It would be difficult to think of an historical acting style that affected twentieth-century performance more than the Italian sixteenth-century commedia dell'arte. For avant-garde directors in the 1910's—people like Meyerhold, Evreinov, Reinhardt, Copeau—the commedia, with its reliance on stereotyped characters, masks, broad gestures, and improvised comedy, represented the very theatricality of the theatre. Performing across Europe and elsewhere from 1550 to 1750, often without dramatic texts as such and outside proscenium stages, commedia troupes developed large audiences of all classes, another feature that made their work so attractive to avant-garde directors. Even the most popular entertainments of the first part of the twentieth century—silent and sound motion picture comedy as well as radio comedy—seem closely related to the commedia. Indeed, it is hard to conjure images of the commedia without seeing Charlie Chaplin, W.C. Fields, Bert Lahr, the Marx Brothers, or Laurel and Hardy.

One of the most frequently encountered words in the avant-garde theatre community has become the term “workshop.” Everywhere one turns, there is talk of a new workshop being offered, or of so-and-so's workshop of last summer, or desperate inquiries of young actors concerning whether so-and-so is giving another workshop soon, and if so how does one get in? Clearly, the experimental theatre workshop is now a popular phenomenon rather than the exclusive domain of a select few. Publications such as Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theatre (1963), Jerzy Grotowski's Towards a Poor Theatre (1968) and Robert Pasolli's A Book on the Open Theatre (1970) have been responsible for disseminating workshop ideas to mass audiences, while many groups' early touring efforts helped to reach audiences and actors who might never have found out that an alternative form of theatre existed.

It had been placed there by Aleister Crowley, occult magician, poet, and author of the advertised ceremonies. It was located directly at the end of an article that rapturously praised a preview of the Rites held during the past summer. The article was signed “P.”—certainly not the most inventive of Crowley's numerous pseudonyms, which included “Lord Boleskine,” “Oliver Haddo,” “Count Vladimir Svareff,” and his favorite, “The Beast.”

Crowley's predilection for fictive names was matched by his fascination with costume, whether it was the leopard-skin robe he wore as a Magician of the Golden Dawn, the black gown of the alchemist, the Headdress of Horus with the eye in the triangle, or, as “Baphomet,” full Masonic regalia. The theatrical urge in Crowley becomes apparent from whatever direction he is viewed. His early interest in the occult and its secret systems of knowledge was quickly focused on ritual magic. His poetry was soon elaborated into dense mystery plays. He even dramatized the personality conflicts between himself and others—William Butler Yeats, for one—by engaging them in “magical combat.”

The Rites of Eleusis occurred in Aleister Crowley's life at a point midway between a series of visions he had in North Africa in 1909, which revealed to him his true nature as a Magus, and his involvement with a secret society called the O.T.O. in 1912, from whom he learned the rudiments of the sex-magic that obsessed him for years. He was 35 years old at the time of the performances. The persecution by the press, which was to last until he died in i947, had not yet begun. He saw himself as the prophet of a new religion— Crowleyanity—and the Rites were to be his first great evangelization.

We did not want to create a play about New York (especially not about America); we have never wanted to create a play about something, because theatre is not about something but it is from something, it is itself; from a given place, from the social and personal forms of life. It is conceptual and existential at the same time. And it is In and From New York where one can come to speak.

Madeleine-Madelaine-Madeleine G.-Madame Madeleine-Madame Magdaleine—the many names under which the famous “sleep dancer” appeared early this century in Europe, only heightens the mystery surrounding her. We do not precisely know where she hails from nor do we know anything about her fate after closing out a strange dancing career of roughly one decade. She lived in Munich, but most certainly was not born there, and no information is available as to when and where her death occurred.

Two famous Munich painters—Fritz August von Kaulbach and Albert von Keller—made portraits of her on which she looks beautiful, even-faced, dark-haired, with extremely bushy eyebrows, protruding Jaws and a low nose bridge. In photographs she always wears a white wrap-around, with her eyes mostly closed.

During the first World War, in Paris Jacques Copeau developed the idea of a severe and simple form of theatre, neither classical nor topical, but versatile through the economy of its means. In 1919 he remodelled the stage of the Vieux-Columbier in accordance with his new ideas, and over the next two years he founded a school for the training of actors, the École du Vieux Columbier. Both in design and in acting, Copeau wanted to make large statements with simple gestures. The pursuit of simplicity made him eliminate distractions, to create the still ground against which a movement or a form could be seen. His bare architectural stage was meant to magnify the evanescent statements of the drama. “I want the stage to be naked and neutral,” he wrote, “in order that every delicacy may appear there, in order that every fault may stand out; in order that the dramatic work may have a chance in this neutral atmosphere to fashion that individual garment which it knows how to put on.”

In the years after the first World War, two plays unexpectedly achieved a clamorous success in the major capitals of Europe. This phenomenon demonstrated that an important new phase of Italian theatre was replacing the almost exclusive domination of D'Annunzio in the years past. The two plays were: Six Characters in Search of an Author by Luigi Pirandello, staged in Paris in 1923, and The Mask and the Face by Luigi Chiarelli, staged in London in 1924.

The triumphant reception given by the Parisian spectators to Six Characters was the beginning of Pirandello's international success, and it initiated the prodigious dissemination of his work. The London production of The Mask and the Face, on the other hand, was the end of a flowering of plays that had taken place during the war and had been given the rather incorrect name of the Theatre of the Grotesque.

