Ken Dewey

Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Dewey (1934-1972) was an American performance artist, playwright, and director who was active in the happening and action theatre movements in the U.S. and throughout Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s.[1]

Ken Dewey (right) with the Finnish composer Henrik Otto Donner when they organized a happening in Helsinki, August 1963.

Career

Dewey studied sculpture with Oronzio Maldarelli and writing with playwright Theodore Apstein while attending Columbia University as an undergraduate. He lived in San Francisco in the early 1960s and he became an assistant director at the Actor's Workshop in San Francisco. He also studied mime with R.G. “Ronnie” Davis at the San Francisco Mime Troupe and dance with Anna Halprin.

Dewey became interested in performance art when he was introduced to the work of Robert Whitman. Dewey used geography, social science, architecture, and technology in his work. His projects were often designed around a particular city and focused on that city's infrastructure, history, and culture.[2] Notable works in this vein included City Scale (San Francisco) with Ramon Sender and Tony Martin, Street Piece (Helsinki), Exit Music (London), and Cincinnati Journey (Cincinnati).

Dewey lived and worked in European cities from 1963 to 1964, where he staged several happenings and action theater pieces, collaborating with Terry Riley, Chet Baker, Erkki Kurenniemi, Henrik Otto Donner, members of Anna Halprin's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop and the Living Theater, among others. He collaborated with Mark Boyle, Allan Kaprow, and others on a happening at the International Drama Festival during the 1963 Edinburgh Festival.[3][4][5]

In 1966 he produced Selma Last Year at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center, Philharmonic Hall Lobby, New York City. It was one of the first multichannel video installations, with photographs by Bruce Davidson, and music by Terry Riley.[6]

In 1966 Dewey became a staff member at the New York State Council on the Arts.[7] While at NYSCA he held the positions director of program development and director of research. In 1970, he was appointed by Governor Nelson Rockefeller to serve on the New York State Commission on Cultural Resources, a temporary state commission started by Rockefeller to study the current and long-range fiscal needs of cultural institutions. That same year he was also director of Planning Corporation of the Arts, a one-year research project, partially funded by the NYSCA, into the role of arts in a democracy

Dewey died in 1972 in a plane crash. A posthumous retrospective of his work Action Theatre: The Happenings of Ken Dewey was curated by Barbara Moore at the Franklin Furnace Archive in 1987.

References
  1. Szilassy, Zoltan (1986). American Theater of the 1960s. Southern Illinois University Press. p. 68. Archived from the original on 2016-08-25. Retrieved 2017-09-02.
  2. New York Public Library. "Ken Dewey Collection". Archived from the original on 6 September 2013. Retrieved 6 September 2013.
  3. Paul Henderson Scott, ed. (2005). Spirits of the Age. Saltire Society. p. 100. ISBN 0-85411-087-9.
  4. Sandford, Mariellen (1995). Happenings and Other Acts. Routledge. p. 369. Archived from the original on 2016-03-09. Retrieved 2017-09-02.
  5. Roy, Kenneth (2013). The Invisible Spirit. ICS Books. pp. 307–8. ISBN 978-0-9546527-8-4.
  6. "Events by Year". www.experimentaltvcenter.org. 2013-02-02. Retrieved 2023-05-13.
  7. Ken Dewey collection, 1943–1987 (bulk 1959–1972), held by the Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts
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