'The Theatre of Mixed Means' & 'The Theatre of Images'

When I was doing research on the avant-garde theater of the last decades of the 20th century, I found two books especially pertinent and helpful.  Since then, I’ve had occasion to refer to them a number of times (most recently for my article on Rick On Theater about Richard Wagner’s concept of Gesamtkunstwerk, posted on 21 January). 

The books, Richard Kostelanetz’s The Theatre of Mixed-Means and Bonnie Marranca’s The Theatre of Images, are both relatively old, so many readers of this blog may not know about them.  So I’ve decided that it’s a good time to make a kind of formal introduction of them to ROTters.  Think of this as a sort of grown-up’s book report.

Let me do the bibliographic and biographic business first.

Both books appear to be still in print in later paperback editions.  The first of the two books originally had the formal title of The Theatre of Mixed-Means: An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments and Other Mixed-Means Performances.  It was originally published in 1968 by Dial Press and was reissued (with the variant subtitle An Introduction to Happenings, Kinetic Environments, and Other Mixed-Means Presentations) in 1980 by RK Editions.  There also seems to be a 1981 edition from Archae Editions, the latest publication. 

The Theatre of Images, of which Bonnie Marranca is credited as editor, also has multiple editions.  First published in 1977 by Drama Book Specialists, it was rereleased in 1996 by Johns Hopkins University Press.  The Theatre of Images is a collection of texts of three performance pieces that exemplify what Marranca labeled “the Theatre of Images”: Pandering to the Masses: A Misrepresentation (1975) by Richard Foreman, A Letter for Queen Victoria (1974) by Robert Wilson, The Red Horse Animation (1970; revised 1972) by Lee Breuer. 

The Theatre of Images’ 1977 edition had an “Introduction,” composed in 1976 by Marranca, a discussion of the avant-garde theater of the time (almost a decade after Kostelanetz wrote about that scene in The Theatre of Mixed-Means).  Twenty years later, when she reedited the book, Marranca added an “Afterword to the 1996 Edition” which she called “The Avant-Garde at the Century Turning.”  In it, Marranca updated her assessment of the experimental theater as it was in the ’70s.

Richard Kostelanetz was born in New York City in 1940; he is the nephew of the conductor Andre Kostelanetz (1901-80).  A writer, artist, critic, and editor of the avant-garde whose work spans many fields, including contemporary art and literature, Kostelanetz has a Bachelor of Arts degree (1962) from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Master of Arts in American history (1966) from Columbia University in New York; he’s the recipient of Woodrow Wilson, New York State Regents, and International Fellowships, among many other grants and fellowships, and studied at King’s College London as a Fulbright Scholar.  Kostelanetz has lectured widely and served as a visiting professor or guest artist at a variety of institutions.

Among Kostelanetz’s other pertinent writings are The New American Arts (Horizon Press, 1965; Kostelanetz edited and contributed two essays), On Innovative Art(ist)s (McFarland & Co., 1992), and A Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes (A Cappella Books, 1993; Chicago Review Press, 1993; Schirmer Books, 2000; Routledge, 2001).  He’s also worked in audio, video, film, holography, prints, book-art, computer-based installations, among other new media. 

Bonnie Marranca was born in 1947 in New Jersey and works in New York City as a writer, editor, critic, and publisher.  She received a B.A. in English from Montclair State University in New Jersey and an M.A. in theater from Hunter College of the City University of New York.  She also attended the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.  In 1975, she married a fellow theater student from Calcutta (now Kolkata), Gautam Dasgupta (b. 1949), and the following year, they launched The Performing Arts Journal, which became one of the most respected and successful theater journals in the country. 

Now entitled PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, the triannual publication has a particular interest in contemporary performance art and features extensive coverage in video, drama, dance, installations, media, and music.  It eventually spawned PAJ Publications, the book division, which issued the 1996 edition of The Theatre of Images, one of the seminal books on contemporary theatre.  Marranca’s writings have been translated into twenty languages.

Marranca is a professor of theater at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts of New York City’s New School.  She’s a Guggenheim Fellow, a recipient of the 2011 Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) Excellence in Editing Award for Sustained Achievement, and was awarded the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professorship in the United Kingdom.  Marranca’s a Fulbright Senior Scholar who’s taught at Columbia University, Princeton University, New York University, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, the Free University of Berlin, the Autonomous University of Barcelona Institute for Theatre, the University of Bucharest, and the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. 

Kostelanetz’s Theatre of Mixed-Means is a critical examination of the new theater composed of language, music, dance, light, kinetic sculpture, painting, as well as modern technology as it was emerging in the late 1960s.  Though many of the nascent performance forms, like Happenings, have mostly disappeared from the current scene, their influence on contemporary theater and performance was permanent.  The Theatre of Mixed Means predicted the kind of performance milieu the next generation of theater-makers would be entering and the kind of theater they’d be drawn to. 

