‘And this theatre will be liberated.
Repeat. This theatre will be liberated.’
– The Performance Group, Dionysus in 69

1969 has been described as the year that defined or ended an era. Half a century on, its landmarks – Vietnam, Woodstock, the Stonewall riots, the Manson family murders, the Days of Rage protests, to mention but a few – remain prominent in our political, social and cultural space. Symbolising peace and violence, liberation and entrapment, the events of 1969, like the last two figures in the date, were essentially inverted reflections of each other, opposites locked in an uneasy embrace. Among the works of art that captured this duality, one stands out as especially perspicacious: Dionysus in 69, a production by The Performance Group (TPG), directed by Richard Schechner.

A contemporary reworking of The Bacchae by Euripides, the play riffs on the plot of the tragedy, centred on a confrontation between Dionysus and Pentheus, the king of Thebes, an antagonistic yet inseparable pair embodying liberation and oppression. The city’s women, Pentheus’ mother among them, disobey the tyrant in favour of the god, and when Pentheus spies on their bacchanalia, they tear him to pieces and dance with his severed head. With Dionysus manifest in the sixties hippy culture and the carnivalesque atmosphere of rebellion, the production seemingly invited a straightforward reading. Long live the god of ecstasy, it appeared to be saying; let’s get rid of the oppressive authority and embrace the pleasures of freedom. On closer inspection, however, it was anything but an endorsement of the ‘turn on, tune in, drop out’ ideology. In fact, as the double entendre in the title suggests, the themes of Dionysus lend themselves to dialectical interpretations.

The play opened in New York in 1968, three months after the My Lai massacre, two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the day after Robert Kennedy was shot. The violence underpinning the original drama resonated with those events, while the motif of freedom, which filled the air as the summer of love rolled on through the seasons, provided a counterpoint. The cycle of ecstasy and destruction, vividly acted out in the play, presaged such U-turns as the Altamont concert with its tragic denouement, which followed ‘three days of peace and music’ at Woodstock. Dionysus captured the spirit of the times in radically new ways. The conflict between the communal and the individual was examined both within the group and through audience participation, a novel device that often produced unexpected results. Tribal rituals taking up the entire performance space were the earliest example of what is now known as environmental staging. Some of the scenes were played naked; the most crucial development was a homoerotic encounter conceived by its participants, both straight men, as the hardest thing they could think of doing in public at a time when the police were raiding gay bars.

The experimental theatre of the sixties was essentially an American phenomenon that grew from happenings, an art form invented by Allan Kaprow in the previous decade, under the influence of the poor theatre, a movement founded by Jerzy Grotowski a little later. Julian Beck and Judith Malina’s Living Theatre realised their motto – ‘Life, revolution, and theatre are three words for the same thing: an unconditional NO to the present society’ – in Paradise Now, an unscripted event that ended with the actors and audience undressing and emerging into the streets. ‘I demand everything: total love, an end to all forms of violence and cruelty such as money, prisons, people doing work they hate,’ the crowd shouted. ‘We can have tractors and food and joy. I demand it now!’ (The role of tractors in their programme remains obscure.) One of their comrades-in-arms, Joseph Chaikin, went on to found the Open Theatre, a troupe with a focus on collective creativity, whose best-known production, Viet Rock, conveyed the horrors of war by evoking the audience’s own mortality. The Bread and Puppet Theatre, led by Peter Schumann, was famous for its masks and puppets, particularly giant caricature figures, used for plays and in anti-Vietnam demonstrations. They had no political agenda except to protest against the inhumanity of modern life, often using Christian imagery to depict the corruption and violence of imperialism. More popular in Europe than on the home ground, experimental theatre came close to rock music in its capacity to inspire change. It was its readiness to cross boundaries of convention that helped to relax theatrical censorship. The problem was that its participants, while being under constant pressure from the authorities, were deemed too conformist by the hardcore left, whose main interests lay in the street dramas of radical politics.

In October 1968, a benefit was organised in New York in support of the Columbia University student uprising, which began as a protest against the Vietnam war and was brutally suppressed by the police. Along with other avant-garde collectives, TPG was on the bill with a show based on stories of their own subversive acts, which, to quote Schechner, ‘ranged from violating dormitory rules to cheating on exams and stealing something from the bookstore’. At one point during the evening, several people from the audience rushed the stage and declared the theatre ‘liberated’, demanding it for their ‘community’. TPG had a vote and decided not to perform. ‘They’re fascists,’ one of the group said. ‘Dirty, fucking fascists.’ The rebels were eventually allowed to use the theatre on Wednesdays, but they couldn’t agree on what to do with it, did nothing and soon handed it back.

