CRESPY Fortunate Collision: Al Carmines’s Encounter with Claes

CRESPY

forTunaTe collision: al carmines’s encounTer wiTh claes olDenBurG’s Ray Gun Spex

David Crespy

In February of 1960, Claes Oldenburg, Allan Kaprow, Ralph Rauschenberg, and Jim Dine staged the first happening, Ray Gun Spex, in the Judson Art Gallery and within five months they had staged three more. Happenings were a spontaneous and jarring improvisation of theatre, visual art environments, music, and dance that attempted to create a non-linear, visceral experience for the audiences who participated in them. Generally, happenings artists attempted to create art that was “unmatrixed,” that is, without message per se, with the hope that each audience member would find her or his own meaning in the experience. Like the spontaneous, improvised music of John Cage, happenings were also a form of “chance art.” A happening, was experienced in the moment—never to be repeated exactly again—with materials meant to be thrown away after the performance.

In Ray Gun Spex, Claes Oldenburg appeared in a feathered football helmet, mukluks, fluorescent orange shorts, and body paint; he walked through the rooms of the happening reading Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Ralph Rauschenberg added pop and modernist dance to the performance, and the audience was encouraged to participate in the action of the piece. The first happenings at the Judson were attacked as being too secular and avant-garde for a church. Its minister, Howard Moody, staunchly defended them saying that the “real Church” was “a real Happening in the World.” He insisted that such an event occurs whether the community wants it or not, and it cannot be predicted since it is one of the “surprises of God.” The happenings at the Judson Art Gallery set the tone for the avant-garde Judson Poets’ Theatre that began in 1961. Al Carmines was one of the young people who attended these happenings, and the shock of this new art was an aesthetic and spiritual awaking for him. For Carmines the influence of the happenings was direct:

I remember a happening where Claes read The Scarlet Letter in Swedish, as we all followed him through the gymnasium. It was thrilling, and bizarre, weird. And the happenings somehow melded in with the theatre also, because the theatre was happening at the same time.... For instance a lot of the Gertrude Stein musicals I

forTunaTe colliSion 63

created for Judson took their impulse from Happenings.1

He was stunned by these curious performances—little of which he could remember, except its experimental, multi-media, chance quality. It was the free-wheeling experimentalism of the happenings that set the tone for the performances at the Judson Poets’ Theater.

And it was in this single, unique, unexpected, theatrical instant in February of 1960, that Alvin Allison Carmines, a culturally-transplanted Virginian, then a student of the Union Theological Seminary, became the nexus of postmodern playwriting, a form of playwriting that I describe as dreamwrighting. Carmines would be at the epicenter of the avant-garde conflation of theatre, dance, visual, and music that became synonymous with the Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s. Carmines’s experience of Ray Gun Spex in the Judson Gallery of Judson Memorial Church was, according to Carmines himself, the single moment in his personal theatrical history when his destiny became clear to him. He realized that the drama he would shape would transcend the restrictions of traditional theatrical form and move into visual and musical collage that epitomized his musical theatre. Carmines discovered within these happenings the method that he would use to create at the Judson, an improvisatory, yet closely considered, theatrical dramatic technique, informed by a studied and professional chance-based, non-matrixed informality.

I would also argue that the possibility for dreamwriting, a chance-oneiric and new non-linearity in American playwriting, was born with Carmines’s experience with Ray Gun Spex. A dreamwright is any playwright who uses the associative, non-matrixed logic of dreams rather than the linear logic of traditional dramaturgy to create drama. Dreamwriting is also characterized by what is at times an alogical transformational progression of uncanny, bizarre, and the grotesque in imagery, characterization, and plot. This is a dramaturgical style that was increasingly embraced by 1960s off-off-Broadway playwrights, particularly those who were a part of the Judson Theatre. And at any given moment, nearly all of these off-off-Broadway playwrights were part of the Judson community and/or attended performances there.

As I detail in my book Off-Off-Broadway Explosion, this new wave of off-off-Broadway dreamwrighting also stemmed from many other influences, such as the new dramaturgies of the European absurdist playwrights, performances in jazz and poetry cafes of the 1950s, the surrealists like Marcel Duchamp and Andre Bréton living in Greenwich

1 Al Carmines, interview with Stephen Bottoms, New York, September 1995, website: http://www.judson.org/judsonpoetstheater, (21 May 2012).

64 creSPy

Village, and the early poetic dramas and techniques produced by the Living Theatre. But a primary influence on 1960s-based dreamwrighting was the melding of art and media of the Village into one interdisciplinary art form that encompassed the music of John Cage, the happenings of Allen Kaprow, the dance of Yvonne Rainer, the art of Claes Oldenburg, the films of Andy Warhol, and the plays, playwrights, directors, and actors of the Living Theatre. And by Carmines’s own admission, the congregational community of the Judson Memorial Church and Judson Poets’ Theatre was the glue that held the off-off-Broadway community together. While there came to be many off-off-Broadway companies, the community ostensibly included the “big four” Joe Cino’s Caffe Cino, Ellen Stewart’s La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Ralph Cook’s Theatre Genesis at St. Marks at the Bowery, and the Judson Poets’ Theatre. For Carmines, “Cino, La MaMa, Genesis were all off-off-Broadway, we were all in opposition to what Broadway was, and we were very cooperative.” For example, if Carmines needed a costume at the Judson, Stewart would send over a costume, if he needed a prop, Genesis would send over a prop. And if a theatre was failing, the community stepped in to intercede, as Carmines points out: “Cino was going bankrupt at one point, and they asked me to do a series of concerts to support the Cino, so I did a series of concerts for them, and they were able to keep their space.” But if there was cooperation, there was also a distinction between Judson and the Cino, La MaMa, and Genesis for Carmines:

