whether to grant the Group rights to continue, and finally decided not to. The Miller part of LSD was rewritten by Michael Kirby who wanted to keep the rhythms of LeCompte's mise-en-scène intact. Because he was performing in LSD he was very familiar with these rhythms – in rewriting the Miller parts he was interested only in these rhythms, not in character or plot. See David Savran, ‘The Wooster Group, Arthur Miller, and The Crucible’, and Aronson, Arnold, ‘The Wooster Group's LSD’, both in Drama Review, XXIX, 2 (1985), p. 99–109, 65–77.Google Scholar

6. I first had the idea for Prometheus when, while leading a workshop at the University of Mexico, I was taken by Nicolas Nunez and Helen Guardia to the ‘Sculpture Garden’ near UNAM's performing arts centre. This garden was a circle of monoliths facing in on a field of naked black cold lava. The volcanic rocks were frozen liquid – twisting, bulbous, frothy, living. Immediately I proposed doing Prometheus on this site. But when the peso was devalued soon afterwards the project was suspended. In the summer of 1983 Carol Martin and I led a workshop on Prometheus at NYU's Tisch School of the Arts. On the final day of that workshop we and the students showed more than three hours of dancing and scenes. In January 1984 I, and my assistant director Matthew Silverstein, went to the University of Texas, Dallas, where we staged a version of The Prometheus Project with students and professional performers from Dallas. This work-in-progress was performed three times, on 7, 8, and 9 February 1985. At present, I am planning another revision of Prometheus at the Performing Garage for December 1985.

7. The key deconstructionist concept of open text negotiated during each performance or reading is prefigured in classical Indian ‘rasa theory’. Rasa – the flavour or juice of a performance – does not exist except at the interface where the actions/sounds of the performers interact with the expectations/knowledge of the spectators. This theory was first written down in the Natyasastra, a performance treatise compiled between the second century BC and the second century AD. The Natyasastra has been commented on, elaborated, and practised ever since. Rasa reworked in various permutations is also fundamental to Chinese, Japanese, and south-east Asian aesthetics. See my Between Theater and Anthropology, and Kale, Pramod, The Theatric Universe (Bombay: Popular Prakashan, 1974).Google Scholar