The materials of Happeningsperformer, physical element, or mechanical effecttend to be

concrete. That is, they are taken from and related to the experiential world of everyday life.
Within the overall context and structure, the details in Happenings relate to things (or classes
of things: note the already conventional one-word titles) and function as direct experience.
This does not mean that the concrete details may not also function as symbols. They often
do. But the symbols are of a private, nonrational, polyvalent character rather than
intellectual.
Happenings might be described as a purposefully composed form of theatre in which
diverse alogical elements, including nonmatrixed performing, are organized in a
compartmented structure.
Every work of art is formed in a historical context of attitudes and influences that make the
work possible. No new art form springs fully grown into existence.
The picturetransformed into combines, assemblages or constructions which hang on the
wallmoved out into the real space of the room. As an Environment the painting took over
the room itself, and finally, as sort of an Environment-with-action, became a Happening. The
simplicity of this theory is one of its strong points, and, if it does not completely explain
Happenings, at least it does relate them intellectually to some of their most important
precedents.
According to the theory, traditional music with its discrete notes, scales, and harmonies is
abstract. Noise, on the other hand, since it is part of everyday life and experience, is
concrete. Sirens, motors, typewriters, and other concrete elements were blended with both
popular tunes and music of a more classical feeling in Erik Satie s score for Parade, a ballet
performed in 1917 in Paris.
Although the Tanzgymnastik, or gymnastic exercises, apparently were used only for
conditioning, they influenced a certain kind of thought that began to consider movement for
its own sake rather than as a means of artistically conveying character information. A
Hungarian, Rudolf von Laban, attempted to set down laws of movement based on everyday
life. In order to study movement, he built a glass-faced icosahedron Happenings 19 within
which a person could stand and move. In Zurich during World War I the LabanWigman
troupe, of which Sophie Taeuber was a member, danced during Dada performances.
The emphasis in modern dance in general has been away from the two-dimensional pictureframe approach of classical dancing and into a dynamic three-dimensional use of space that
might be related to the dominant tendency in Happenings to reject the traditional stage, but
most modern dance retained a matrix. The plot turned inward and dance became a
representation of subjective emotional states and stories.
For a good number of years many people have felt that theatre was not functioning at the
profound aesthetic level of the other arts. Over half a century ago, in 1905, Konstantin
Stanislavsky wrote: realism, and (depicting) the way of life have outlived their age. The time
has come to stage the unreal. Not life itself, as it occurs in reality, must be depicted, but
rather life as it is vaguely perceived in fantasies and visions at moments of lofty emotion.
This is the spiritual situation that must be transmitted scenically, in the way that painters of

the new school use cloth, musicians of the new trend write music, and the new poets, poetry.
The works of these painters, musicians, and poets have no clear outlines, definite and
finished melodies, or precisely expressed ideas. The power of the new art lies in its
combinations of colors, lines, musical notes, and the rhyming of words. They create general
moods that carry over to the public unconsciously. They create hints that make the most
unobservant person create with his own imagination.