Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Dewey (1934-1972) was an American performance artist, playwright, and director who was active in the happening and action theatre movements in the U.S. and throughout Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s. [1]
Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Dewey (1934-1972) was an American performance artist, playwright, and director who was active in the happening and action theatre movements in the U.S. and throughout Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s. [1]
Dewey studied sculpture with Oronzio Maldarelli and writing with playwright Theodore Apstein while attending Columbia University as an undergraduate. He lived in San Francisco in the early 1960s and he became an assistant director at the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco. He also studied mime with R.G. “Ronnie” Davis at the San Francisco Mime Troupe and dance with Anna Halprin.
Dewey became interested in performance art when he was introduced to the work of Robert Whitman. Dewey used geography, social science, architecture, and technology in his work. His projects were often designed around a particular city and focused on that city's infrastructure, history, and culture. [2] Notable works in this vein included City Scale (San Francisco) with Ramon Sender and Tony Martin, Street Piece (Helsinki), Exit Music (London), and Cincinnati Journey (Cincinnati).
Dewey lived and worked in European cities from 1963 to 1964, where he staged several happenings and action theater pieces, collaborating with Terry Riley, Chet Baker, Erkki Kurenniemi, Henrik Otto Donner, members of Anna Halprin's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop and the Living Theater, among others. He collaborated with Mark Boyle, Allan Kaprow, and others on a happening at the International Drama Festival during the 1963 Edinburgh Festival. [3] [4] [5]
In 1966 he produced Selma Last Year at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Philharmonic Hall Lobby, New York City. It was one of the first multichannel video installations, with photographs by Bruce Davidson, and music by Terry Riley. [6]
In 1966 Dewey became a staff member at the New York State Council on the Arts. [7] While at NYSCA he held the positions director of program development and director of research. In 1970, he was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to serve on the New York State Commission on Cultural Resources, a temporary state commission started by Rockefeller to study the current and long-range fiscal needs of cultural institutions. That same year he was also director of Planning Corporation of the Arts, a one-year research project, partially funded by the NYSCA, into the role of arts in a democracy
Dewey died in 1972 in a plane crash. A posthumous retrospective of his work Action Theatre: The Happenings of Ken Dewey was curated by Barbara Moore at the Franklin Furnace Archive in 1987.
Improvisational theatre, often called improvisation or improv, is the form of theatre, often comedy, in which most or all of what is performed is unplanned or unscripted, created spontaneously by the performers. In its purest form, the dialogue, action, story, and characters are created collaboratively by the players as the improvisation unfolds in present time, without use of an already prepared, written script.
Nilo Cruz is a Cuban-American playwright and pedagogue. With his award of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his play Anna in the Tropics, he became the second Latino so honored, after Nicholas Dante.
Robert Woodruff is an American theater director.
The American Conservatory Theater (A.C.T.) is a nonprofit theater company in San Francisco, California, United States, that offers both classical and contemporary theater productions. It also has an attached acting school.
Edward Artie Bullins, sometimes publishing as Kingsley B. Bass Jr, was an American playwright. He won awards including the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award and several Obie Awards. Bullins was associated with the Black Arts Movement and the Black Panther Party, for which he was the minister of culture in the 1960s.
Luis Miguel Valdez is an American playwright, screenwriter, film director and actor. Regarded as the father of Chicano film and playwriting, Valdez is best known for his play Zoot Suit, his movie La Bamba, and his creation of El Teatro Campesino. A pioneer in the Chicano Movement, Valdez broadened the scope of theatre and arts of the Chicano community.
Bill Bowers is an American mime artist and actor based in New York City. As an actor, mime and educator, Bill has performed throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Asia. He is a Movement for Actors Instructor at NYU Tisch School for the Arts and also teaches at the William Esper Studio and the Stella Adler Studio in NYC.
Prince Gomolvilas is a Thai American playwright. He has written many plays which have been produced in the United States and won several distinctive awards, including a PEN Center USA West Literary Award for Drama.
Eduardo Oscar Machado is a Cuban playwright living in the United States. Notable plays by Machado include Broken Eggs, Havana is Waiting and The Cook. Many of his plays are autobiographical or deal with Cuba in some way. Machado teaches playwriting at New York University. He has served as the artistic director of the INTAR Theatre in New York City since 2004. He is openly gay.
Philip Kan Gotanda is an American playwright and filmmaker and a third generation Japanese American. Much of his work deals with Asian American issues and experiences.
