from The Life of the Theatre
30
The purpose of the theatre is to serve the needs of the people.
The people have no servants. The people serve themselves.
The people need revolution, to change the world, life itself.
Because the way we are living is too full of pain
and dissatisfaction. Fatally painful for too many people.
For all of us.
This is a period of emergency. Therefore emergency theatre is
the theatre of awareness.
The first thing is to feed everybody, to stop the violence, and
free us all. This is what anarchism means in our time.
The theatre of anarchism is the theatre of action.
The slavery to money has to end. Which means that the entire
money system has to end. A society of free goods, freely
produced, freely distributed. You take what you need, you give
what you can. The world is yours to love and work for. No state,
no police, no money, no barter, no borders, no property. Time
and disposition to seek good, seek one another, to take trips
deep into the mind, and to feel, to find out what it is to have
a body, and to begin to use and make joy with it.
The theatre has to work with the people to destroy the systems of
civilization that prohibit the development of body and brain.
In order to work in most factories you have to stop the mind
from working lest it die of pain and injury. You have to stop
the body from feeling lest it wince consciously thru the day.
This is the work of the theatre.
Theatre has to stop being a product bought and paid for by the
bourgeoisie. The whole age of buying and selling has to end.
Theatre has to stop being the servant of a system in which the
only people who go to the theatre are those who can pay for it.
The poor are disinherited. Well, activist artists are going to
play in the streets,
we are going to tell what’s going on, how bad it is,
and what the people can do to change things,
and what the destination – the objective of the revolution – is,
and ways to get there.
how to make the revolution, to bring it into being, and what to
do when we have it, and how to carry it further.
The revolutionary artist will seek ways to drench the people in
such beauty that they tear down the flags and subvert the armies,
from communes and cells and a society in which there is a
possibility of being.
Because borgeois society doesn’t tell the people what beauty is.
The secrets have been appropriated by the rich with their
exclusive education and avidity, and the people are poisoned
by the mercury in the mass media.
The working people are going to take over the means of production,
occupy the places of industry and turn them all into factories
of food clothing shelter heat love and the extended mind.
It is going to happen.
And we are going to do this by exorcising all violence, and the cause
of violence, the need for violence, violence in all its forms,
violence of hands, teeth, bombs, police, army, state, law, land,
real estate, property, education, social, political,
moral and sexual.
This is the work of the world.
And this work of the world is the only work of the theatre:
because the theatre principally is the dancing place of the
people
and therefore the dancing place of the gods who dance in ecstasy
only amid the people.
And therefore we aim this theatre at God
and the people
who are the destination of the most holy
holy holy revolution.
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Julian Beck
More about The Living Theatre at Songs of the Revolution.
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