"There's Something Happenin' Here

Richard Schechner
TDR: The Drama Review, Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2010 (T 206), pp. 12-17 (Article)
Published by The MIT Press

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Theres Something Happenin Here... Richard Schechner

what it is aint exactly clear. Thus sang Buffalo Springeld in 1969. A world ago, a different epoch, no connection to now. If so, then why all the reenactments of classic works from the late 1950s and 1960s? Why did performance studies scholar Andr Lepecki agree in 2008 to restage for a Munich exhibit of Allan Kaprows work the worlds very rst Happening, the 1959 18 Happenings in 6 Parts? Also in 2008, why did French choreographer Anne Collod replay Anna Halprins 1965 Parades and Changes in Paris for the Festival dAutomne in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou? And in 2009, why did the Rude Mechanicals of Austin, Texas, replicate exactly The Performance Groups 1968 Dionysus in 69 using Brian de Palmas 1969 lm as their text? For several years, the Living Theatre has remounted some of their classic works, including in 2007 Kenneth H. Browns The Brig and the group-devised Mysteries and Smaller Pieces.1 Or take the Brooklyn-based Darmstadt: Classics of the Avant Garde music series where music/performance (often not scores, but actual physical stagings) from the 1950s to 1970s are enacted including, for the 2009 second annual Essential Repertoire Festival, works by Meredith Monk, Peter Zummo, Phil Niblock...and others. I realize that a number of works in the Essential Repertoire festival are not strictly reconstructions or reenactments. But I believe the impulse driving the festival is to validate the paradoxical idea of a repertory of avantgarde pieces reaching back decades. After Paris, Parades and Changes, Replays (Collods retitling) graced the 2009 Performa festival in New York and went on tour to other venues. Dionysus in 69 will also probably tour. These are not reinterpretations or new versions. They are as close to the originals as can be.2 A contradiction in terms, avantgarde and classics? Of course, reinterpreting the dramatic texts of the great writers is a mainstay of orthodox theatre. How many Chekhovs, Ibsens, Brechts, Williamses, Mamets, Kanes, Churchills, Sophocleses, and Shakespeares have you seen? Even deconstructing the dramas of the masters is old-hat, a mainstay of the Wooster Group and its acolytes. But whats going on now is different. Artists stage performance texts not dramatic texts. They do not reinterpret, they replicate. The claim is double: That there are classics of the avantgarde and that these in their original form speak to people of today. Analogies are at hand, but are they accurate? Was going to Dionysus in 69 in Austin like going to a museum and regarding a painting from another century? Are live actors the equivalent of inanimate paints or other materials? And what about the audience? Audiences for live performances interact with each other and with the show. Museum-goers look at art objects. Or they used totodays art museums are much more interactive than formerly; but none that I know of allows the viewers to touch, change, or directly intervene with the works on display. Writing with great intelligence and sensitivity about why he agreed to restage 18 Happenings, Lepecki said he didnt know much about the original production except Michael Kirbys very meticulous description of it, which, up until Kaprows archives became available, was the

