Shawyer dissertation May 2008 final version - The University of ...

environment that pays special attention to time, sounds, and the presence of people (184).Because Happenings add the element of time and audience, Kaprow warns that audiencemembers may bring with them theatrical conventions, such as an expectation to sit stilland watch quietly (187-188). Kaprow’s rules are therefore meant to disrupt theconventional expectations audiences bring with them to the Happening from their priorexperience with theatrical performance. For Kaprow, Happenings were an extension ofhis art collages, and although audience members were present, the event itself was notmeant to be a performance in the traditional sense.The neutrality of the word “happening,” as well as its use of an audience ofspectators, however, allowed the term to be co-opted by performers. Some Off-Off-Broadway performances used the term “happening” to appeal to avant-garde audiencesbecause the term was in vogue (Higgins 269). The addition of an audience to an art workalso captured the attention of theatre scholars. In Happenings: An Illustrated Anthology(1965), playwright, actor, director, visual artist, novelist and performance scholarMichael Kirby conceives of Happenings as a new kind of theatre, one with “diversealogical elements” that are “organized in a compartmented structure” (21). In Happeningsinformation is produced in discrete components, rather than with many elements ofinformation giving and receiving meaning, as in the character-driven or action-drivenplay texts of traditional theatre. Because a Happening focuses its energy on structure,rather than content, it tends to be non-narrative and apolitical. Kirby also notes thatHappenings are “non-matrixed,” that is, the time and place of characters or actors are thesame here and now as the audience, rather than an imagined other (“New Theatre” 29).121