Thesis: The Anarchic Theatre of the 1960s

The Living Theatre

In The New Radical Theatre Notebook, Arthur Sainer presents an eclectic and fragmented survey of the 1960s fringe theatre in the USA. From the Firehouse Theatre’s provocative audience interaction during Still Failing (‘I disrobed that young lady and she was very agreeable… she started doing a little dance number,’ remembers Marlow Hotchkiss (Sainer, 1975, p201) to The Living Theatre’s collective creation (when asked about a forthcoming production, founder Julian Beck replied ‘We haven’t created it yet. It’s going to be put together by the company the way Frankenstein was,’ cited Sainer 1975, p295), America radical theatre challenged both theatrical form and the society around it. 


In her description of performance art, RoseLee Goldberg reflects this definition: 'permissive, open-

Uncle Fatso

ended medium with endless variables, executed by artists impatient with the limitations of more established art forms' (cited in Carlson 1996 p79). This description easily describes the attitude of the companies discussed by Sainer, who lead political demonstrations (The Bread and Puppet Theatre had their giant puppet Uncle Fatso, a caricature of then-president Johnson), or encourage audiences to buck the system –San Francisco Mime Troupe’s Ronnie Davies’ ‘guerrilla theatre,’ included practical skits teaching passers-by ‘how to stuff the parking meter’ (cited Sainer, 1975 p 49) and  even helped Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver escape arrest.

Their legacy s is clear throughout C Carr’s essays on the art scene of America in the 1980s and 1990s (Carr, 1993). From the emerging cross-border experiments of Guillermo Gomez-Pena to the Kipper Kids unique slapstick vaudeville, Carr emphasises their rawness, echoing the brutality of the New York No Wave music scene, but also harking back to the earlier experiments. 

Lecoq

While the rage of the 1980s precludes much of the playful joy of the happenings of the 1960s - The Om-Theatre held a sharing service in a church which respected the environment and maintained a sense of fun (Sainer, 1997 p66 -73) - the outrage at political oppression and the insistence on the immediacy of expression is shared. The anarchic refusal to respect authority, and the ownership of the performance by the performers, echoes the pioneering mayhem of the guerrilla theatre.This fringe theatre had been inspired by the simultaneous social resistance of the 1960s – in France, the riots of 1968 inspired Jacque Lecoq to develop a distinctive aspect of his training. The auto-cours is time set aside for the students to teach each other.

‘(The students) said to Lecoq, we don't want to work, we want to teach ourselves' (McBirney, cited in Murray 2003, p61). Far from compromising with the demands, Lecoq found a way to integrate them into the curriculum. This self-taught work is then presented and as Murray notes (op cited p61) assessed with a high 'degree of formality... the student group subjected to a fair, but rigorously astringent, analysis from a team of tutors.'

Itself created as a result of the dialogue between student and teacher, the auto-cours also follows a dialectic model: the demands for independent learning and freedom, which follow similar experiments of American radical companies, are balanced against the discipline of academic assessment: Lecoq synthesised the apparently oppositional ideas.


Antithesis: British Leftist Theatre
Synthesis: Fanshen

Antithesis: The Carnivalesque Leads to Irony

In chapter 4 of Devising Theatre, Deidre Heddon and Jane Milling discuss the growth of devised performances within the explicitly political companies of the early 1970s, before charting their demise over the subsequent decades. For some of these companies, the energy and immediacy of the devised process – such as CAST’s ‘rock’n’roll’ pub theatre (Heddon and Milling 2006, p 97) or El Teatro Campesino’s happenings to support California striking farm workers (ibid, p 96) – allowed the presentation of complex political ideals in a satisfyingly potent performance. However, over time, these companies returned to the ideal of the script.

Baz Kershaw (Kershaw 1992: pp 67 - 90) identifies a dialectical process in the evolution of British political theatre during the 1970s: the thesis of Marxist agitprop theatre (represented by CAST, a company created by performers expelled from the more traditional Marxist London Unity Theatre) and the antithesis of the carnivalesque (that is more anarchic, permissive and playful, defined by Bakhtin as the inversion of the status quo and its values) as espoused by The People Show or 'early Welfare State' - this carnivalesque could equally apply to the strategies of The Open Theatre in the USA.

Kershaw sees a more sophisticated, ironic form of political theatre emerging as a synthesis of the Marxist and carnivalesque, without limiting the diversity of alternative theatre to a monolithic whole: a perfect dialectical process of thesis and antithesis tending towards a synthesis. Irony, for Kershaw evades the obviousness of rhetorical agitprop, feeds a sophisticated audience's need for complex, layered theatre. Interpretation is no longer fixed, but open to diverse readings. 

THESIS: Joint Stock's Fanshen
SYNTHESIS: Gecko's The Arab and The Jew