Andy Warhol's Last Love, the first play made by Squat Theatre in the U.S.A., opened in their New York storefront theatre and home on West 23rd Street on June 2, 1978. Pig, Child, Fire! (T75), their previous production seen in New York, had been created largely in Holland, although one scene was originally done in their apartment in Budapest after they had been banned from performing in the theatre there. The new work of the group reflects their experience in New York. And, as in Pig, Child, Fire!, the spontaneous New York street events seen through the front window become an important part of the performance. In fact, two performances take place simultaneously—the one seen from inside by the paying audience and the one seen free by the spectators outside. The first section of Andy Warhol's Last Love takes place in a room on the second floor.

During the past dozen years or so a number of contemporary theatre groups in Tokyo have been exploring, each in their own way, new and intensely theatrical approaches in the actor's art. Each group bases its work on ensemble playing, so that in the midst of the exploration, some consistency of performance style has seemed desirable. In either formal or informal ways, this usually means an actor training system created out of the group and designed for its own needs. A training system that is especially Japanese is the one developed by Tadashi Suzuki with members of the acting company of the Waseda Little Theatre (Waseda Shogekijo see T60, T65).

Suzuki formed the Waseda Little Theatre in 1965. Among the twenty members of the acting company today, seven are part of that original group. They gather four nights a week, after working at other jobs, to train under Suzuki's direction. Suzuki, with the actors, has created a series of training disciplines, combining voice and body, which, while being flexible and capable of variation, are precise in their structure.

Drawing on pre-Christian Assyrian, Phrygian, Armenian, Zoroastrian, Sufi, Tibetan, and Persian elements at the time of the Russian Revolution, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff attempted to create a school of thought that would coordinate and expand Western man's anatomic and intellectual centers of energy Into newly dynamic forms. Certain physical and mental activities, Gurdjieff believed, could bring about a total alteration of consciousness. For over sixty years his philosophy has found adherents among the intelligentsia of the Russian, French, and English-speaking world. Directors, choreographers, musicians, designers, painters, writers, and psychologists like Nikolai Evreinov, Sergei Diaghilev, Thomas de Hartmann, Alexander and Jeanne Salzmann, Louis Jouvet, Felix Labisse, J.B. Priestley, Aldous Huxley, Katherine Mansfield, Frank Lloyd Wright, Moshe Feldenkrais, and Peter Brook have all sought artistic inspiration in the esoteric teachings of the Russian-born mystic.

According to Squat, the downstairs stage of Andy Warhol's Last Love is Warhol's Factory: the place he used to manufacture his art-objects. And upstairs the Blue Room, where the first part of “Warhol” is staged, is the actual living space of Eva Buchmüller and Istvan Balint. The street is 23rd Street, a theatrical environment only by virtue of the casement glass window separating Factory from street. As in Pig, Child, Fire!,the street is used in the show both randomly and by careful design. Randomly as passersby (and a few regulars, or knowing ones, like me) stop to see the same movie those in the Factory are seeing (the screen is transparent) or crowd in around the glass door to glimpse Kathleen Kendel, the naked witch, being interviewed in the Factory by (a) Warhol (lookalike).

What is particularly Italian about the theatre that is produced in Italy? What characteristics make it different—recognizable—to the foreign spectator?

After the war, Italian theatre was scarcely significant for its innovations. An effort to restore tradition in theatre absorbed most creative energies. Three outstanding influences belong to this period. The first is that of the Academy of Dramatic Arts, founded in 1936 by Silvio D'Amico with the purpose of raising the cultural level of Italian theatre. The Academy concentrated on the critical analysis of texts. Orazio Costa and his students, Luigi Squarzina and Vittorio Gassman, were the main exponents of this concern for tradition. The institution was a profound influence on the generation of postwar actors.

The second influence was that of foreign theatre. After the war, there was a consumer attitude toward French, English and American “hit shows.”

The number of methodological options available to the contemporary critic of any art is quite intimidating: Marxism, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, Structuralism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, etc. Of course, the situation is even more complicated than this list suggests because on the one hand, each of these headings can be subdivided into more specific, often warring, camps, while on the other hand, some of these headings can be conjoined by hyphens, generating newer positions, like Marxist-Psychoanalytic-Structuralism. You could devote an entire career to mastering all these methods without ever applying one of them.

In this essay, I don't want to invent another perspective. Instead I hope to clarify what I take to-be our ordinary approach to theatrical analysis when it is unaided by the explicitly formulated philosophical or scientific categories of schools of thought like Freudianism or Critical Theory. By divorcing criticism from these larger enterprises, I don't think it ceases to be a cognitive activity.

I am going to describe a workshop technique that makes the abstractions of conceptual thought available as physical experiences, and in so doing, makes abstraction itself—usually thought of as a danger to theatre work—available to theatre, both as a subject matter and as an untapped source of performance energies.

There is a tendency, in most branches of contemporary thought, to use metaphors of space for all sorts of concepts and relationships that are not in themselves spatial. Literary critics locate the nuances of a word in “semantic space.” Psychiatrists refer to the “therapeutic space” in which they encounter their patients. Anthropologists imagine networks of kin-relationships spread out in “social space.” Musicologists speak of a “harmonic space” within which tones and timbres are distributed.

Between 1909 and 1913 the German section of the Theosophical Society held annual conventions in Munich. Part of the festival was the production of plays that were pertinent to spiritual science. It was Rudolf Steiner who gave the impulse for dramatic performances. His four “Mystery Dramas” were written for the Theosophical conventions. He wrote plays only when he knew that they were about to go Into rehearsal in Munich, and each was in production for about two months. In those days there was not yet any special training for the amateur performers in the plays, save in rehearsal periods. Each play was revived each year between 1910 and 1913 so that by 1913 all four plays were performed for the Society's two-week meeting.