Left of New Left: The Living Theatre's Anarchism

Hope exists only in the imagination.We cannot survive without hopetherefore we cannot survive without the imagination.This has to do with the work of unleashing the imagination of the people.

—Julian Beck, Rio de Janeiro, September 13, 1970.¹

In 1970, the anarcho-pacifists Judith Malina (1926–2015) and Julian Beck (1925–1985) took their twenty-two–year-old performance project to Brazil. Rejecting bourgeoise and college student audiences, they went searching for an economic class of people who were, in theory, endowed with the power to sustain the revolution. Engaging with foundational anarchist thinkers like Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) and Pitr Kropotkin (1842–1921), and drawing on the Black Panther Party's (BPP) reconceptualization of Marx, the Living Theatre worked to activate the Lumpenproletariat in the poor mining town of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, Brazil. By openly studying and working with the "man on the street" (as Julian called the average Joes of the world) the Living Theatre endeavored to create a massive living manual for revolution consisting of over 150 plays, The Legacy of Cain Cycle Plays. Ze Ceslo (b. 1937) is a fellow theatre artist and was their sponsor to the country. That year he tried to warn Beck and Malina of the brutal dictatorship Brazil was suffering under but the Becks were undaunted by the news of kidnappings and government repression. By 1970, they were intimately familiar with the realities of censorship, and as lifelong anarchists they regarded state control in any country as punitive and abhorrent. For them, the situation in Brazil, "… if less lethal, seemed as endemic as in France."² After seven months in Brazil, the Living Theatre was arrested on charges of sedition and marijuana possession and company members were eventually deported back to the United States.

Early political influences on the Living Theatre include the individualist-anarchist philosopher Emile Armand (1872–1963), Catholic Worker-founder Dorothy Day (1897–1980), and the writer and therapist Paul Goodman (1911–1972). Early theatrical influences include German director Erwin Piscator (1893–1966), a contemporary of Brecht's who Judith studied under, and the avant-garde director Antonin Artuad (1896–1948). In 1948, Judith Malina and her husband cofounded the Living Theatre in New York City as peace activists and anarchists. This was the same year they got married, and around the same time Malina was first arrested for refusing to participate in air raid drills. She and Julian Beck, an abstract painter and the designer for the company, were arrested again in 1963 during a controversial production of The Brig, a story that included drug use and interpersonal violence in the military. After their second arrests, which were officially over tax evasion, Malina and Beck left the United States. They continued to create theatre in Europe while living in a collectivistic manner until their sensational homecoming tour in 1968, Paradise Now!

However, their 1968 notoriety would quickly be eclipsed by the arrests and deportations from Brazil. Although much has been written about the Living Theatre's work up to and during 1968, the events in Brazil are less understood. What has been written about the "Brazil period," a brief seven months, has been historicized through the lens of New Left politics, sometimes at the profound expense of the Living Theatre's well-documented and continuously professed anarchist politics. To read the existing literature is to ask if Brazil was simply an errant blip in an otherwise long legacy of critically acclaimed political theatre, or perhaps a blunder with disastrous results, or even a nebulous convergence of public practices that defy political affiliation.³ Contributing to the erasure of the Living Theatre's (LT) anarchism, is the trend of U.S. scholars to historicize the LT through the timeline of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). Historians have written a linear history of the Living Theatre from 1948 to 1968, through the Beats and into the hippie Movement. But this conflated timeline between art and politics collapses when it comes to the events in Brazil and the work the Living Theatre continued to do in the...