So the difference between Judson and all the other places was that we were a genuine community where the congregation of the church and the actors who acted in the church within three years were indistinguishable and it became a grounding and a meeting place for everyone in the off-off-Broadway community. The other off-off-Broadway theatres were wonderful, but they had no conditions of that kind of community. They were isolated and at Judson things were so constituted that you couldn’t tell who was actor and who was a church member.2

Because of the importance of Judson as a kind of cathedral of art within the off-off-Broadway community of playwrights, and Carmines’s musical collaboration with them, I assert that Carmines’s experience with Ray Gun Spex became the nexus for 1960s-born dreamwrighting that has continued

2 Alvin Allison Carmines, interview with author, New York, 6 December 2001.


until this day.

Transcending Barriers of Art and Theatre

The real instigation for the associative techniques of dreamwrighting was the breaking of barriers between what constituted visual art, music, performance, and theatre that Carmines discovered during the evening he experienced Ray Gun Spex. Happenings were a visceral embodiment of the rational, studied formalism of John Cage’s chance art conflated with a surrealist expressionism born of the 1960s infusion of Artaud. These sensibilities were then distilled by Carmines in the camp absurdity of the Judson’s productions of Gertrude Stein’s work as well as Carmines’s musical collaborations with Maria Irene Fornés, Rochelle Owens, Ron Tavel, and Sam Shepard. In particular, Carmines’s collaboration with Maria Irene Fornés, who became an icon of the new wave of this dreamwrighting, and who later became a major educator of yet another generation of dreamwrights, contributed to Carmines’s own special place in the history of dreamwrighting and the new theatre of the 1960s.

Judson productions had a distinct chance performance quality, facilitated by Carmines’s own informal pastiche technique of musical composition, as well Laurence Kornfeld’s oneiric strategies of bizarre imagistic directorial juxtaposition—a dramaturgical single-mindedness which creates a kind of dream plot through associational logic rather than linear dramatic structure.3 Kornfeld was Carmines’s director/collaborator, and he had cut his teeth as a director with Julian Beck’s and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre. In this discussion, I take a phenomenological attitude toward the Carmines/Ray Gun Spex historical collision in order to bracket off and examine a single moment of interdisciplinary connection among theatre, playwriting, and performance art. This attitude is not unlike the one brought to bear by performance theorist Bert O. States in his several books on dreaming and fiction.4 It is then possible to understand and clarify how the elements of this event influenced the dreamwrighting technique fomented by Judson Poets’ Theatre and offer possibilities for future scholarship and opportunities for new pedagogies of chance oneiric playwriting.

3 For a discussion of “singlemindedness” in dreams, see Allan Rechtschaffen, “The Singlemindedness and Isolation of Dreams”, Sleep 1, no. 1 (September 1978): 97-109.

4 See Bert O. States, Dreaming and Storytelling (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Bert O. States, The Rhetoric of Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Bert O. States, Seeing In the Dark (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

66 creSPy

The Carmines/Ray Gun Spex aesthetic car crash resulted from Carmines’s own curiosity about the pulpit he was considering at Judson Memorial Church. He decided to go downtown with friends Don Morse and Stephen Rose as part of his self-education in Greenwich Village’s avant-garde art world.5 The social activism of Judson Church, under the progressive ministry of Reverend Howard Moody, was branching out to the community of artists comprising Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. Moody encouraged the Judson’s then minister for the arts, Bud Scott, to actively pursue ways to understand and meet the needs of the Village’s artistic community. Scott met with artists in their studios, bars, and coffeehouses, trying to encounter them on their own turf. Ray Gun Spex, the event that Carmines attended, was one of Scott’s projects to reach out to the artists of the Village, and it grew from his understanding that artists needed a place to show their work outside the commercial pressure of coffeehouses, galleries, and other familiar performance venues in Greenwich Village. The piece was also one of the first major collaborations of happenings artists to occur in the United States—and perhaps anywhere—led by Claes Oldenburg, now the sculptor of monumental pop art pieces. “Ray Gun” was Oldenburg’s own talismanic term for New York, “Nug Yar,” but it was also his way of characterizing his pop art sensibility. The word “spex” was play on Swedish word for comic skit, and it suggested a “spectacle” or “specifications.”6 The piece was a sampler of current trends in happenings and included Oldenburg’s Snapshots from the City, The Smiling Workman by Jim Dine; Dick Higgins’s Edifices, Cabarets, Contributions; Allen Hansen’s Projections; Allan Kaprow’s Coca Cola Shirley Cannon Ball; Red Grooms’s The Big Leap; and Bob Whitman’s Duet for a Small Smell. Spex was a seminal event in the visual arts world and spawned a new generation of happenings and later performance art, which were then growing out of the break with the Abstract Expressionists.