1. The Living Theatre also brought Mysteries back in 1994. 2. At New Yorks Performa 05, Marina Abramovis Seven Easy Pieces reworked some of her own earlier performances as well as pieces by Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, and Gina Pane. Abramovi did not try to duplicate the originals (which aside from her own, she had not seen). So although Seven Easy Pieces is a forerunner of what I am writing about, it is not dead on. See Cesare and Joy (2006). TDR: The Drama Review 54:2 (T206) Summer 2010. 2010 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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discursive proxy for the event (2009). Lepecki also noted that Kaprow dened Happenings as events that exist for a single performance, or only a few, and are gone forever as new ones take their place (Kaprow 2003:17). On these grounds, Lepecki almost declined the invitation to restage. Lepecki nally accepted because rst and foremost: Kaprows extraordinarily generous personal consent. But there were other reasons. Lepecki found in Kaprows notes a massive textual and visual work, almost autonomous in itself in its prolic poetic ramications and performative potentialities. [] On paper, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is a dynamic, truly rhizomatic collection of virtual ideas, beautiful poems, impossible actions, architectural dreams, sharp short manifestos on art, music, and theatre, hilariously self-aggrandizing narratives, hilariously self-deprecating narratives, brilliantly compact theoretical texts, insightful quasi-ethnographic snapshots of quotidian expressions, acute diagnostics on urban life, heartbreaking confessions of the artist before the huge challenges posed by the project. (2009) In other words, restaging 18 Happenings put Lepeckiand by inference, audiencesdirectly in touch with Kaprows Kaprowness. Or, to put it another way, redoing the Happening was the only way to know it as an artwork in a way analogous to how a museum viewer may know a painting by seeing it (however out of context, however removed in time from the occasion of its being painted). This sense of rst encounter is a core reason for the spate of restagings we are witnessingand why we are bound to see a lot more of them. The experience of rst encounter is paradoxically both missing from todays media-infected experiences and made possible largely because of the prodigiously increased abilities to archive. To make an accurate rst encounter (again), one needs a score and/or lm-video record. Thus the paradox: only by virtue of an ever-increasing and ever-more complete audiovisual record (from celluloid to videotape to digital traces) can what is to be restored and replayed be accessed. Lepecki had Kaprows detailed artists notes plus Kirbys description. But Lepecki also had to ll in a lot of details. And he faced the difcult problem that Kaprows Happening was to be shown inside an art museum while in 1959 it was staged in the Reuben gallery, an empty loft on Fourth Avenue in Manhattans East Village (2009). Not to mention that in 1959, Allan Kaprow was not yet that Allan Kaprow: his work was not canonized; the audience consisted largely of friends-cum-fellow artists, etc. etc. As with 18 Happenings, so with all other replays: they are replayed because the productions have grown into famous events, they were not (necessarily) that back when. But Anna Halprins Parades and Changes, unlike Kaprows 18 Happenings, was to some degree famous from the moment of rst presentation. Or, maybe, notorious. As Alexis Clements noted about Parades and Changes at New Yorks 2009 Performa: Originally staged in 1965, the piece caused a sensation both in the dance world and with the general public. When the work was mounted for the rst time in New York in 1967, arrest warrants were issued for the artists involved. Why all the fuss? At the time nudity on the citys stages was illegal and rarely used, even among those who would thwart the law. Today, nudity in performance art and dance has become banal in some sense, or at the very least expected in many settings. Halprins use of the nude body was one of the earliest, most deliberate and prolonged examples. That said, the lack of clothing was only one of the conventions that Parades & Changes was pushing up against. Perhaps more importantly was her testing of conventions of sexuality, authorship, and even the denition of dance. Given all that, it might be fair to expect that the reimagining of the piece [] would no longer carry the same bite as the original had over forty years ago. While its true that it wasnt a shock to see naked bodies on the stage or to see same sex couplings, what was surprising and still resonant about the piece was the struggle that we still have within ourselves and as a culture to come to terms with our bodies, our sexuality, and

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what it means to represent oneself in the world. In other words, the work taps into both a universal human struggle and a cultural struggle that persists. (2009) Yes, the struggle persists, and this is why these seemingly outdated works still appeal. But appeal in what way? As nostalgia, as a challenge, as a model for action, as a reproach? And precisely what struggle? Against the perpetual wars we are in, for social justice, against poverty, for real democracy? Before parsing the appeal, let me offer one more example. In December 2009 the Rude Mechanicals of Austin, Texas staged as exact a replication of Dionysus in 69 as they could manage using Brian de Palmas movie, the book of texts and photos, and my participation in a few rehearsals. The director, Shawn Sides, stated: Re-enactments always differ from the original to varying degrees, of course, and well just never know how close or far our version really, really is. Not even Richard can tell us, because memory is such a funny thing. We studied blocking, and gestures and inection, and the way the original actors carried themselvestheir personal physical habitsfrom the lm. We would call it karaokewed play the lm and perform along with it. But weve also added scenes that were cut from the lm, and put the nudity back into the birth and death rituals.3 The moments that weve put back in, or tweaked, are inaccurate in terms of the lm, but more accurate in terms of the original performance. And then theres all that audience interaction. The accuracy comes not only from the technical work but also from the spirit of the thing. [] I think part of the creative challenge that the actors are digging into is riding the line between technically re-tracing the original casts physicality and being alive and present as themselves in the room. Its really hard and theyre really good at it. (2009) In Austin, the audiences participated with even more abandon than they did 41 years earlier. In the performances I attended, more than half the audience joined in dancing and caressing each other. And when I wasnt there, the spectators jumped into the performance even more enthusiastically. On 2 January 2010, Sides emailed me: The nal Friday [18 December] was the most Dionysian. The Hill Country Nudists heard about the show and took off their clothes as soon as they found a seat, remained naked, of course, for the whole play. During the caress a couple crept off by the bathroom and had sex standing up. Toward the very end of the caress a woman who wasnt in the caress apparently saw a guy down on the oor in the caress that she thought was hot and couldnt take it anymore. So she came down off the high platform and made a beeline for him and started making out. Not normal making out, but like they do in soap operas with lots of grunting noises and rolling around. They would NOT leave the mat. They just kept grunting and rolling around all during the death ritual and the clean up and they didnt quit till the uorescent lights came up at the end. They had come with other dates and they left with those other dates. You would think they would at least leave together. One of the critics made it his #1 art experience of 2009. Another put it at #3. (2010) There are several reasons why audience participation in 2009 was so total. First, what was shocking and new in 1968 is no longer so. Secondly, Dionysus in 69 in Austin had plenty of preperformance publicitymuch of it emphasizing the promised nakedness and participation. Audiences attending the Rudes production knew what was expected of them, or at least

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3. When The Performance Group opened Dionysus in 69 in June 1968, there was no nakedness. But after Jerzy Grotowski saw the piece and commented on the hypocrisy and teasing quality of the costuming, the almost but not quite naked, the Group decided to perform the birth and death rituals naked. In the film, the Group returned to the costume version because we, and de Palma, wanted the movie to be widely distributedand we felt that total nakedness, both women and men, would prevent this.

