Theatre Design & Technology - Oct 1970 - 24

than illumination of all that pubic hair would
have done, and there was one odd effect.
Imagine the candle as a projector and a
man squatting on the projector. This presented a reversed phall ic symbol on the
wall, which may have been the best design
of the year. I give this the award because
the very best design I had seen was Grotowski's Akropolis, which extravagantly
used six candles. This also involved tossing
a large flood light off the floor. It was the
destruction of the expected environment
achieved by both these things that I liked.
In absolute terms, the best designed show
of the year was that of Marcel Marceau, not
because of the costumes or anything else
but because of it's use of the human body.
Last week one of the most brilliant young
designers in NewYorksaid, in effect, "Death
to scenery, death to designers." He didn't
want to work with that kind of material. He
had a much better material available and
said that designers better learn to use itthe human body.
I think the human body is an improvization which I call "stof wapod," the sexy
theatre of fun without any playwrights or
designers. We've worked on awareness
stuff, but I gave it up because I realized I'd
have to start the "Stof wapod theatre."
For me the potential of the human body
is important, I teach awareness, I don't
I ike any false psychiatry or false personal izHugh Hardy addressing the Conference.

ing of people. Encounter-awareness exercises attract people who would otherwise
be actors.
If we are going to change society we
need a new kind of theatre, not just an activist theatre. There is a series of techniques involved in a theatre of disruption,
and we ought to be training our students
for it before they blow themselves up with
bombs. They should know enough not to
do that. We need disruption in our society,
not just in order to have a radical social
revolution but as a means of changing the
natu re of society.
I am speaking to designers and to architects. We need to find ways of changing
the normal social behavior in all areas of
society. We have to break up rooms; we
should be breaking this room up. Anybody
who is a teacher knows there is more that
can be done. Start your lecture some day,
dry and dull as it usually is, then suddenly
walk into the middle of the classroom-you
will scare people shitless. They will not
know why you're doing it. They will suddenly realize they are in a class, and may
even real ize you are a human bei ng as you
come close to them, because even though
they may know you personally, they never
see you as a person in a classroom. We
must do that kind of breaking up if we are
to really reach people in the way I've been
speaking about today.

I don't know where I should be speaking
to you from, but I know it should not be
from this lecturn. When I was a kid I played
this game: You go to Manhattan and stand
and look up at the top of a building. If you
stand there long enough (even if you are
ten years old). somebody else will look up.
You can do this for about ten or fifteen
minutes and have a whole crowd of people
looking up. Then you walk away and turn
back and say, "I did that." That is social
disruption.
I think the art of doing things like that
has been lost among our children today.
We owe it to ourselves to return it to
them. Carrying meaningless banners, making
meaningless gestures, has an incredible effect. I've asked students to go down a
block and pat someone on the shoulder and
say, "You're OK, kid." People are strangely
pleased, angry, or perplexed. It is an experience they haven't had. We can start
having all sorts of tactile sensory experiences.
The changing of any kind of feel ing, emotion, or behavior has always been one of
the functions of the theatre. I'm merely
suggesting that there is a new kind of
political social activism that we ought to
be engaged with ourselves. I don't like
theatres anymore: A lot of people don't
like theatres.

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