This happenings movement seemed to have two tracks, at least according to Oldenburg, who methodically observed the new trend before engaging in it himself. One of the tracks was rational and formalist, the other was emotional and expressionistic. On the one hand, Jackson Pollock’s legacy of action painting represented an expressionistic predecessor to the chance art of the happenings. Pollock’s work was both a leaping off point and an entrenched aesthetic to be eradicated for such happenings artists such as Allan Kaprow, whose essay, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” was

5 Robert Boynton Helm, “The Rev. Al Carmines and the Development of the Judson Poet’s Theater” (Ph.D. diss., Western Virginia University, 1979), 28.

6 Julie H. Reiss, From Margin to Center: The Spaces of Installation Art (MIT Press, 2001), 21-26.


extraordinarily influential and important itself.7 Oldenburg saw a clash within the happenings movement between the anti-expressionistic, non-intentional, Cagean chance-art impulse of artists like Kaprow and the neo-expressionistic Artaudian cruel theatricality represented by the work of the Living Theatre.8 Oldenburg had, by March 1960, seen the work of many of the most important New York happenings artists:

I had seen pieces by Robert Whitman, Red Grooms, Allan Kaprow, Dick Higgins, and perhaps George Brecht. I was aware of a tradition called “happenings” and also the experiments lumped with happenings although they had a different sort of inspiration, such as Red Grooms’s The Burning Building. I had also seen the productions at The Living Theatre. I was influenced of course by all these things, but since my purpose was making all this useful to myself, I wasn’t trying to be the first one to do anything. At the time, I made an analysis of what was going on. I felt that there were two possible choices whose differences then looked very clear to me. There were people, both performers and spectators, who would go to one kind of theatre and ignore the other. I remember very well that the late Bob Thompson said he would not see a Kaprow, for example, because he was in the Red Grooms piece. I remember that when a Red Grooms piece and a Kaprow were put on together at the Reuben Gallery, in January of 1960, there was really a lack of communication between the two groups; they divideds between an emotional and a rational expression. The latter had come out Cage’s ideas and what Kaprow had done with the 18 Happenings.9

Ray Gun Spex was created specifically by Oldenburg to pull together these two disparate threads of experimentation and simultaneously reinforce and introduce the concepts of happenings to a curious public. In the three short days it was performed, Ray Gun Spex united an artistic community far beyond the realm of visual art and galvanized artists across disciplines.

7 Allan Kaprow, Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), xix.

8 Richard Kostelanetz, The Theatre of Mixed Means (New York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1968),135.

9 Ibid., 135.

68 creSPy

This was, in fact, the goal of the project that Bud Scott had envisioned.The evening was a collage of competing happenings aesthetics

to draw together a community of artists who were moving down related but very different paths. Carmines describes the evening as almost a kind of party of the avant-garde where suddenly a new dialogue was possible; barriers were torn down and artists could reach across disciplines to create work that transcended traditional limitations:

I remember every element of it vividly—the happening lasted about an hour and a half, and then we went over to the student house and they had a big party, with Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka] and his wife, Hettie. And it just blew my mind. I stayed out all night long, I had to go to my church the next morning, and was just absolutely worn out. But I adored it; I loved it, I just was thrilled by it. And it changed my whole life because I began to talk to Merce and I began to talk to Yvonne [Rainer] and later they got me interested in forming a Dance Theatre at Judson which Judson had never had.10

Because of Carmines’s location at the center of all the art created at the Judson Memorial Church, the entirety of the Judson sensibility seems to have been formed in that one evening. The conflation of theatre, poetry, dance, music, and visual art that took place in Ray Gun Spex was the Judson art project in a microcosm; a meeting place between what Michael Kirby called the matrixed informational structure of traditional plot or story structure and the non-matrixed, compartmented, and alogical structure of happenings.11 Many of the figures who would go on to form Judson’s Dance Theatre were there as well, including Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Ann Halprin.

In the midst of what could only be described as a communal, liminal celebration of a new art form, Al Carmines, a curious onlooker in a church he was considering for a possible position as assistant minister, suddenly found himself emotionally and physically transported beyond the traditional theatre he had performed at Union Theological Seminary. It was his rite of passage into a post-modern aesthetic, and the evening was fraught with possibilities:

It was a happening that Claes Oldenburg led. Alan

10 Alvin Allison Carmines, interview with author, New York, 8 August 2002.

11 Michael Kirby, Happenings (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 13.


Kaprow was there; Al Hansen was there, and Tom Wesselmann was there, but Claes led it, and it was in the gym of the Church and everyone had to lie on the floor. Claes had a candle and we had to step over the bodies and he recited the Lord’s Prayer in Swedish, backwards. Now I was in seminary at this time, my last year, so I went down to Judson, because I knew was going to be there the next year. This was 1960 and I went down there to see what Judson was all about. So I was totally unprepared for this kind of happening; it just blew my mind. But I participated.12

Carmines was “at first frightened and then terribly excited by the experience,” and he himself admitted it was terrifying at times.13 He was a theological student who had a strong background in very traditional musical theatre suddenly facing art that was at once utterly foreign to his sensibilities, and yet the experience suggested an entirely new language of theatre. This was, as Boal might describe it, a Chinese crisis, or one which represented danger and opportunity in a single instant.14 What made this a particularly visceral experience for Carmines was that the experience of Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Spex completely changed his perspective on his own body and the nature of musical and theatrical composition with regard to dance and movement:

