Performance Studies Professor Researches the 1959 Work of Alan Kaprow

By Richard Pierce

André Lepecki, associate professor in the Department of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, will direct a “redoing” of Allan Kaprow’s seminal performance piece 18 Happenings in 6 Acts (1959), for the Allan Kaprow exhibit at Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany. This is the first “redoing” of Kaprow’s influential work, whose performances at the Reuben Gallery in New York City in 1959 opened up whole new fields of possibilities for visual arts, the performing arts, and post-modern dance in the following decades.

Writing in 1961, Kaprow defined happenings as “events that, put simply, happen.” And concluded: “They exist for a single performance, or only a few, and are gone forever as new ones take their place.” If this is true, the question remains: why redo this work today?

“We are not doing the work again because we are interested in representing an original, or in producing a replica,” said Lepecki. “We are redoing the piece knowing that his work can only be redone once and we embrace it as an always moving, always provisional, always renewed set of dynamic propositions. In our attempt to be absolutely faithful to the power contained in Kaprow’s notes, we inevitably start testing the limits of the work, finding out that the work itself seems to set up its own ways to self-destroy; that the work itself presents its own inner contradictions, as well as its many possibilities, its hidden dynamics—all of which is preciously and ambiguously kept in Kaprow’s notes and drawings.”

Lepecki and his team will set about to rethink how Kaprow’s documents and a title as powerful as 18 Happenings in 6 Parts keep producing new possibilities for the meaning of contemporaneity as well as the contemporaneity of the work itself. “It involves some considerable research: at the movement level, we need to analyze, recompose, and learn the several movement sequences scripted by Kaprow,” noted Lepecki. “Architecturally, we need to understand how to rebuild the original space Kaprow designed. As for the sound, we need to find, restore, and use as much as possible of the original soundtrack, as well as to identify its role in the several parts. Dramaturgically, we need to train the performers to memorize the different monologues, actions, and movements.”

Lepecki’s commission is done in collaboration with Stephanie Rosenthal, chief curator at Haus der Kunst, the Kaprow Studio, and the International Dance Festival of Munich. The artistic team, under Lepecki’s direction, includes performance studies Ph.D. candidate Noémie Solomon (movement analysis and reconstruction); architect Christin Vahl (environment); and Brown University Ph.D. candidate Shawn Greenlee (sound design and sound reconstruction).

For more information: www.hausderkunst.de.