Kostelanetz observes that the “recent development in American theatre represents such a great departure from traditional practice that it has acquired a plethora of new names . . .” (xi).  He lists “happenings,” “the new theatre,” “events,” “activities,” “painter’s theatre,” “kinetic theatre,” and “action theatre”; I have found myself using terms such as “performance event,” “theater piece,” and “performance piece” because the presentations are clearly not simply “plays” but something more—but what?  What can we call them?

After dismissing for solid reasons all the designations he listed, Kostelanetz comes up with his own answer: “I prefer to christen the entire movement ‘the Theatre of Mixed Means,’ a term that encompasses various strains of activity and yet makes the critical distinction between this theatre and traditional, predominantly literary mono-means practice . . .” (xi).  His “Foreword” introduces and defines this new theater.

Kostelanetz’s explanations of what went on on the stages and in the performance spaces of 40 and 50 years ago bears examining to understand what we’re seeing today.  Emily Mann’s Execution of Justice (première, 1985; Broadway, 1986), Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (première, 1991; Broadway, 1993-94), Metamorphoses by Mary Zimmerman (Off-Broadway, 2001; Broadway 2002-03), Golem from the London troupe 1927 (London, 2014; Lincoln Center Festival, 2016), and other multi-media productions on mainstream stages might not have ever been staged if the type of theater Kostelanetz describes had not been so influential.

The body of the book is a short “art-historical” introduction to mid-20th-century multi-media performance, followed by a series of conversations with artists on the edge of art and performance in the 1960s, such as composer, music theorist, artist, and philosopher John Cage (1912-92); painter, sculptor, and graphic artist Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008), who also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance; painter, assemblagist, and pioneer in establishing the concepts of performance art Allan Kaprow (1927-2006), who essentially invented the Happening; and sculptor Claes Oldenberg (1929-2022), who was another pioneer in Happenings; among others. 

The mixed-means theater, as Kostelanetz defines it, incorporates “the means (or media) of music and dance, light and color (both natural and chemical), sculpture and painting, as well as the new technologies of film, recorded tape, amplification systems, radio and closed-circuit television” (4).  (Since Kostelanetz was writing in the late 1960s, we should add video and computer technology as well as digital sound recording techniques, all of which are currently used on stage.)  This line of development is continued by what Bonnie Marranca describes as “the Theatre of Images.” 

The mixed-means theater is not a new phenomenon and it’s linked quite specifically, like both 19th-century Romanticism and Antonin Artaud’s (1896-1948) concept, to “primitive ceremonies” which integrated singing, dancing, acting, sculpture, and painting (3).  Kostelanetz observed that the various arts probably became separated when societies began to see “Art as distinct from life” and a principle of the mixed-means theater—also a tenet of Native American epistemology, for example—is that life and art are not distinct, but rather “continuous, if not identical” (3, 34). 

“Not only does the Theatre of Mixed Means descend from the formally chaotic tendencies in the arts it encompasses . . . ,” asserts the author, “so it also contributes to that great modern tendency that would blur the traditional lines separating one art from another, in order to synthesize means from all the arts, as well as non-artistic technologies and materials, into a single, great, catholic super-art” (283).

In the final chapter of The Theatre of Mixed-Means, Kostelanetz lays out what he sees as the “critical values” applicable to mixed-means performances.  Kostelanetz notes that, at its beginning, such work was rejected by everyone except the artists as “ugly and chaotic” (276) because, he contends, “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful . . .” (275). 

(This statement echoes art philosopher Suzanne Langer’s definition of beauty as she explained it in her 1953 book Feeling and Form.  Langer, 1895-1985—on whom I posted a two-part article on ROT; the discussion of her views on beauty is in Part 2: 8 January 2010—was quite clear about what could be beautiful and what might not be:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so.  Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . .  Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them.  The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

(This interpretation can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we would regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure.)   

Both Kostelanetz and Marranca stress that the new theatrical conventions minimize text and accentuate visual and aural imagery in an Artaudian vein.  Ultimately, however, Kostelanetz observes that the mixed-means theater doesn’t altogether reject language, as did Artaud ostensibly, but opts “for a more elliptical, poetic, or simplistic use of words” (278). 

Bonnie Marranca, in her book, picks up where Kostelanetz leaves off in The Theatre of Mixed-Means.  She defines the “Theatre of Images” as the “particular style of the American avant-garde which . . . exclude[s] dialogue or use[s] words minimally in favor of aural, visual and verbal imagery that calls for alternative modes off perception on the part of the audience” (x). 

The avant-garde critic explains in her June 1995 afterword that her book “grew out of my own search for a new critical vocabulary to describe the art I was seeing” (160) in the 1970s, which she characterized as “a glorious period” (159) when “[a]rtists, critics, and audiences together created a genuine avant-garde community and an expansive discourse, which evolved naturally from all the performance activity and discussion about it in the air” (159-60).

Before presenting the three examples of imagistic theater texts, Marranca intends “to demonstrate the significance of this Theatre of Images, its derivation from theatrical and non-theatrical sources, its distinctively American roots in the avant-garde, its embodiment of a certain contemporary sensibility and its impact on audiences” (x). 

