Avant-garde theater concepts reached mass audiences through political street action

Evidence

19 Lester’s article, published in the Times “Arts and Leisure” section, argued that advanced theater groups of the ’60s (the Living Theatre, Performance Group, and Open Theater) had been eclipsed by the more vital and genuinely apocalyptic theater found in the streets. Hoffman had “culled the esoteric concepts formulated by Dada and Surrealist artists at the beginning of the century and worked over for years in East Village lofts and West Coast workshops and made them relevant to an audience of millions.” Lester credited Hoffman with the major role in five Theater of the Apocalypse masterworks—raining money on the Stock Exchange, levitating the Pentagon, fomenting the Grand Central Station police riot, orchestrating the Yippie Festival of Life in Chicago and starring in the follow-up conspiracy trial. Hoffman, she declared, was “nothing short of what Artaud [that name again!] described as the ideal director of a brilliant nonverbal theater—‘a kind of manager of magic, a master of sacred ceremonies.’” — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 2038

Categorization

• XREF: Directly supports the core thesis that avant-garde ideas diffuse outward from cheap lofts into mass culture — the diffusion mechanism the reader wants to test. — connects to: The avant-garde is absorbed and neutralized as entertainment by advanced industrial society — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 319; Community theatre transforms isolated audiences into creators of original work — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1829