I was part of the art work myself; and it changed me totally. It was the beginning of my understanding of movement as a part of art because I had been in a lot of plays on at Union [Theological Seminary] and other places in college where the verbal facility was the important thing. And so I didn’t do much work on my body. And this was all based on body work. It was like lying on the floor, stretching, standing up, kneeling, turning over. It was almost like Yoga. And it was my introduction to modern dance is what it really was. Even though it was visual art.15

12 Carmines, interview, 2002.

13 Helm, 28.

14 Augusto Boal, Legislative Theatre (London: Routledge, 1998), 56.


70 creSPy

In many ways, Carmines had been preparing for this event; even though he was not entirely aware that he had been doing so. He had spent a good deal of his time finding ways to reconcile his desire to create theatre with his deep religious faith at the Union Theological Seminary, a place he originally chose because of his interest in theologian Paul Tillich. Tillich’s beliefs clarified for Carmines the inseparable linkage between art and faith, and dissolved the boundaries between them.16 At the same time he came to understand the differences between these two forms of expression and the necessity of both:

Art is created by a very emotional part of you; but I would say this though. I never felt that faith and art were the same thing. I’ve always maintained against most of my contemporaries, that there are two parallel tracks, but that they never meet in this life. Because Art has to do with truth, and faith has to do with love. And we never in this life combine those things. Maybe in eternity we will. We must be honest in our search for truth even it goes against our feelings of faith and we must be honest in our search for faith even it goes against our knowledge of truth. So you have to bear this tension in you. And a woman up at Union Seminary said to me once, “what do you do when they conflict?” Finally, you shift, and you move from truth to faith.17

Carmines wrestled with these notions even as he was discovering his own aesthetic as an artist; Ray Gun Spex offered a way to find the bridge between art and faith through the body in performance. Carmines was, in fact, that rare site of what Robert Haywood calls a collapse of schism between between avante-garde art and religion, a “central theoretic subtext in the critical discourse of modernism.” Ultimately, Judson Memorial Church would sponsor many diverse evenings of performance art, environments, happenings, among which included The Apple Shrine (1950) by Allan Kaprow, Carolee Schneeman’s Meat Joy in 1964, and Yvonne Rainer’s dance/performance Trio A for the People’s Flag Show (1970), an event which would result in Moody and Carmines being jailed.18

16 Robert Joseph Cioffi, “Al Carmines and the Judson Poets’ Theater Musicals” (Ph.D. diss.,New York University, 1979), 15-16.


18 Robert Haywood, “Heretical Alliance: Claes Oldenburg and the Judson Memorial Church in the 1960s,” Art History 18, no. 2 (June 1995): 185.


Happenings and the Improvisation of Church & Theatre

What Carmines learned during that one evening at Ray Gun Spex became the rallying cry of a generation. Carmines was an accepting innocent in the middle of the radical art scene of the 1960s. Stunned, shocked, and at the same time, utterly available and interested in even the most unusual experiences in performance, Carmines was able to process the radical art at the heart of Judson’s experimentation and make it utterly accessible and relevant to the congregants and audiences at Judson Poets’ Theatre. He had the unequivocal support of his minister, Howard Moody, and as a minister himself and as director of Judson’s art activities, Carmines exerted tremendous influence on the power of theatre to transcend traditional barriers. During the performances to the point where the borders between art and religion literally and physically disappeared within the Judson’s grand sanctuary, and the church and its congregation were transformed:

The Poets’ Theatre became very famous, and we continued to work together, and then we moved from the loft of the church, down to the sanctuary of the church, and then we had a meeting that lasted a year long where we had Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, Larry Kornfeld, Deacons from the Church, Howard Moody, and myself, and we met a year to decide to how we were going to commingle the artists and the church part of the sanctuary and that resulted in the elimination of pews entirely and a huge agape feast on Sunday where a lot of artists came because they were hungry and everyone was invited and it was a very thrilling time.19

As the composer of the Judson musicals, which themselves eventually entered into the annals of avant-garde American theatre history, Carmines had tremendous power over his playwrights, reshaping their work with his music. The improvisatory aspect of Ray Gun Spex affected him when he was working with Maria Irene Fornés on their collaboration with her play Promenade that became an off-Broadway hit (which I discuss in greater detail below), Carmines notes:

Particularly with Irene—she submitted a script and I loved it, but I said, “Irene, we’re going to have to take the


72 creSPy

stage directions as part of the script.” And at first she was kind of hesitant and then she said, “well, go ahead.” And I built a series of about four songs based on the stage directions she had written for her play and that was the direct result of having been to the happenings and seen how important the movement was. Meaning that if she had a stage direction that said “Point Left” and say so in so, I said you must include the “Point Left” as well as say so in so. So it changed my whole idea of what playwriting was—moving it from a verbal art to a whole art.20

Ultimately this mingling between movement, music, and audience reflected how Carmines with his traditional musical theatre background was trying to consciously find ways into the text while avoiding the linearity of traditional drama. By allowing the music to shift and change around the movement, the plays found an alternative momentum which grew out of the physicality of performers and the associational logic of dreams. This concept would have been completely foreign to Carmines before his Ray Gun Spex experience, but it became one that Carmines was to apply over and over again in his work both with the language of Gertrude Stein and in his work with the off-off-Broadway playwrights of the 1960s.