The editor adds that she “will perhaps suggest an attitude to bring to this theatre” and hopes also to “offer helpful, new tools of analysis—an alternative critical vocabulary—with which to view contemporary theatre” (x).  In these aims, we can see that Marranca and Kostelanetz share a belief that, at least in the beginning of the last third of the 20th century, audiences and critics alike were unprepared for the emerging theater they were describing.  (Nor were they the only critics of the contemporary theater and art scene who felt this way.)

Marranca specifically names several avant-garde companies she feels were the progenitors of imagistic theater, specifically the Living Theatre (Julian Beck and Judith Malina), the Open Theatre (Joseph Chaikin), the Performance Group (Richard Schechner and Elizabeth LeCompte), the Manhattan Project (Andre Gregory), and the Iowa Theatre Lab (Ric Zank).  She adds a few troupes with more political agendas: El Teatro Campesino (Luis Valdez and Agustin Lira), the San Francisco Mime Troupe (R. G. Davis), and the Bread and Puppet Theater (Peter Schumann).  Of course, the three artists whose work she presents in the book are high on her list of avant-gardists of the Theatre of Images: Foreman and his Ontological-Hysteric Theater, Wilson’s Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, and Breuer of Mabou Mines.

In the Theatre of Images, Marranca explains, “The absence of dialogue leads to the predominance of the stage picture . . . .  This voids all considerations of theatre as it is conventionally understood in terms of plot, character, setting, language and movement” (x).  Marranca links this imagistic theater to the then-newly emerging form of “art-performance”—what we now call performance art (see my post, “Performance Art,” 7 and 10 November 2013). 

Marranca continues: “Actors do not create ‘roles.’  They function as media through which the playwright expresses his ideas; they serve as icons and images” (x-xi).  You can see, I imagine, how this style of theater would attract visual artists like Rauschenberg, Oldenberg, and Kaprow to shift between painting and sculpture and this new kind of performance, and how performance art might be born of the amalgamation of the two art fields. 

You can also see how works like Richard Jones’s Hairy Ape and Judgment Day as they were mounted at the Park Avenue Armory (see my reports on 18 April 2017 and 16 January 2020, respectively) might spring from more conventional scripts from earlier in the 20th century after mixed-means and imagistic theater invaded the mainstream stage.  Marranca asserts that “the innovations of the Theatre of Images have filtered into the staging, performance styles, and design concepts of other older and younger generations, traveling off-Broadway, to regional mainstream theatres, to Broadway, and the opera” (184).  Her book, as well as Kostelanetz’s, connects the dots from then to now.

The Theatre of Images posits that on the imagistic theater, “the painterly and sculptural qualities of performance are stressed, transforming theatre into a spatially-dominated one activated by sense impressions, as opposed to a time-dominated one ruled by linear narrative” (xii).  See if that description doesn’t approximate my depiction of Judgment Day earlier this month. 

You might even note that those who disparaged aspects of the production complained about what Marranca sees as an asset in imagistic theater: “Sound and visual images dominate in performance in an attempt to expand normal capabilities for experiencing sense stimuli” (xiv).

“The significance of the Theatre of Images,” declares the editor, “is its expansion of the audience’s capacity to perceive.  It is a theater devoted to the creation of a new stage language, a visual grammar ‘written’ in sophisticated perceptual codes” (xiv-xv).

Of somewhat less importance to my point here is Marranca’s disappointment 20 years after publishing The Theatre of Images, expressed in her 1995 afterword.  Less important because the book’s value to me is its real-time assessment of a vital and influential period in American theater and performance.  That Marranca felt that by 1995, that brief candle had gone out, as sad as it is, doesn’t detract from her description and analysis of what was happening in the theaters of the 1970s while she was seeing it.  Whatever happened later, that chronicle and explication is still there—and still true.

Marranca saw that the avant garde she wrote about in 1976 dissipated in the 1980s and 1990s when art ran into sociology and politics.  While artists like Wilson, Foreman, and Breuer continued to strive to make meaningful art—even extending their reaches—the culture out of which they had emerged had turned to entertainment and socio-political agendas (161-65).  It’s a sad commentary on the art-vs.-politics struggle in this country at a time when the culture wars (see my post of that title, 6 February 2014), and at the same time as Marranca was writing her addendum, I saw its toll on artists I knew (Leonardo Shapiro) and many more I didn’t (The NEA Four, Robert Mapplethorpe, Chris Ofili, 2 Live Crew). 

But even if the aura of the ’70s is lost, for one brief, shining moment, it glowed—and Marranca captured it for us today.  And so’s the influence that’s palpable in all the theater of the ’80s. ’90s, ’00s, and ’10s that we had (and have) that exists because of Marranca’s Theatre of Images and Kostelanetz’s Theatre of Mixed-Means.  Their books help us understand how that work got that way.