Mo/ot Roach, for the City of Zagreb

American performance artist, playwright, filmmaker and arts administrator Ken Dewey was active in the happening movement in the 1960s. He visited Zagreb with Anna Halprin’s Dancers’ Workshop from San Francisco, who performed the show The Five-Legged Stool as part of the second Biennale in 1963. The performance caused such a fiery response from both the audience and critics, that the members of the ensemble stayed in Zagreb for a few more days to attend press conferences and clarify what it was really about.

During their extended visit, Ken decided to stage a 26-minute happening in a public space. As an art form, happening was still in its infancy back then. Blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life, the audience and the performer, a happening challenges the traditional understanding of an artwork as a static object. According to the script, Mo/ot Roach, For the City of Zagreb, was intended for one performer with a trombone (Folke Rabe), one with a portable tape recorder or transistor radio (John Graham, movement and text), and a spectator in the audience (Lynne Palmer).

Although unfinished, the performance paved the way for new friendships and collaborations. One of the Zagreb students, Josip Pepi Stošić, a poet, visual artist and art historian, kept in touch with Ken after the Biennale, who in turn directed and produced Josip’s one-act mimical show in Rome, in November of the same year.

Before the reconstruction of the happening, Janka Vukmir from the Institute for Contemporary Art will hold a lecture revealing more details about this interrupted encounter.

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Ken Dewey, author of the happening
Janka Vukmir, curator

House of Extreme Music Theater:
Damir Bartol Indoš, performer
Tanja Vrvilo, performer