Kenmore West High School

Rignatorious Theatre Manifesto

1. Theatre is a site of convergence.
2. The theatre encompasses everything.
3. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
   ( F.T. Marinetti, “Futurist Manifesto”)
4. Theatre practitioners take everything seriously.
5. The Theatre is a den of thieves.
6. I adopt as my musical collaborators Giuseppe Verdi, Leonard Cohen and Ane Brun.
7. I adopt as my visual collaborators Malevich, Botticelli and  Hiroshige.
8. The text need be neither the starting point nor the goal of a production. There may be no text at all. (Richard Schechner, “Six Axioms of Environmental Theatre.”)
9. Theatre’s true subject is Blake’s man with the ladder, struggling to reach the goal of his desire, which is always beyond his limits. (William Blake, “I Want, I Want”, 1793. Referenced in //www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/3653480/ViewfinderI-want-I-want-1793-by-William-Blake.html)
10. Theatre is the engine of ethics.
11. The idiom of theatre is reality.
12. Some say that theatre should strip us of our prejudices; if we are stripped, without our protective ideological “clothes,” the theatre must become the place where we make our new clothes—otherwise we will put our old prejudices back on with the overcoats we left on the back of our seats when we came in.
13. “A theatre which makes no contact with the public is a nonsense.” (Brecht, Bertolt.  Brecht on Theater. New York: Hill and Wang, 1964.)
14. Theatre is the only art that requires collaboration.
15. The act of theatre can be seen.
16.  The act of theatre can be heard.
17. No matter what, the theatre cannot disguise its nature as craft.
18. The tools of the theatre artist are all things that are available.
19. The inspiration of the theatre is necessity.
20. The theatre respects the authority of the task.
21. All aspects of the physical event of the theatre are its setting.
22. The true artist of the theatre is the imaginative spectator.
23. The theatre is the Cathedral, Mosque and Temple of the human experience.
24. The theatre is the visible manifestation of the human spirit.
25. Theatre is the central point of enlightened divergence.
26. The site of the theatre is the self.
27. This document is unfinished.