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

invite audience participation rarely add any artistic value to the event (49). He doesconcede that if given certain specific instructions, a participating audience can lend the“spirit of a party” to a Happening (50). On the other hand, theatre practitioners likeSchechner liked the idea of participant observers: Schechner in particular beganexperimenting with a mobile audience in the late 1960s in works like Dionysus in 69,which invited audience members to move around the performance space (EnvironmentalTheater 5-6).The Yippies had no qualms about encouraging audience participation: theythrived on the spirit of do-your-own-thing. Thus their revolutionary-action theatercreations resembled not the classical art Happenings in the Kaprow tradition that includedan audience but kept them carefully controlled, but instead an open-ended andparticipatory non-matrixed performance event. The Yippie Happenings also differed fromclassical art Happenings because of their narrative scenario and obvious political slant.Despite adopting the form and structure of the Happening, at the Yip-In the Yippies stillfocused on content: they used the brief scenario of the spring festival, and hoped that theHappening would convey their political message to the watching media.Fabulous happening. Hippies! Glorious hippies, I address my final appeal to you:children, flower child in any country, in order to fuck all the old bastards, who are givingyou a hard time, unite, go underground if necessary in order to join the burned childrenof Vietnam.—Jean Genet on the Yippies (89)124