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encouraged. But there was more, I think. Spectators were honoring a kind of sexualitywithout-fear of the pre-AIDS epoch; they were retro-enjoying an interlude of release that they at least thought characterized the 60s. The audience intentionally overlooked the cautionary tale that Dionysus in 69 told in its own time, a tale that remains clear in the retelling. As I wrote as the conclusion of my Politics of Ecstasy: Are we ready for the liberty we have grasped? Can we cope with Dionysus dance and not end upas Agave didwith our sons heads on our dancing sticks? (1969:228). Few in Austin wanted to hear that. In 2004 the Wooster Group premiered Poor Theatre in Warsaw; and in 2006, Hamlet in Berlin. Both of these productions focused on exactly reproducing earlier performancesthe 1968 lm of the Polish Laboratory Theatres Akropolis (1962)4 and Richard Burtons 1964 Hamlet. In Poland, Poor Theatre was regarded by many as a faded carbon copy (Kowalczyk in Dunkelberg 2005:49) and by others as a new look at Grotowski (Gruszczyn ski in Dunkelberg 2005:50). The reason I am not detailing the Wooster Groups works in this Comment is simply because, as Savran (2005) notes, Woosters renditions are enactments of absences, the negation of the kind of presence and re-presence of originals typied by the redoings of works by Kaprow, Halprin, and The Performance Group. In other words, part of the success of the redoings is the rejection of postmodern cool in favor of a retro-hot. If this is sterile nostalgia or a fertile harbinger remains to be determined. Or to put it still another way, again following Savran, Poor Theatre is all about deaththe death of artists in and close to The Performance Group and the Wooster Group (Stephen Borst, Ron Vawter, Paul Schmidt, Spalding Gray) and the death of the avantgarde itself. The source works engaged the world; the redoings engage the task of redoing. The redoings engage the world also, but from the position of been there, done that. The source works were not originalnothing is original; all were based on earlier experiments and probings. But the auteurs of the source works (including me) operated under a very compelling and energizing illusion: that we could make something truly new. Almost like an imitation of birthing: each child is genetically a continuation, yet each child is new, itself. And the 1960s (understood as an epoch, not a decade), for all its horrors, and there were many, shown forth optimistically by engaging these horrors with a view to ending them. Utopia was not yet a farce. In redoing the works of that epoch, people get the chance to experience an aftertaste of, pardon me, spass (fun by Brecht) and jouissance (pleasure by Lacan). In the fall of 2009 I taught a course on the performances of the 1960s. Nicole Marie Roberge and Elliot Gordon Mercer elected to restage some classics of the period. One of these was a redoing of Simone Fortis 1961 Huddle (also restaged in 2009 at New Yorks Museum of Modern Art). The Roberge-Mercer-Forti Huddle took place on a rainy morning under the gushing fountain in Washington Square Park. The six performers were doubly soaked as they piled on top of each other, the whole huddle slowly circulating around the fountain. A few passersby stopped to look, some under umbrellas. And then, to my surprise and delight, an onlooker ran to the huddle and joined in. And then another, and another. Huddle, like Dionysus in 69 in Austin, reignited a new generation of participating spectators. Huddle was part of a series of redoings staged by Roberge and Mercer in 2009. Their description-manifesto fuses concerns of the 1960s, what Sally Banes dubbed democracys body ([1983] 1993), with a very particular 21st-century agenda: We have spent the past six months reinventing performance pieces by Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Anna Halprin, Simone Forti, and Allan Kaprow. These reinventions

4. The 85-minute 1968 film of Akropolis was directed by James MacTaggart. It was shot in a London television studio before an invited audience. See http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale09/grotowski.html and also Romanska (2009). Poor Theatre also included a section based on several of choreographer William Forsythes lectures and dance lessons. These were not as exactly mimicked as Grotowskis Akropolis.