Ray Gun Spex embodied for Carmines the possibilities of reassigning traditional theatrical elements. The performance was composed of several distinct happenings, each with its own world of inference and association. Carmines distilled this technique of the purely non-intentional, non-matrixed chance-oneiric operation of happenings and emotional/associational dream structure in all of his and Lawrence Kornfeld’s musicals. In particular this was true of Carmines’s adaptations of Gertrude Stein’s In Circles, and in Irene Fornés’s Promenade. Both productions represent the successful use of non-realistic strategies of repetition, transformation, and dramaturgically-based movement linked directly to the physical movement, game activity, and the chance logic of happenings. For Carmines, the elements of a play, dialogue, stage directions, character development, song, and plot became interchangeable, mutable, and followed John Cage’s “electronic” logic.

Even in such abstract work as Carmines’s composition for In Circles, his musical adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s play, he attempted to find meaning in a clearly matrixed manner, using the guidance of the actors’ instincts to create characters with discernible relationships. Jacque



Lynn Colton, a member of the cast of In Circles and a frequent off-off Broadway performer, remembers the experience this way:

We’d read a sentence or a paragraph or page or however long we wanted to read. And we’d pass it to anyone else in the group. After three or four days, patterns began to emerge—someone would hand me the script when a certain line or section would come up …. The director, after a few days, stopped the process. “Let’s go around the circle. Let’s discuss what character or character traits are emerging from this experience, and any relationships you might be forming with anyone one else in the group.”21

At the same time it is clear that Carmines’s continued exposure to the happenings, which continued throughout the early years of the Judson Poets’ Theatre, had a profound effect on his willingness to allow his musicals and plays to move out of the traditional, linear vein and enter into the nonmatrixed, alogical structure of happenings. For example, the opening number of In Circles, “Papa Doses, Mama Blows Her Noses,” was entirely improvised each evening. Carmines composed a new music and the actors relearned this number each night, and they eventually discovered four part harmony. This was a way of allowing the actors to warm up, and at the same time, inviting the audience to become part of the artwork itself. He developed this idea directly from his experience with Ray Gun Spex, which was primarily created in order to bring the human figure directly into the artwork, to “reintroduce reference and figuration into painting.”22 This painterly correlation between Carmines’s improvised rehearsal process and metatheatrical performance of his adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s In Circles is further unpacked below.

Going back to Ray Gun Spex and by examining it in some detail allows the correlations to appear without belaboring the concordance and difference between Ray Gun Spex and the kind of play productions Carmines championed at Judson Poets Theatre. Oldenburg’s evening of happenings began with his own Snapshots From the City—an enormously emotional and physical undertaking-performed by Oldenburg himself, mummified in a wrapping of tape and debris that Oldenburg had carefully gathered from the street. Allan Hansen described it this way:

In the basement gallery were Oldenburg and his wife,

21 Jacque Lynn Colton, interview with author, tape recording, 2 October 2002.

22 Haywood, 193.

74 creSPy

Pat, covered in bandages and paint, charging about, dying. It was like Shinbone Alley aftermath of Hiroshima in Manhattan. There were shreds of buildings—objects made of cardboard with blackened edges—and Claes moved about like a modern mummy waving a bottle and being a cross between a Bowery bum and an accident victim. It was very hard to see because the space was so crammed. The lights blinked on and off (Lucas Samaras had been told simply to turn them on and off 32 times during the piece, at any intervals). People were trying to film it. Stan VanDerBeek was juggling 16 mm. cameras.23

It is difficult to avoid characterizing Snapshots From the City as anything but a clearly matrixed performance, as it was created to address the needs of Judson art outreach program, which was created to support artists struggling in an urban setting. Oldenburg and his wife Pat Muschinski turned themselves into the walking dead for this piece, covered with torn wrappings, struggling in the refuse of the city. Oldenburg himself was wrapped head-to-toe in bandages, burlap bags, and was covered in filth. He would spasmodically gesture, grunt, and create sounds that were disturbing and at the same time were a reflection of the world of the street. Germano Celant offers a comparison of the action painting of Jackson Pollock versus the interactive art of happenings that occurred in Oldenburg’s performance:

Compared to traditional painting (experience frontally) or sculpture (which is taken in from all sides), The Street was a dynamic model in which human figures and objects converged in a single context. They inhabited an environment that simultaneously made reference to the outside and inside. They did not, however, form a rigid, petrified system, as is usually the case with sculpture and environmental art; rather, in their organic and inorganic definitions, ranging from the flesh of the performer to the cardboard of the various elements, they moved about, were active. They led one to think that their difference was not definitive, stable and perfect, but penetrated a space that is wholly continuous and without voids.24

23 Al Hansen. A Primer of Happenings & Time/Space Art (New York: Something Else Press, Inc., 1965), 61.

24 Germano Celant, “Claes Oldenburg and the Feeling of Things,” in Claes


The piece was a deeply personal one for Oldenburg, who was struggling with the challenges presented by creating art in New York City. He was attempting to create a kind of “contemporary primitivism” that would be a popular art, and, therefore, perhaps, a bit more accessible for a neophyte like Al Carmines. This appealed to Carmines, whose own work had a strong emotional quality as a well as a quirky and outrageous sense of humor. In some ways it was not as formalistic as the later pieces that Oldenburg performed. He points this out in an interview about the piece with Richard Kostelanetz:

I suspect that Snapshots had more of an expressionist effect than later pieces; it was partly because of the tremendous involvement which anything at the Judson at that time inspired. There was a great sense of crisis constantly; that was the style of the time and the place. They were starting to reach out into the community, and the community was flowing in there. The place had a lot of action then.