As oppression and liberation swept through the world, from the battlefields of Vietnam to American campuses, the central idea of Dionysus – to regard these phenomena as complementary moieties – proved especially timely. The ease with which ecstasy can tip into bloodshed was illustrated by the play’s dynamics: bacchanalia segueing into a chase, culminating in a ritualised killing. The show (which opened during Nixon’s election campaign) ended with the god running for president, his speeches revealing the dark side of the Dionysiac cult: ‘And this theatre will be liberated. Repeat. This theatre will be liberated.’ As in the original drama, he curses his followers in the finale, but in this version their main crime is a failure to turn him on. ‘You have nothing to lose but your chains!’ the crazed god-candidate screams, promising ‘absolute freedom’ to the voters; the play’s title doubles as his campaign slogan, and his Nazi salute completes the picture.

Communality was key for the sixties art scene, characterised by a return to performance, a tradition older than theatre, possible only within a societal context, stemming from shared concerns. TPG went back to the origins, aiming to revive ‘rites, dances, cruel and joyful celebrations, orgies, cures, trials’. Their best plays were devised collaboratively; they all worked together to convert a building they had acquired into a performance space; they took part in group therapy sessions. Their next production, Commune (pronounced as a verb), a study of individuality and collectivism, drew parallels between the murders committed by the most notorious commune of the time, the Manson family, and the Vietnam atrocities. Before entering the performance space, the spectators had to take off their shoes, which the actors would wear for the murder scene: a comment on everyone’s complicity in the crimes, but also on the concept of ownership. In the course of the action, the audience were asked to represent the civilian victims of My Lai. Once it led to a three-hour-long confrontation, when the performers refused to finish the play until there were enough volunteers to take part in the scene.

To go back to Dionysus, audience participation took various forms there: from a male model stripping down to dance around, distributing his business cards, to denunciations of the war. One night a bunch of students kidnapped Bill Shephard, who played Pentheus. Another time, during a remarkable scene in which Pentheus tries to find a woman in the audience willing to make love to him (someone would usually go along with it for a while before rejecting him), Shephard left the theatre with the woman halfway through the performance. Such a close involvement made it hard to maintain boundaries. During the ‘total caress’ scene, some members of the audience occasionally went too far in communing with the performers, making the female actors feel prostituted, so the scene, which earned the name ‘group grope’, was changed as a result. Was the audience driven by purely base instincts in their desire to join in? According to Schechner, it was more complex: ‘they wanted to find a community, so they found one in us’.

For all its X-rated features, Dionysus was concerned not so much with sex as with intimacy in a wider sense. Nakedness was introduced to make the performers vulnerable, to shift the focus from their characters to themselves. The play’s run saw members of TPG arrested for public exposure and performances cancelled; when Brian De Palma filmed the show, the actors had to wear camisoles and jockstraps (the film was released in 1970, with an apostrophe added to the title, as if to keep an eye on the naughty couple). ‘Every society has sought to regulate both sexuality and artistic expression, and to a degree each has succeeded,’ Schechner wrote at the time. ‘Freedom, so called, is nothing other than agreement on what to suppress.’ In another piece, he cautioned: ‘There are many young people who believe that an unrepressive society, a sexualized society, is Utopia. Nudity, free sexual expression, communal rather than family units, “inner space,” and sensory overload are becoming political issues… The hidden fear I have about the new expression is that its forms come perilously close to ecstatic fascism.’ Flower power was never an antidote to violence – only a temporary relief from societal tensions.

The avant-garde art of the era was frequently denounced as a movement that betrayed revolution for the sake of personal liberation, but its critics overlooked various dialectical forces at play. TPG, unanimously anti-war and pro-civil rights, was otherwise politically diverse. ‘Some people were reading Marcuse while others were reading Ayn Rand,’ Schechner recalled. Although in the former camp himself, he felt ‘powerless to change the social structure through any personal action’: a university professor enjoying a comfortable lifestyle, he knew that ‘it is fear – a complicated fear of being left out of history and a simple fear for the body – that generates a good deal of revolutionary feeling’ among his fellow intellectuals. For them, the only way to promote revolution was through art.

If the aim of revolution is freedom, what does it mean to be free? ‘Most of us have a pretty cheap fantasy of self-liberation,’ one of the characters says in Dionysus; another sees no reason ‘why anyone, god or candidate, can promise a man joy, freedom, ecstasy’. Fifty years on, still unable to define the notion in black-and-white terms, we could learn from this cautionary portrayal of the flower child and the Hell’s Angel as two sides of the same coin. ‘Liberty can be swiftly transformed into its opposite, and not only by those who have a stake in reactionary government,’ Schechner wrote. ‘Are we ready for the liberty we have grasped? Can we cope with Dionysus’ dance and not end up… with our sons’ heads on our dancing sticks?’

The critic Stefan Brecht found Dionysus a powerful work, though he remained sceptical about its politics. ‘Not only does the show not incite to a clean break with parent, law, order: it is conciliatory,’ he said in his review. ‘It proposes a substitute – screwing.’ That’s one way to read it. Another is to go with its creators’ intention to explore ‘a dialectic between a temporary liberation which is a madness, and a kind of fascistic imposition of the power of this crazy god’. Taking this idea further, we can imagine the play as a mirror that turns things upside down, flipping desire into violence, aesthetics into politics, communality into individuality, and vice versa. Life and art are both made of such invertible couples – opposites that repel and attract.