In fact, in May 1968 in France has created exceptional conditions for an ideal happening, the implementation of all contemplated therein potency. Powerful and very colorful in its aims and slogans of the social movement itself strongly gravitated to the carnivals and festivals, has captured a lot of young people, obsessed with the instinctive expression, bore a huge charge of the creative energy that does not even have to "unchain" provocative antics - she only needs was a worthy use. But just then and found that the Happening promises much more than can give.
As an organized, deliberate form of "random" it is clearly not bear comparison with life itself. First of all, if the real movement was able to cover a range of different and sometimes mutually exclusive events and behaviors and then Happening in the "Odeon" was almost immediately marked by narrow sectarian traits and intolerance. It was found that in general the right to «spontaneous» self expression is not everything. It was also found that improvises and demonstrates their creative spontaneous reaction is possible only in a certain direction - so as to promote the speedy destruction of the existing political system and culture.
The leader of the French happening, artist Lebel, interpret the experience of "Odeon", said that art should be spontaneous, like life itself, and inseparable from it. At the same time, however, he quite clearly identified the direction and even manifestations of spontaneity: insult, desecrate the existing civilization, not by word but by deed. This was the last step, which could make Happening on how insulting provocation: either he had to stop all existence as "art" and withdraw into the circle of monotonous unscrupulous attacks, or switch from provocations in the shares directly to a destructive nature. Happening here directly poured into terrorism.
It is a "hot" in the spring of 1968, during the tumultuous youth and student performances, was split into two streams happening. One quickly moved into the mainstream of acute political activity, where the theater happenings like games of chance diverse quickly gave way to one and cruel theater of terrorism. Another attempt to end exhausts its possibilities as a kind of imitation of magic ritual that is likely to influence the real course of events.
It is this attempt to transform the world in the ways of imagination have taken the heads of the living theater couple Julian Beck and Judith Melayna in the play, created directly influenced by the events of May. As told reporters Julian Beck, the play will show how happiness can be achieved «hie et nunc» - «here and now." He will give "answers" to the "questions" that tormented him with the creators of the early 50's, but at the same time and answer all questions rebellious generation. More than that, it wills once and for all that all these questions superfluous, since open the way to "heaven - immediately! »
These paths Theatre, born in 1951 in the U.S., looking for a long time and has incorporated in its history, in fact, the history of the formation of counter-culture - from the Beats to Paris in May. Decisive milestone in the first stage of its development was the play "Brig." "Brig" - a place of detention at the U.S. military ships, and specifically in the play it was a prison of this kind on Okinawa, where he had been and the play's author, Kenneth Brown, during his military service. "Brig" is notable that interpretation, which has in it so significant at the origins of youth rebellion militaristic theme of violence: anticipating the evolution of direct protest against such violence to the expansion and all the more mystical interpretation of it in the bosom of the counterculture, the show sought to equate militarism moreover, in the crudest forms of it, and bourgeois system as a whole. Scenery, which, in fact, was nothing but barbed wire, was to create a visible image of the "world-prisons." But even more important role in creating this image was assigned to the style of the "theater of cruelty" to which Beck and Melayna was first approached by the production of "Brig". |