This is a brief account of the life thus far of I Nyoman Rajeg, a Balinese dalang, or shadow-puppeteer. Pak Rajeg, now in his early 60's, grew up and was educated under the Dutch regime, lived through the Japanese occupation, participated actively in the independence movement, and subsequently has lived through the rapid and deep changes brought on as Bali experiences modernization. And yet, for all the changes that have come to pass in his lifetime, Pak Rajeg lives a life in the traditional performing arts of his culture that is well-founded and (it would seem) secure, a life moreover that is integral with the main fabric of the society in which he lives.

Pak Rajeg is a professional dalang. He and his four musicians and two assistants form a small troupe that has its base of operations in his houseyard. From there they go forth to perform, usually in the nearby vicinity.

Him or Me: a portrait of a detective drama, the second of Jim Neu's plays to be presented in New York, opened at the Squat Theatre on March 9, 1979. The performers were Nancy Shinkle, Carol Mullins, John Nesci, Jim Neu and Bob Feldman, saxophonist. Recorded music was composed by Lenny Pickett. Bill Wert designed the projections. The play was directed by Jim Neu and John Nesci.

The audience is seated in tiers of seats facing a square, flat performing area which is quite bare. The large storefront window of the Squat Theatre is concealed by a white backdrop that doubles as a screen and onto which slides are projected from backstage. Lighting, pink and white, is projected from overhead and from two downstage side spots. Scene settings are suggested by light and music with a minimum of props—table, chairs, a divan, etc.

Gianni Colosimo is the founder and sole member of the Teatro Ludico Libidinale (Ludicrous Libidinal Theatre). His performance, the title of which means “Freud, My Friend,” announces a personal poetics in autoperformance. Colosimo does individually what others in the so-called Post Avant-Garde (T77) do collectively; that is, he plays with “symptoms” of his own pathology and puts them together in a sort of “kinetic” analysis. He tries to materialize the process of “forming” his unconscious, according to Freudian schemes of assimilation. Colosimo identifies himself with the Oedipus character, but the onstage “analysis” is more a cruel ceremony (as in Artaud) than the kind of analytical cruelty that has come to be identified with the Post Avant-Garde and Body artists. The myth is, for him, more important than the materials.

John Zorn founded the Theatre of Musical Optics in 1975. Since then he has developed two different types of concerts. In one he plays a musical instrument. As a saxophone player and composer, he appears regularly with a group of musicians working with “improvised music” or “music for improvisers.” In other concerts he performs alone in intimate situations using small objects visually as though they were musical “notes.” Though he has performed these shows with objects at Anthology Film Archives, the Collective for the Living Cinema and the Ontological-Hysteric Theatre, most of the work has taken place at his small studios on Lafayette Street and, more recently, on the Lower East Side.

More than five years ago, a group of young English artists formed a workshop in London under the direction of Anthony Howell. This group, eventually to be known as the Theatre of Mistakes, uses improvisational exercises—strictly controlled by formal structure—to develop performances.

Howell concedes that he was influenced in particular by an exercise of the Living Theatre, used in Paradise Now, in which one person performed an action and another copied it. The interaction was far more interesting to Howell than anything the traditional theatre could offer. And he also felt that this exercise was more significant than the “histrionics” of the Living Theatre because it implied a new means of working in a group to create performance art.

For the next two years, such concepts as repetition of each other's actions were used as the basis for exercises for the group, and performances were built from chosen exercises.

The idea to develop Teatr Loh came after I had already lived in Indonesia two years. For many reasons I was dissatisfied with the process of developing my previous work, Jalannya Salju, in Java. My intention was to bring the best of my tradition with me in collaboration with artists here. Teatr Loh, by Indonesian standards, was a very small group. During the first few months we were five Balinese, one Sundanese, two East Javanese, a Central Javanese, a Frenchman and two Americans. A few of the people had worked with me on the previous production. Pak Tempo was a key figure in rounding up the other Balinese members. He is a fine topeng performer from Tampaksiring, who had toured to Europe and Shiraz. It was a surprise that he joined our group because he was in his 50's, and it meant leaving behind in the village his wife, six children and numerous grandchildren.

Psychologically, the solo can be seen as the quintessential form of performance. The audience's relationship to the soloist is undivided, gratifying the performer's deepest desires not only to be seen but to be the center of attention. The solo is a means of presenting the self to others, generally in terms of a display of virtuosity designed to elicit the spectator's admiration and awe. Traditionally, the personal, psychological significance of the solo form remains unacknowledged in the performance, shielded, so to speak, by the display of virtuosity. But in the work of Jack Smith, Stuart Sherman and others, the submerged motives of the solo become apparent because it is the play of private obsessions that commands the audience's attention. Amy Taubin's solos are less personal than Smith's or Sherman's. But they are also concerned with emphasizing the solo as a representation of the self.