What I’m trying to get at is that I tried to make an analysis at this time of the theatre that could be done, and then I decided what I wanted to do; and I was very selective about what I took; I think I came out with a synthesis that was something quite personal.25

Oldenburg considered himself to be an outsider to the happenings movement; he was not a member of Kaprow’s “New Jersey” group and had not studied with John Cage.

Oldenburg’s sensibilities were more oriented toward the work of Artaud and the theatre of cruelty. His character in the piece was going through a kind of cruel experience. The audience was as well, as it was subjected to darkness and Lucas Samaras’s constant “snapshot” blinking effect. For Oldenburg, the point was to bring himself and audience from an inanimate sculpture into an animated artwork:

There was a lot of jostling around. Often, too, the unpredictable and unprofessional surroundings of the

Oldenburg: An Anthology, ed. Germano Celant (New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1995), 22-23.

25 Kostelanetz, 135.

76 creSPy

performances produced suffering, simply by lack of foresight or sufficient provision for the audience. One must admit, though, that such indifference is a form of cruelty. Here was this mixture of my acting out suffering and forcing the audience to undergo suffering; yet the whole idea of the piece was rather objective—I was going to translate myself analytically from an inanimate object to an animate one.26

In the midst of what must have been a harrowing, emotional experience for the audience and for Carmines, Oldenburg had a formal experiment, one that was repeated throughout the evening in the other pieces performed, and that was the insertion of the human figure into the artwork itself. Oldenburg would move from one project to the other, making “a very engaging and emotional sequence.” Then he would suddenly stop and drop, starting something entirely different. Oldenburg was experimenting with two streams of happenings with Snapshots from the City: one based in the Cagean non-intentional experimentation, and the other following Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty.27

After Oldenburg’s piece, the audience then moved into another room where they saw Jim Dine’s Smiling Workman, his first psycho-drama. Dine performed the work himself, wearing a painter’s smock, and scribbled the words, “I love what I’m doing, HELP!” over the face of a large canvas—embodying the notion of a “painter’s theatre,” which became another term for the happenings. Dine then drank what appeared to be red paint (it was actually tomato juice) and poured it over himself. Next, he dove into the canvas in an attempt to fuse his three-dimensional human figure with the two dimensions of the canvas. This was a clear satire of the action painting of the Abstract Expressionists, although it also served as a kind of homage. This was followed by Allen Hansen’s Projections, a multi-media piece including newsreel images of travelogues, W.C. Fields, paratroopers, children, rock and roll dancing, and the China Clipper taking off.

Allan Kaprow’s piece, Coca Cola Shirley Cannon Ball was then performed by Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, and Lucas Samaras in the Judson gym. There seemed to be an enormous foot, which moved around the space and was surrounded by “flats,” which created the walls of the performance space. The piece was accompanied by sporadic bursts of language including, “Fat Baby,” “Tick,” “Tock,” and “Hello Sam Spade.”

26 Ibid., 135.

27 Celant, 22.


The piece was performed in the half-subterranean world of the Judson gymnasium, which was built just below the street level. The foot had an ominous quality, and it was occasionally subverted by smiling faces, both real and fabricated, seen through holes in the flats. Allen Hansen describes the rest of the evening:

Then the audience had a sort of open-play-wander-around period during which people sold assemblage items from pushcarts as well as small magazines and comic books made by the artists who took part. I handed out 800 children’s drawings in poster colors. After Oldenburg read from The Scarlet Pimpernel in Swedish from a balcony the audience went back upstairs for Bob Whitman’s Duet for a Small Smell, which involved Pat Oldenburg chopping up a body that had plastic bags of paint in it, and ended with acrid incense being burned—the odor of rotten egg chemicals. The finale was Dick Higgins’ long piece, Cabarets, Contributions, Einschlusz, a collage of small happenings.28

Oldenburg describes Higgins’s final piece as an exhortation for the audience to leave, since it was, “in fact interminable—counting in German until everybody left.”29 The piece was designed to “give a spectrum of what was going on,” but at the same time it was an exhausting, overwhelming experience. For Carmines, it became a kind of basic training in which he was indoctrinated with a new improvisatory, chance sensibility that profoundly affected the nature of the plays and playwrights he would work with as a composer/collaborator.

