Self-immolation by three Americans directly seeded anti-war performance art

Evidence

Soon after, Schumann began work on a Vietnam piece, Fire, dedicated to three Americans—Alice Herz, Norman Morrison, and Roger LaPorte—who self-immolated to protest the war. Performances began at the former Delancey Street Museum in late 1965. The piece is a series of nine tableaux in which masked players stand in for the inhabitants of a Vietnamese village. Clearly meant to represent the dead, the peasants perform routine communal actions in a ceremonial silence, ending in an atrocious cacophony as the village is bombed. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 793