Ten or twelve spectators attend each performance, and that is too many. The size of the audience is partly by choice, and partly it is forced by the size of the theatre, which is a small living room. The play is called I Misteri di Londra (London's Mysteries). A panorama of Victorian society written, prepared, animated, and interpreted by Guido Ceronetti and his wife, Erica Tedeschi, with the assistance of two young women from the neighboring apartment, it is performed by beautiful marionettes.

Guido Ceronetti is a writer and poet and a translator of ancient texts. In newspapers and periodicals, he is an ironic moralist who doesn't believe in progress and has a pessimistic vision of contemporary society. This is something that is not appreciated by the progressive Roman intelligentsia, who have marked Ceronetti as reactionary. Ceronetti, then, is an isolated and singular character in the Italian cultural field.

Ermione, the title of my play, was also the name of the monkey who performed with me in it. It was originally the name of a mythical character, the daughter of Helen and Menelaos; more recently, It was used by Gabriele D'Annunzio in his poem “The Rain in the Pine Forest.” In my play, the monkey corresponded to D'Annunzio's “nymph with the sylvan face” who accompanied him through the metaphorical wood of life.

The text of Ermione was comprised of poetry that I had written from the age of sixteen to thirty; the action consisted of experimenting with ideas for a eventual reading of it. The first thing I wanted to test was the actual selection of verses. I read from a notebook, then provided a running commentary in order to create a distance between the time when the poems were written and the time when they were read. By so doing, I was able, at the same time, to minimize this distance by connecting the old poems to a “live” situation, thus making the link between poetry and life explicit. Next, I wanted to test the actions—the theatrical renderings of the poetry that corresponded to the different stages of life.

Is it a: 1) critical method, 2) an artistic process, 3) neither or 4) both?

The correct answer to the original question is—structuralism is both, as Barthes so succinctly states. But what of the phenomenon referred to as “structural film“? Is “structural film” “structuralist film” in disguise?

The invitation to see Bye Bye Blacksheep came privately. It was the summer of 1976 and Jamie Leo, then a member of Iowa Theatre Lab, invited me to view a short piece he had written and directed for actor Mark Bronnenberg. The performance was private, not in the sense of excluding the public, but in that the audience was limited to one observer.

The invitation came at the last moment—I was to be there in 20 minutes—an action that belied the elaborate timing and logistical complexity of the performance. I arrived at the large, old apartment house and waited in Jamie's living room until he came in, blindfolded me with a black silk scarf, and led me into the corridor. As he carefully guided me down the long passage, he gave me the following information and directions:

SAHOO: I am now sixty years old; I started dancing at the age of four. I belong to the tradition. My father and grandfather were dancers. I belong to the Kansari caste, which is engaged In the practice of these dances; its main vocation is the making of household utensils. My family also made works of art in gold and other material. In our country often a particular caste or community is involved in the practice of a particular craft or a form of dance and theatre. Arts are community based and family based. The techniques are passed from father to son, from one generation to the other. Since the transmission of the techniques is oral, this pattern works more effectively than any other.

For the past two and a half years I have been writing, staging and performing in my own work. Most of these performances have taken place in galleries and museums. Before I began doing my own performances, I worked for short periods of time with different theatre artists in New York. Because I considered myself primarily a performer rather than a writer or director, my first performance began with an idea for a particular character. After making the costume and collecting a few props, I went into the space dressed as the character and improvised different actions. I had a vague idea of possible situations beforehand, but I did not write a scenario or make any notes in advance. Although I wrote a small amount of text as I went along, the final performance was based primarily on the improvisations I did during rehearsals. The performance was a vehicle for the character and a vehicle for me as the performer.

For many reasons in Roman theatres, both large and small, you always have to wait at least 20 minutes beyond the announced curtain time. These are vaguely anguishing waits, in which one is forced to stay in the company of strangers in foyers, corridors, and hallways that come to resemble doctors’ waiting rooms. One of these Beckett-like waits became an organic part of Itinerario-Corpo (“Body-Itinerary”), presented by the Teatro Autonomo di Roma from March through June, 1979, on the two upper floors of a private apartment building on Via degli Scialoia.

