1968/2008

If you haven’t read or heard or seen a thing about the Living Theater’s epic happening Paradise Now which began it’s run through insurrectionary Europe and then the States in ‘68, a journey into this work is well worth a visit.

This Anarchist troupe, who today operate out of a revitalized Theater For a New City in NYC, back in the day put together a work of “theater” that savages theater, art, and revolution like nothing else. As close to a situationist peice of art as you’ll ever see. It’s astounding what audiences of that day would sit through with the expectation of being delivered a cohesive political experience message or “radical chic” spectacle. What they get is naked calisthenics , dialectical games, anti-speech making, rants, and in Mystic Fire’s documentation of the work- an ending that has the audience fleeing a Brussel’s theater being chased by loin clothed “actors” taunting them with “get out of the theater never come back the real theater is in the streets.”

Arthur Magazine has dug up a wholly other documentation of the play and making it available for purchase. Well worth a veiw if you want to know how crazy radical art of the time could be.

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