Happenings Are Happening

In the beginning, there was the word.

The beginning was 1959, and the word was happening. Drawing on the antics of Dadaism and surrealism, Manhattan Artist Allan Kaprow decided to stage a series of highly unorthodox, one-shot performances for a handful of friends in Greenwich Village. Read the invitation: "Think of a buying spree at Macy's; how to grow geraniums in New York. Do not look for paintings, sculpture, the dance or music."

There were paintings, sculpture, dance and music--of a sort. At the happenings that Kaprow and his colleagues staged, the "actors" splashed paint on canvas, played electronic John Cage music, danced like puppets with leaden strings, climbed up cardboard mountains, peeled oranges and clothes on stage. To get the audience into the act, they gave them newspapers to tear up, even ran their hands up female spectators' legs.

Main Course: Sex. Inevitably, the novelty wore off, and jaded Villagers began to drift away. But the word was too catchy to let go, and happenings have since been steadily spreading uptown and out from New York as the newest novelty in party giving and fund raising. Society matrons talk glibly of happenings over cocktails; actors who have never seen one are beginning to stage them. Whereas the first happenings were planned down to the last syllable and step (one Kaprow script read: "Walks to within 3 ft. of person seated opposite, stops here for seven seconds"), the latter-day copies are undisciplined free-for-alls. Sex, once a piquant accent, is now a main course.

In San Francisco, some 9,000 people last month jammed the Longshoremen's Auditorium for a three-day happening, or "trip." Slides of pop and op art were flashed on and off the walls and ceiling. Onstage a woman in a negligee was bombarded with raw eggs, a stark-naked Negro beat the drums, an acrobat bounced on the trampoline. Without letup, pounding music exploded in the eardrums and blurred reason. Most spectators joined in the fun. One wore a toga made from an American flag, another sported a sign reading: "You're in the Pepsi generation, I'm a pimply freak." A girl dancer stripped to the waist, had to be rerobed by a friendly cop.

In Atlanta, an avant-garde theater group called the Interplayers has decided to play happenings to the hilt. One night, they ran a lawnmower down the aisles and accidentally set fire to the sets. On another, the audience was sent to a nearby art gallery, where they found leftover Christmas trees and a huge mound of peanuts. After putting paper bags over their heads, "to ensure the fertility of Georgia's famous goobers", everyone ended up madly shelling each other with peanuts.

Nude on the Round. Nothing better demonstrates how far happenings have wandered--and how badly they have fallen off--than Salvador Dali's, held last week in Manhattan. It was billed as a "Super-Gelatinous Melting, Silly-Putty Happening," and staged at the new Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center. But the best Dali could do was to cavort onstage inside a huge plastic bubble as he painted its transparent surface with a roller, here with a giant cross, there with a black angel. To inspire him, Sarah Lawrence girls danced ponderously; a blind, spear-carrying beggar named Moondog was brought in to survey the scene; a singer sang soundlessly into a dead mike.

The only thing that kept the audience from departing was Stripper Silva from Paris' Crazy Horse Saloon. On a revolving platform on center stage, she cast off her shirt and string, rotated in the raw for five minutes. When the Daliance was over, one lady in mink got up, proudly announced: "Well, at last I have seen my first happening!" Shrugged Innovator Kaprow, who took the whole thing in: "It had nothing to do with a happening". But then he did not patent the word, and while the fun lasts, there is nothing he can do to stop it.

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