ABSTRACT
In November 1967, Robert Wilson performed a solo piece, Baby Blood, in his loft at 147 Spring Street, the former home of the Open Theatre. Although the Bob Dylan music seemed to place Baby Blood squarely within the sociopolitical milieu of the 1960s, the performance was apolitical, non-confrontational, and emotionally distanced, and it clearly was not an ensemble creation. A few months later in April 1968, Richard Foreman presented Angelface at the Cinematheque on Wooster Street, the then new home of the New American Cinema movement and literally around the corner from Wilson's loft. The work of Foreman and Wilson drew upon the ideas and aesthetics of Gertrude Stein, abstract expressionist painting and Russian suprematism, Happenings and chance theatre, pop art, minimalism, and to some extent the philosophical ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger. It also reflected the powerful influence of avant-garde film, and in particular the influence of filmmaker and performance artist Jack Smith.
