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

theater are the theatrical notions of improvisation and active spectatorship, modeled afterthe avant-garde art world’s concept of the Happening. The Happening was an abstractperformance art form that emphasized process over product, and explored the relationshipbetween artist and audience. Using definitions of the Happening drawn fromcontemporary critiques such as artist Allan Kaprow’s Assemblage, Environments &Happenings (1966) and performance scholar Michael Kirby’s Happenings: An IllustratedAnthology (1965), I argue that because Happenings focused on the aesthetics ofenvironment and artistic consideration of everyday actions, they also serve as a usefulillustration of the Yippies’ own performative lifestyle. This chapter also investigates thechallenges of writing a history of the Yippies, a movement whose leaders denied its veryexistence, and who took delight in releasing contradictory information to the media. Withmany different accounts of the Yip-In performance, I reconstruct the events at the Yip-Inby comparing Yippie memoirs, Hoffman’s Revolution for the Hell of It, and reports of theevent from papers like the New York Times and East Village Other. As the first officialYippie mass demonstration, I analyze the Yip-In performance as a rehearsal for theChicago demonstrations.The next chapter, “The Festival of Life: Form Made into Chaos,” uses thedemonstrations of the Festival of Life in Chicago as its main example. Much morematerial is available on the Yippies’ Chicago actions than on the Yip-In, in part becausethe Yippies combined their efforts with other groups like SDS, Mobe, and the BlackPanthers in a large-scale demonstration stretching over several days, and in part becausethe Chicago protests resulted in horrifying violence that captivated the media. Using44