Jack Gelber was an American playwright best known for his 1959 drama The Connection, depicting the life of drug-addicted jazz musicians. The first great success of the Living Theatre, the play was translated into five languages and produced in ten nations. Gelber continued to work and write in New York, where he also taught writing, directing and drama as a professor, chiefly at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, where he created the MFA program in playwriting. In 1999 he received the Edward Albee Last Frontier Playwright Award in recognition of his lifetime of achievements in theatre.
Guerrilla theatre, generally rendered "guerrilla theater" in the US, is a form of guerrilla communication originated in 1965 by the San Francisco Mime Troupe, who, in spirit of the Che Guevara writings from which the term guerrilla is taken, engaged in performances in public places committed to "revolutionary sociopolitical change." The group performances, aimed against the Vietnam war and capitalism, sometimes contained nudity, profanity and taboo subjects that were shocking to some members of the audiences of the time.
Ronald Melville Whyte (1941–1989) was an American playwright, critic, and disability rights activist.
Asian American theatre is theatre written, directed or acted by Asian Americans. From initial efforts by four theatre companies in the 1960s, Asian-American theatre has grown to around forty groups today. Early productions often had Asian themes or settings; "yellowface" was a common medium for displaying the perceived exoticism of the East in American performance. With the growing establishment of second-generation Asian-Americans in the 21st century, it is becoming more common today to see Asian-Americans in roles that defy historical stereotypes in the United States.
Simone Forti, is an American Postmodern artist, dancer, choreographer, and writer. Since the 1950s, Forti has exhibited, performed, and taught workshops all over the world. Her innovations in Postmodern dance, including her seminal 1961 body of work, Dance Constructions, along with her contribution to the early Fluxus movement, have influenced many notable dancers and artists. Forti first apprenticed with Anna Halprin in the 1950s and has since worked alongside artists and composers Nam June Paik, Steve Paxton, La Monte Young, Trisha Brown, Charlemagne Palestine, Peter Van Riper, Dan Graham, Yoshi Wada, Robert Morris and others. Forti's published books include Handbook in Motion, Angel, and Oh Tongue. She is currently represented by The Box L.A. in Los Angeles, CA, and has works in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Generali Foundation in Vienna, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
Anthony Clarvoe is an American playwright born in 1958.
Mary Gallagher is an American playwright, screenwriter, novelist, actress, director and teacher. For six years, she was artistic director of Gypsy, a theatre company in the Hudson Valley, New York, which collaborated with many artists to create site-specific mask-and-puppet music-theatre with texts and lyrics by Gallagher. These pieces included Premanjali and the 7 Geese Brothers, Ama and The Scottish Play. In 1996-97, she directed the Playwrights Workshop at the University of Iowa, and she taught playwriting and screenwriting at New York University/Tisch School of the Arts from 2001 to 2010. She is a member of Actors & Writers, a theater company in the Hudson Valley, and the Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, where she developed many of her plays and created and moderated the series, "You Can Make a Life: Conversations with Playwrights" from 1994 to 2001.
Shyamanand Jalan was a Kolkata-based Indian theatre director, and actor. He is credited for the renaissance period of modern Indian theatre and especially the Hindi theatre in Kolkata from the 1960s to 1980s. He was the first to perform modernist Mohan Rakesh, starting with Ashadh Ka Ek Din in 1960 and in the coming years bridged the gap between Hindi theatre and Bengali theatre, by mounting Hindi productions of works by Bengali playwrights, like Badal Sircar's Evam Indrajit (1968) and Pagla Ghora (1971), which in turn introduced Sircar to rest of the country. In 2005, he directed his first and only film Eashwar Mime Co., which was an adaptation of Dibyendu Palit's story, Mukhabhinoy, by Vijay Tendulkar.
Michael O'Sullivan was an American actor, "larger than life," who appeared on Broadway, at Lincoln Center, on the London stage, at San Francisco's Actor's Workshop and in many regional theaters and festivals of America throughout his brief career in the late 1950s and '60s.
Richard France is an American playwright, author, and film and drama critic. He is a recognized authority on the stage work of American filmmaker Orson Welles. His publication, The Theatre of Orson Welles, which received a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Book Award in 1979, has been called "a landmark study" and has been translated into Japanese. His 1990 companion volume, Orson Welles on Shakespeare has been praised by Welles critics and biographers.
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