"Education is the continuous process of the adjustment of the individual to his environment; and if the individual ever claims to be completely educated, it merely indicates that he is in need of a change of scene."

- Herbert Read, The Grass Roots of Art (1946)

Jim Dine, The Smiling Workman, 1959

"The limits of this new theatre are only those of science and imagination."

- Michael Kirby, "Films in the New Theatre" (1966)

There is no exact origin of Happenings.  Most scholars agree that these events were developed and performed originally in and around New York City in the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, but Happenings have also been presented in other places around the world.  It is also generally agreed upon that there was no common definition of the performance genre that would come to be known as a Happening, before these performances took place.  While the exact genesis of this art form is unknown, there are six major predecessors whose influence is said to have contributed to the development of the original Happenings.   These are the work of the collage painters in the 1920s, the psychological shift in ideas regarding art as a whole, the Dadaists, Bauhaus theatre, the rise of modern dance, and Surrealism.

Collage painting began in the early 1920s, when artists began to place small, torn pieces of canvas on-top of one another to create a new effect.  Over time, this led to the development of the Environment - a work of art or creation that surrounds or encloses the viewer on all sides.  Environments were paintings that combined physical elements - canvas, newspaper, dirt, machinery - with the typical stationary canvas, making the art move out into the overall space of the room.  In 1924, Kurt Schwitters, a master of collage painting, transformed his house in Hanover, Germany into a large Environment, or series of Environments.  It was entitled Column or Cathedral of Erotic Misery, and consisted of walls and ceilings covered completely with various angled and protruding abstract, randomly chosen shapes.  This was all done in an effort to break  the so-called "fourth wall" - that being the unseen wall between the performance and the audience.  When artists began to combine actions with Environments, some scholars believe the Happening was created.

Other scholars note the overall shift in the perception of art beginning in the later 1940s and early 1950s with the work of Jackson Pollock.  Pollock's famous "drip" paintings, where paint was dripped over a blank canvas to create a work, shifted emphasis from the final product to the act of creating that product.   Pollock's work became famous and made art cosmopolitan in America.  Many people began to view the performance (or production) of a work of art as more important than the subsequent viewing of an artist's creation.  This sort of thought grew into the late 1950s until the production of one of Pollock's paintings, or works by similar artists, became almost a form of theatre itself.  This shift in the perception of art was not just happening in America.  Across the globe, in Osaka, Japan, a group of Japanese artists known as the Gutai were experimenting with action and painting.   Gutai artists often painted with their feet, or threw bottles filled with paint at a canvas with rocks under it.  In 1957, the Gutai presented a formal, more theatrical work for an audience that was later described in an article in the Sunday, December 8th edition of the New York Times. This performance, with all of its theatrical uses of action and mechanization resembled compartments of later Happenings and the publication of it in the New York Times is said to have influenced the origins of Happenings.

Another artform given credit with the creation of Happenings is that of the Dadaists in the early 1900s.  Dada began with performances that took place in Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 in Zurich.  In a small, back room of the Cabaret, diverse, often simultaneous performances of lectures, concerts, readings, sounds poems and dances occurred.  Two major elements found in Dada are considered integral to Happenings.  The first is the importance of the element of chance. Dada was an anarchistic movement of sorts that sought to throw out all the conventional rules of theatre and performance and create a realm in which few, if any, rules existed.  In a similar manner, Happenings were an attempt at a new form of theatre, viewing traditional theatre as unimaginative and overdone.  By using the element of chance as a foundation, both art forms saw themselves as radical and groundbreaking.  Another element of Happenings whose origins can be traced back to Dada is the desire to bring everyday life onto the stage.  Dada performers sought to blur the distinction between art and life, until the two were interchangeable.  In Happenings, artists often sought to take the everyday and familiar and present it in such a matter that audiences saw the art in the everyday.

Another influence on Happenings was the work of the Bauhaus artists found in Germany in the 1920s.  Unlike the Dadaists, Bauhaus artists sought to create a theatre based on rationally determined "laws".  Bauhaus theatre was highly mechanical and combined many laws of engineering and architecture with those of dance and theatre.   Bauhaus was essentially a dance theatre - with most of the productions containing choreographed segments of mechanical dance-like movements to a mechanized sort of music.   This mechanized music, originally titled "noise music" by it's Futurist creator - Russolo - was an attempt to move ahead into modern times and see the music in the sounds of machines and industrial cities.  Bauhaus theatre also incorporated the use of lighting, conducting entire "light plays" where the varying in the color and length of different forms of light or shadow consisted of the whole performance.   Both  "noise music" and the use of light as an integral part of the story were incorporated into Happenings.

With the rise of modern dance after the first World War, another important factor in the creation of happenings began to take place.  Up until this time period, dance was almost always presented in a matrixed format with rigid rules of time, place, character and style.  Modern dance arose out of the desire to show dance for what it was - movement - not as part of a storyline or as a visual picture.  A Hungarian by the name of Rudolf van Laban attempted in 1908 to set down laws of movement for the body based on movements made in everyday life.  Laban's work greatly influenced his students to view dance not simply as a two-dimensional picture frame but as a dynamic three-dimensional use of space.  This work led to later developments by such famous names in the realm of dance as Merce Cunningham and John Cage.  Cage created his own Happening in 1952 at Black Mountain College, during a time period in which many of the subsequent creators of Happenings, included Allan Kaprow, Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine were in attendance at the college.

A final major influence on the development of Happenings comes from the rise of Surrealism in  the 1920s and the prevalence of the philosophy throughout the 1960s.   The basic idea behind Surrealism was the desire to join two or more disparate images in order to create a new reality.  Happenings almost always joined images or actions that seemed inappropriate or unrelated, often in an attempt to provoke thought or feeling.  Happenings also used the blending of the animate and the inanimate, a principle found in Surrealism. 

All of these movements and shifts in thinking seemed to have contributed to the development of happenings.  In an effort to provide as much information as possible on these various schools of thought, I have chosen not to present a wide variety of examples on this page.  On page four of this site, you will find detailed descriptions of four happenings that have examples of all the concepts and movements mentioned here.

Go to Performance Descriptions for detailed synopsis of specific Happenings.

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Calling, Allan Kaprow, 1962