Via degli Scialoia is neither a street of theatres nor of artists, like Via Margutta, nor is it a loft area such as is found in New York City. It is one of a group of streets located north of Piazza del Popolo between the Tiber and the Villa Borghese park.

On the southwest coast of India, between the mountain rangeof the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, lies the South Kanara District of Karnataka State. Here, paddy fields and plantations of palm, mango, cashew and banana alternate with patches of thick jungle forest. In this lush setting, devotees of nearly three hundred cults meet in nightlong sessions offering worship to locally unique spirit deities. Some of these spirits are believed to have been sent to earth by Hindu Gods; others are considered the souls of persons who long ago died violent and untimely deaths. Yet others are recent ancestors troubling their descendants. As spirits have benevolent and malevolent aspects and are believed to possess power over human health, fertility and fortune and over the land and cattle, they must be ritually propitiated.

Each spirit has its own form, mythic history, special powers and propitiatory requirements. Therefore the worship of each spirit differs somewhat from that of all others.

Many structuralist plays could be made quite directly into structuralist films. The time or durational structures of the live performances could simply be filmed, with or without the filter of changed camera angle and variation of frame size, to make a movie. Even the three-dimensional spatial structures important to most structuralist plays could be represented or “translated” in film. (For example, two alternating and interwoven stories separated spatially on stage could be distinguished in a film by using different color filters for each; spatial progressions could be translated into color progressions; etc.) Yet it would be impossible to make most structuralist films into live performances. Structuralist films tend to exploit the high degree of mechanical control inherent in the medium, a control that is not possible in live performance. Thus an analysis of selected films that may be called structuralist should tell us something about the media of film and theatre and about structuralism itself.

At one time, Stuart Sherman was writing a great deal. To begin the process, he would open a book, choose a word and write. The initial word might be eliminated eventually, no longer needed, but the accumulated associations would have provided ample material for a story. He felt the use of a visual stimulus prevented preconceived notions about the work from hindering the flow of Ideas. In those days, he was also making abstract line drawings, word pictures, of everyday objects: a tree, sunlight, a waterfall. However, the two-dimensionality of the drawings and the writing began to give him the sense of increasing alienation from “animate” things. As a result, he now performs pieces that he considers visual abstract language about the relations between objects; he calls the work “Spectacles.”

Slaughtered goats are scattered everywhere, lying in pools of blood outside the temple compound. Decapitated chickens have been thrown together in large separate piles. The god Karin Camundi's mask lies discarded atop one of the mounds of carcasses, soaked with blood and feathers. The paint is soiled and the image of the god has begun to blur. There are no drums, no firecrackers. It is predawn, and the only light is a faint blue glow. Some of the sacrificial goats hanging from trees are being skinned and prepared for selling. The temple grounds are empty after the previous night's festivities, when hundreds of anxious spectators crowded together, pressing to catch a glimpse of their god gulping down blood of the sacrificial animals. The flies come with the day. This is the aftermath of one of the bloodiest performances of teyyam kettu—a highly structured ritual folk performance in the Cannanore District, Kerala State, Southwestern India.

It is six o'clock on a spring day in rural Virginia. The year is 1938, and in a small C.C.C. camp located near Charlottesville the enrollees are just finishing their evening meal. (The C.C.C—Civilian Conservation Corps—was the relief agency created in 1933 to employ jobless young men on land and forest reclamation projects.) Talk of the day's work is interrupted by a large black automobile that roars to a stop in front of the mess hall.

A uniformed man jumps from the car, rushes into the hall, and, flashing a sheriff's badge, demands to see the camp commander. The two men move to a corner of the room where they engage in an animated conversation. Everyone else is silent, straining to hear what is being said. The consultation ends, and the sheriff pounds on the nearest table for attention.

As a sculptor, photographer, playwright and director, Michael Kirby has been and is still an articulate proponent of the interanimation of the arts. As a practitioner as well as a theoretician of several arts, he has made and defended work that not only mixes media but also transposes forms and preoccupations of one art to others. Kirby’s commitment to the lively cross-fertilization of the arts partially accounts for the rise of Structuralist Theatre since that movement, in certain respects, appears to have been influenced in important ways by the tendency of Minimalist Art referred to as systemic painting.

Some of Kirb’s Structuralist plays, like Revolutionary Dance and Identity Control, are composed of a series of dramatic, narrative vignettes that have no apparent causal or chronological relation. Kirby created his dramatic incidents as a painter might choose a color or shape, i.e., with an eye to its place in the overall formal structure.