Avant-garde performance festivals combined drone music, incense, and slow projection into hypnotic total theater

Evidence

The festival within the Festival, namely Rites of the Dream Weapon, was a multipart exercise in low-tech music-driven total theater coordinated by MacLise, with Jerry Jofen, Jack Smith, John Vacarro, Don Snyder, and Piero Heliczer responsible for individual chapters. The pieces tended to the long and hypnotic. Their prototype was LaMonte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, whose events featured loud and repetitive drone music, as well as the burning of incense and the slow projection of patterns created by Marian Zazeela. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 775

Categorization

• XREF: The low-tech total-theater aesthetic connects to the chapter’s broader thesis about material conditions of the NY avant-garde; also resonates with the ‘economy of cheap production’ debates from the reader’s shelf on cultural stagnation.