An East Village anti-war theatre piece burned the American flag in April 1966.

Evidence

Around 2:00 in the morning, April 9, Soltero appeared with a live chicken, strung it up by the legs from a beam over the stage, and directed the audience to evacuate from their seats into the aisle. As recounted in the Voice by Fred McDarrah, the house lights dimmed, a strobe was activated, and a phonograph needle dropped on the nation’s #1 song, “The Ballad of the Green Beret.” Carrying an American flag, Soltero and his confederates marched over the chairs to the stage. McDarrah, a former US Army paratrooper, was reminded of “a patrol of soldiers under fire on a battlefield with the mortar, machine gun tracer bullets, and screeching rockets overhead.” Then the flag was ceremonially set ablaze. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 856

Categorization

• CANDY: Flag-burning performance art dated by ‘The Ballad of the Green Berets’ being #1 — a tightly compressed cultural collision begging to be retold.
• SEED: The performance was an anti-Vietnam action at a Warhol venue — a concrete early 1966 data point for when the underground crossed from art into protest.
• ADDENDUM: For ‘On Sacrifice’: the strung-up live chicken as sacrificial gesture in an antiwar flag-burning approximates ritualized killing as protest theatre.