Promenade, A Chance-Oneiric Musical

The influence that Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Spex had on Al Carmines, is especially obvious in his collaboration on Promenade, the musical written by María Irene Fornés and which would raise the bar for all other Judson productions. One of the Judson’s most important productions, Promenade, originally opened in April of 1965. Though Carmines certainly brought his “happenings” style to his earlier work, which he created from Gertrude Stein’s texts, Promenade was written with a living collaborator, María Irene

28 Hansen, 61.

29 Kostelanetz, 13.

78 creSPy

Fornés. Her own work as creative artist, playwright, and teacher, was profoundly affected by Carmines’s improvisatory work as a composer.

Promenade was perhaps the ultimate distillation of the Al Carmines/Lawrence Kornfeld/Judson style and Carmines’s collaboration with Fornés was perhaps one of his finest. Fornés had submitted her play on the suggestion of a friend to the Judson Poets’ Theatre. Later she served as a costumer for Judson shows, using her background as a textile designer and seamstress. Ironically, Carmines initially refused to examine Fornés’s script (even though she constantly asked him to read it), because he thought of her only as the Judson costumer. However, Carmines’s secretary threatened to quit if he didn’t read it, and once he did, he realized that Fornés was a genius. Lawrence Kornfeld directed the production—building upon Carmines’s improvisatory style of composition and creation. Promenade is an ironic commentary on social status, performed with the satiric music of Carmines and the lacerating lyrics and power of Fornés’s bitingly funny play. Originally written as an exercise, the play was built with the same element of chance that Carmines experienced in Ray Gun Spex. Fornés writes:

I wrote down the characters on set of index cards. On another set of cards, I wrote different places. I shuffled them together. I picked a card that said, “The Aristocrats.” And I picked the card that said, “The Prison.” So the play started in prison for that reason. But I found it very difficult to write a scene with aristocrats in prison, so the first thing that happened was that they were digging a hole to escape. I wanted to get them out of there.30

Fornés continued to improvise throughout the creation of the play, though she abandoned the character cards, and continued to work with the place cards. The quality of chance was at the heart of the production, and like all of Fornés’s work, which was influenced by her background as a painter, she visualized the world of the play with a landscape-infused, textured theatricality. Adding to the “happening” quality of the creation of the play was the apocryphal story that Carmines and Fornés came together one evening and claimed that they had lyrics and songs they loved but had never been included in a musical. So, according to cast stories, they threw them in a hat and pulled out a batch around which they then wrote a story. While not entirely the truth, these “arbitrary, game-like rules as

30 María Irene Fornés and Robb Creese, “I Write the Messages That Come,” The Drama Review 21, no. 4 (December 1977): 29.


compositional tactic” gave Promenade its remarkable experimental shape.31

While Carmines was influenced by his original experience with Ray Gun Spex, the experience of dance within that happening would lead to another powerful influence on Carmines’s musical score, Judson Dance Theatre. Carmines noted this himself, pointing out that, “Three things—Beckett, Genet, and the Judson Dance Theatre- are always in my mind when I read any play or think of any production....”32 Inarguably, Carmines’s interest in dance, particularly the improvisatory style of Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Deborah Hay, which was built on “chance, collage, free association, co-operative choice-making, slow meditation, repetition, lists, handling objects, playing games, and describing tasks,” was at the heart of his technique in creating musical productions with writers.33 The “happening”-based dance technique was also central to Promenade. Because of this dance influence, Carmines composed some of his finest music for Fornés’s play, and as he used the characters’ physical action as described by Fornes in her stage directions as lyrics for the music he created. While most of the musicals at the Judson were deemed to be camp by most critics, Kornfeld and Carmines strove for the grotesque, the uncanny, the bizarre, the very elements which are at the heart of dreamwrighting. With Promenade, the Judson style—infused as it was by happenings and dance, found a new language for the theatre—a dramatic dream language of music, dance, and drama that followed the alogical logic and emotional truth of a dream.

The production of Promenade was lauded by critics, and the show was revised and rewritten as a full-length musical several years later and transferred off-Broadway to a new theatre at Broadway and Seventy-Sixth Street. The owner named it the Promenade Theatre because he was so enthralled with the Carmines/Fornés collaboration. The new off-Broadway production of Promenade, which included Carmines’s music, Kornfeld’s direction, and sets by Rouben-Ter-Arutunian, was even more successful than the original Judson show. It closed after 259 performances and was recorded by RCA for a musical album. The success of Promenade gave María Irene Fornés international standing as a playwright and later as a teacher of playwriting.

31 Stephen Bottoms, Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, November 20, 2006), 160.

32 Michael Smith, “The Good Scene: Off Off-Broadway,” The Tulane Drama Review 10, no. 4 (Summer, 1966): 172.

33 Sally Banes, “The Birth of the Judson Dance Theatre: “A Concert of Dance” at Judson Church, July 6, 1962,” Dance Chronicle 5, no. 2 (1982): 207.