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explore the translation from one body to another, one space and time to another, and one movement score to another. Transitioning these dances into contemporary contexts opens up new ways of engaging with dance history and performance theory. The performance spaces used for these reinventions are not conventional stages but outdoor public sites around downtown Manhattan. In rejecting traditional staging these pieces transform public space into performance space, democratizing pedestrian, quotidian activities, physical bodies, and dance performance itself. Since the process of reinvention involves the evolution and recontextualization of the original work, these pieces challenge the notion that dances are necessarily xed choreographically and historically. Transitioning these experimental movement scores across time and space emphasizes the physical act of creation and practice. These embodied tributes reinvigorate the ideas and ideals of experimental dance. (2009) At a more personal level, Roberge emailed me on 10 January 2010. In part, she wrote: Looks like practice, the doing, is becoming more popular again. (HOORAY!) Restaging can raise the same personal, social, political, and cultural questions as back then. Its like were saying: Okay, were still at war, were still not equal, were still fucking up the planet bigtime What went wrong? Lets go back and try that again. Or Lets try that again, our way. Sure, maybe it would be better for us to write letters or to run for ofce or to join the peace corps, but every ant in the ant hill has a role to play. The reinventors are surely not ONLY interested in reinvention. Small-scale subversion, from within and en plein air, of sky-rocketing capitalism, conservatism, and the entertainment/ escapist industry, the restaging of radical performances might be one way to relaunch, seeking new directions. I do think the key interest in restaging or playing with the works of the 1960s and 1970s is often as a conduit for the exploration of ideas and possibilities that vanguard artists introduced to American stages, or in many cases, off stages, allowing the physical performer to experience something unlike conventional acting or classical dance, something that still feels new today because it is new each time. (Roberge 2010) New each time in the manner of Shakespeares The Tempest when Prospero replies to his daughter Mirandas: O brave new world, That has such people int! Tis new to thee (V, 1, 20911). Yes, even as these reconstructions ignite they also open to a eld of regret: we live in a time of lost opportunities. In the 21st century even more than in the 20th we know what ails the world, but we see our leadersand by proxy, ourselvesfail to heal whats wrong. Global warming is mocked by Copenhagens failure. We know war isnt the answer, yet President Barack Obama, a philosopher king if the USA ever had one, repeats the syndrome Korea-Vietnam-Iraq-Afghanistan. The American health care system is terribly inadequate and ill-conceived, and the rest of the world offers several excellent models, but our lobby-and-protdriven Congress comes up with a Rube Goldberg reform. After the scal meltdown of 2008, we know that Wall Street needs tighter regulation, homeowners need mortgage help, and the jobless need both infrastructure jobs and green jobs, new kinds of jobs, based on a we-aregoing-to-the-moon effort,5 but we get half-hearted measures. Our political leaders are better

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5. JFKs 1962 speech in Houston set the tone for the decade. At the core of his oration: We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too. [] And this will be done in the decade of the Sixties ([1962] 2007). What others? Peaceful coexistence with the USSR, social programs, racial justice, gender equality... A whole lot; some done, most still awaiting fulfillment.

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at clobbering each other and taking bribes (legal and not legal) than in addressing the problems at hand for which solutions are known. No wonder at the artistic level so many are fascinated with the past. So much past awaiting us in the future.
References Banes, Sally. [1983] 1993. Democracys Body: Judson Dance Theater, 19621964. Durham: Duke University Press. Cesare, T. Nikki, and Jenn Joy. 2006. Performa/(Re)Performa. TDR 50, 1 (T189):17077. Clements, Alexis. 2009. At Performa: Replaying Anna Halprins Parades & Changes. The L Magazine. www.thelmagazine.com/TheMeasure/archives/2009/11/19/at-performa-replaying-anna-halprinsparades-and-changes (22 January 2010). Dunkelberg, Kermit. 2005. Confrontation, Simulation, Admiration: The Wooster Groups Poor Theater. TDR 49, 3 (T187):4356. Kaprow, Allan. 2003. Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life. Ed. Jeff Kelley. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kennedy, John F. [1962] 2007. Challenging America to Reach the Moon, September 12, 1962. In Charge! Historys Greatest Military Speeches, ed. Steve Isreal. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Lepecki, Andr. 2009. Redoing 18 Happenings in 6 Parts. MAP, January. www.perfomap.de/current/ iii.-kuenstlerische-praxis-als-forschung/redoing-201c18-happenings-in-6-parts201d (12 January 2010). Roberge, Nicole Marie, and Elliot Gordon Mercer. 2009. Project Proposal. Unpublished manuscript. Roberge, Nicole Marie. 2010. Email correspondence with author, 10 January. Romanska, Magda. 2009. Between History and Memory: Auschwitz in Akropolis, Akropolis in Auschwitz. Theatre Survey, 50, 2:22350. Savran, David. 2005. The Death of the Avantgarde. TDR 49, 3 (T187):1042. Schechner, Richard. 1969. Politics of Ecstasy. In Public Domain: Essays on Theatre, 20928. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company. Sides, Shawn. 2009. Interview: Shawn Sides on Dionysus in 69. Austinist. http://austinist.com/2009/12/04/ interview_shawn_sides_on_dionysus_i.php (12 January 2010). Sides, Shawn. 2010. Email correspondence with author, 2 January.

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