A shabby former department store housed multiple overlapping avant-garde enterprises

Evidence

There were more formal readings at Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre, newly moved to a shabby four-story building, once a prominent department store, on the corner of Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue. Merce Cunningham had his dance studio on the top floor while the theater occupied floors two and three. The Becks, then in their mid-thirties, were part of an older avant-garde, but soon merged with the Beats. … Gelber’s “jazz play” was scarcely as antic as Pull My Daisy but there was a family resemblance. The Connection concerned a filmmaker’s foredoomed attempt to document a gaggle of heroin addicts hanging around a cold-water loft waiting for their daily dose of the drug they call “junk,” “smack,” or most often “shit.” It also fit with the Becks’ interest in Luigi Pirandello: The play, directed by Malina, purported to be an actual conclave of drug addicts, a quartet of jazz musicians among them, being paid (with heroin) to play themselves in a movie. The proscenium was porous. The supposed screenwriter, seated in the audience, periodically objected to the actors’ alterations of his dialogue. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 51

Categorization

• XREF: The single building hosting dancers, theater, and a merged scene prefigures the physical-proximity argument this reader wants — cheap rent plus collocated art forms producing cross-pollination. Connects to later gentrification-thesis chapters.