Audience members treated avant-garde ritual performance as an endurance test

Evidence

For John Gruen, who covered the event for the newly created (and short-lived) New York World Journal Tribune, this “confused ritual” was a two-a-half hour “endurance test” that in addition to the super-loud rock number included “endless raga scratching on stringed instruments,” and a frenzied, painfully bright strobe-lit dance catharsis, capped by MacLise reading his poetry in a low monotone and near-total darkness. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 780