Revelations

In 1959, a group of New York artists and sculptors created a theater-and-art form known as Happenings, which assimilates into an either scripted or improvised theatrical format every field of art from music to dance, to film, to poetry, to painting, to sculpture, to monolog. The first Happening--Allan Kaprow's 18 Happenings in 6 Parts--took place at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Seventy-five invitations were mailed to people in the immediate area telling them when and where to appear. A subsequent mailing included directions they were to follow as participants in this kickoff performance. Other Happenings took place in churches, basements, barns, back yards, stores and, on one occasion--the December 1963 performance of Claes Oldenburg's Autobodys--in a public parking lot.

Audiences rarely exceeded 30 or 40 and performances were limited to very few, due to the lack of adequate rehearsal facilities and available actors with Happenings experience. Actors in a Happening were utilized more as props or stage effects than as personalities, and the people on stage often ended up representing things, while the things became people.

Although many of their most determined detractors dismissed Happenings as merely works of "anti-art," perhaps their apparent lack of popular endurance power was best summed up by Kaprow himself, who, as father of this theatrical form, once intoned: "Happenings, in my opinion, are the result of presupposing that absolutely anything can be art." In the final analysis, however, they did further the modern dramatist's dream of destroying the "aesthetic distance" that separates the performers from their audience in traditional theater.

After 1963, the number of Happenings being performed around the nation noticeably declined, prompting many to ask derisively, "Whatever happened to Happenings?" The answer to that was two years in coming: but with the official opening of his Berkeley Experimental Arts Foundation's "Open Theater & Gallery" last September, director Ben Jacopetti finally had a regular showcase for his semi-weekly performances of what is now being hailed as the newest--and nudest--variety of Happening ever staged in this hemisphere. These productions, thus far attended only by audience participants from the surrounding San Francisco--Berkeley Bay Area, are aptly titled Revelations.

As the name implies, Revelations is a highly revealing form of "total theater" that creates a colorful onstage cathartic synthesis of sight and sound through the use of stage settings, lights, multiple color-slide projections, an overlaid sound track, live music and, most importantly, nudes who either pose in given positions or dance across the set while various abstract designs are projected on their unfettered frames. Stage props generally include chairs, tables, ladders, doors, windows and pieces of filmy or gauzy cloth that serve as suitable screens for slide projections and allow performers to alter the degree of onstage nudity at will. Clothes are strictly défendu atop this delightful dais; they are looked upon as a social pretext behind which no performer should ever hide. Taped recordings of recitations from the Book of Revelation and The Tibetan Book of the Dead with a multiple musical backing of jazz piano, electronic music and Balinese gamelang round out the audial attractions. The visual stimuli--other than those already mentioned--are provided by four separate slide projectors: two for throwing regular 35mm images, one large overhead projector for outsized colored slides of various far-out hand-painted designs and another dual projector for superimposing purposes. The audience is invited to join in the noisemaking at will, and those who first doff their duds are welcome to participate on stage in the totally impromptu performance.

The object of Revelations, according to director Jacopetti, is to "make the audience join in. What do people do when they take off their clothes and dance to the lights? I should explain that the performance (concluded on page 154) Revelations (continued from page 79) looks entirely different from the audience's point of view than it does from the performers'. To the audience, the performers look like transmitters of light, color and form: they are screens that move. It is not simply an aesthetic experience of hue and form, however, and anyone who has an overwhelming desire to see a man's or a woman's genitalia has every opportunity to do so during Revelations. I don't disparage those who come to be sexually aroused. That, in essence, is the reason for Revelations: so that people can do what they want.

"On stage, things are quite different. A performer is little more than a nude person being bathed by illumination in an otherwise dark room who knows he is being watched by an indeterminate number of people. Some people love to be up there. Others try it only once, dislike it intensely and never do it again. Professional dancers try to control it, choreograph it, as they are threatened by the idea of any performance that is completely uncontrolled, completely free. There are times when everything works up there: the bodies, the objects, the music, the voices, the sounds, the breathing, the movement, the lights, the colors; these are the times when the complexity and intensity of the sensual experience are literally breath-taking. Participation has gone through many phases. We have often had unclothed male and female performers responding to each other on stage; but, so far, there's never been any onstage sexual intercourse. There's no restriction against it, you understand; it just hasn't happened, that's all."

As for the ultimate staying power of Revelations, it remains to be seen whether nudity, as Open Theater director Jacopetti insists, "is the only way." In terms of audience participation, he has obviously eliminated a good deal of the aesthetic distance that normally stands between patrons and potential participants; but Revelations may still have difficulty keeping its legal distance from local authorities, who take a dim view of these well-lit proceedings. "I understand why this is so," says Jacopetti, who was threatened with arrest by Berkeley police if he were ever to attempt to present Revelations in public. "I understand all the notions current in our society about the exposure in public of certain areas of the human body. But no one who has ever seen Revelations has told us they were offended by what they saw. And I assure you that no one is imprisoned during a performance; they can leave whenever they want--and a few occasionally do."