The Living Theatre staged I Ching-based chance theater in Village coffeehouses

Evidence

In those days, aspiring poet Steve Kowit recalled, Berkeley student Diane Wakoski was “Poetry Queen” of the Tenth Street. One Monday she brought “a large and rather peculiar-looking entourage.” Kowit vaguely recognized Wakoski’s boyfriend La Monte Young “dressed heroically in a maroon cape.” The others included Jackson Mac Low, along with Julian Beck and Judith Malina, and other members of the Living Theatre, which had recently staged Mac Low’s “chance” theater piece The Marrying Maiden. The play, which varied with each performance, was based on words taken from the I Ching. New York Times reviewer Brooks Atkinson deemed it unintelligible “gibberish.” More recently, Mac Low had brought the piece to a West Village coffeehouse, Phase 2. Voice critic Michael Smith thought it “looked and sounded like recreation time in the booby hatch.” Now he planned to read at the Tenth Street. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 267

Categorization

• XREF: I Ching chance composition prefigures Cage/aleatoric music threads and later structuralist claims about how avant-gardes share personnel and venues. — connects to: The I Ching’s fluidity-changes cosmology prefigured the postmodern worldview. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 722