Perform the happening once only

4. Break up your spaces. A single enactment space is what the theatre traditionally uses. You can experiment by gradually widening the distances between your events; first at a number of points along a heavily trafficked avenue, then inseveral rooms and floors of an apartment house where some of the activities are out of touch with each other, then on more than one street, then in different but nearby cities, finally all around the world. Some of this can take place traveling from one area to another using public transportation and the mails. You don’t have to be everywhere at once. You don’t even have to be everywhere. The places you’re in are as good as the places other participants are in.

5. Break up your time and let it be real time. Real time is found when things are going on in real places. It has nothing to do with the single time, the unified time of stage plays or music. It has even less to do with slowing down or speeding up actions because you want to make something expressive or you want it to work in a compositional way. Whatever happens should happen in its natural time. Suppose you consider how long it’d take to buy a fishing pole in a department store just before Christmas, or how long it’d take to lay the footings for a house. Well if a group wanted to do both in a happening, one of them would have to wait until the other was done. Maybe if it rained, that’d decide which came first. Of course, two groups could arrange both actions at the same time if that was wanted. But it isn’t really necessary, except when people coming from different places have to catch the same train. Otherwise, why not let the amount of time you do something depend on what is practical and convenient for the particular actions in the happening. You can waste an awful lot of time trying to coordinate things.

9. When you’ve got the go-ahead, don’t rehearse the happening. This will make it unnatural because it will build in the idea of good performance, that is, ‘art.’ There is nothing to improve in a happening, you don’t need to be a professional performer. It’s best when it is artless, for better or worse. If it doesn’t work, do another happening. In any case, it’s unnecessary to rehearse situations like eating your way through a room full of food, tearing down an old house, throwing love letters into a field and watching the rain wash off the ink, driving a bunch of cars off in different directions until they run out of gas. These aren’t perfectible actions.

11. Give up the whole idea of putting on a show for audiences. A happening is not a show. Leave the shows to the theatre people and discotheques. A happening is a game with a high, a ritual that no church would want because there’s no religion for sale. A happening is for those who happen in this world, for those who don’t want to stand off and just look. If you happen, you can’t be outside peeking in. You’ve got to be involved physically. Without an audience, you can be off on the move, using all kinds of environments, mixing in the supermarket world, never worrying about what those out there in the seats are thinking, and you can spread your action all around the globe whenever you want. Traditional art is like college education and drugs: it’s fed to people who have to sit on their butts for longer

and longer amounts of time to get the point, and the point is that there’s lots of actions somewhere else, which all the smart people prefer to just think about. But happeners have a plan and go ahead and carry it out. To use an old expression, they don’t merely dig the scene, they make it.

Allan Kaprow

How to Make a Happening