80 creSPy

Ultimately, the real significance of Al Carmines’s encounter with the weird, unsettling world of Claes Oldenburg was the fact of the success and importance of the playwrights who were essentially “trained” under him, like María Irene Fornés, but also Rochelle Owens, Roslyn Drexler, and others like Sam Shepard and Lanford Wilson. In the case of Fornés, Carmines’s lasting influence was even more profound. She later became a master teacher of playwriting, she and taught the next generation of playwrights both at INTAR Hispanic Playwrights-in-Residence Laboratory at Theatre for the New City in New York City and at the Padua Hills Playwright Workshop/Festival. Her students include, Caridad Svich, Migdalia Cruz, Cherríe Moraga, Eduardo Machado, Milcha Sanchez-Scott, Luis Santeiro, Octavio Solis, and many others. And each of these writers were taught to discover, according to Svich, one of Fornés’s most famous students, “a use of language that is topographical, expansive, physical, and demands embodiment in a different manner than say, the work of more “interior” playwrights…,” and to create plays in the “here of place.” That place was almost always encountered as the theatre space itself. This description itself recalls the “environments” created by Kaprow, Oldenburg, Dine, and other happenings artists in Ray Gun Spex.34

Svich’s descriptions of Fornes’s playwriting exercises bring to mind the kind of dreamwrighting that she and Carmines conceived at Judson Theatre under the direction of Lawrence Kornfeld. In one exercise that Fornes used at INTAR, she asks her students to imagine an object in collision in space, and to actually draw a picture of that object. The exercise then requires the playwright to describe a geographical location for the object, and to write down this landscape, and to allow a color the writer’s childhood to seep into this world. The color then initiates characters who people the landscape the writer has created. The next ingredient are random lines of dialogue the playwright must incorporate into a sequence of dramatic scenes inspired by the landscape and characters.35 The exercise would work just evocatively as elements for a happening as it would a scripted play.

The point of describing this exercise is twofold: to point out the wholly improvisatory, associative and chance-like structure of the playwriting exercise, which is notable for its lack of a linear approach; and to note how deeply that Fornés was shaped by an interdisciplinary approach that grew out of her own background as a painter. This also reflects her collaboration with Carmines’s improvisatory composing style. And that

34 Caridad Svich, “The Legacy Of Maria Irene Fornes,” PAJ: A Journal of Performance & Art 31, no. 3 (September 2009): 3.

35 Ibid., 5.


the heritage of dreamwrighting, to which Fornés’s many playwriting students adopt, grew directly out of a chance occurrence itself. Had that young theological student never made his way from the Union Theological Seminary to Oldenburg’s happening at Judson Memorial Church that evening, it is conceivable that a generation of dreamwrights influenced by Al Carmines’s strange revelations, distilled by Fornés’s collaborations with him, may never have become writers they are today. To some scholars, this may seem a somewhat tenuous connection, but going back to the original happening that affected Carmines, where would a playwright like Fornés have had such a fertile landscape of her own to develop her dramatic art? Carmines provided a field of dreams for Fornés and other writers. And because of the intense cross-pollination of off-off-Broadway, with playwrights like Fornés working in many different venues, dreamwrighting influenced all the playwrights working there, including writers like John Guare, Sam Shepard, Lanford Wilson, Adrienne Kennedy, and many others. And this influence was spread further as the 1960s generation of writers became the teachers of the next generation of writers. It can be seen not only in the plays of Caridad Svich, who is a lifetime Obie Award-winning playwright, but also in the plays of Tony Kushner, who was profoundly affected by off-off-Broadway playwright Jean Claude van Itallie. Dreamwrighting is key to the dramaturgy of Paula Vogel’s plays, whose own writing was affected by the thinking of Bert O. States, and also Irene Fornés and John Guare. Because of Vogel’s profound influence as a teacher, dreamwrighting has spread to her student Sarah Ruhl, whose plays are often structured around the illogical logic of dreams. Perhaps the irony is that it was all just a matter of chance, that Carmines’s encounter with the uncanny world of Claes Oldenburg’s Ray Gun Spex, may never have happened. But that is my assertion, that it was just this kind of chance occurrence, this collision of destiny, that led not only to the Judson Poets’ Theatre, but also the strange alogical logic of dreamwrighting that has entered into the mainstream of American playwriting.

82

conTriBuTors

David Crespy is professor of playwriting, acting, and dramatic literature at the University of Missouri, founded MU’s Writing for Performance program and serves as its co-director. He is the founding Artistic Director of MU’s Missouri Playwrights Workshop. His articles have appeared in Theatre History Studies, New England Theatre Journal, Latin American Theatre Review, The Dramatist, Slavic and East European Performance, and www.glbtq.com. His books include The Off-Off Broadway Explosion, with a foreward by Edward Albee (Backstage Books, 2003); Richard Barr: The Playwrights’ Producer, with a foreward and afterward by Edward Albee (SIU Press, March 2013).

Peter A. Davis is on the faculty of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he chairs the Theatre History and Criticism Program. He is currently writing a book on the early development of the commercial stage in New York City and how economic cycles influenced aesthetic and practical innovations in the theatre industry during the nineteenth century.

Susan Kattwinkel is an Associate Professor of Theatre at the College of Charleston. She has previously published on vaudeville in The Encyclopedia of Broadway and American Culture, an essay in Interrogating America Through Theatre and Performance (eds. Irish Smith Fischer and William B. Demastes), and in her book Tony Pastor Presents: Afterpieces from the Vaudeville Stage.

Shelley Manis received her Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently a lecturer in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Thanks to Chase Bringardner for his careful reading of early drafts of this article.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited withoutpermission.

CRESPY Fortunate Collision: Al Carmines’s Encounter with Claes

Documents

Transcript of CRESPY Fortunate Collision: Al Carmines’s Encounter with Claes