ABSTRACT
THE CONNECTION is a play by Jack Gelber, which was launched on 15 July 1959 in New York by the Living Theatre, a famous underground company led by Julian Beck and Judith Malina. American director Shirley Clarke adapted it for the screen in 1962 in her first feature film, from a script written by Gelber himself, shooting it in nineteen days and editing it over a period of four months. THE CONNECTION was one of the many radical and exciting experiments to come out of New York in the late 1950s, in theatre through The Living Theatre, in cinema with Jonas Mekas, in jazz with the release of Ornette Coleman’s seminal Free Jazz, in contemporary music with the experimentation of John Cage, in dance with Merce Cunningham and in the visual arts through performances. All these artists were determined to challenge the idea of the arts as a safe haven by breaking with established codes of performance and introducing new forms that were as much concerned with the creative act itself as with the mise-en-scène or the relationship with the audience.
