Sandy's Staging Preferences

Sandy seemed to really love the more traditional comedia dell arte and I think that's where her heart was.  She loved staging plays in front of houses and buildings that provided the scenic backdrop.  She would scour the neighborhoods wherever she was to find a perfect tudor looking house and so on to be used as a living stage set to help set the atmosphere of the historic work being presented.  Just as it was done in the old traditional days of comedia dell arte. She also insisted on costuming being as authentic as possible for the play being presented and had a friend who did her costume sewing.

Sandy Archer and Ronnie Davis: Cottage Residents to 1966

Bay Area theater people had close ties with Williams College during the 1960s at least.

One of the cottages, in fact the one which journalist Phil Small had rented previously, had a steady line of theater people in residence for the better part of a decade.

Until 1966, R.G. Davis and Sandy Archer rented and used the cottage. Each of their names are legendary to this day in theater circles.

Sandy Archer is well loved and remembered for her contributions as an actress, teacher, and overall inspiration to theater throughout Northern California. R.G. Davis (or Ronnie as he was known to people closer to him) is the founder of what has become the San Francisco Mime Troupe. Trained as a dancer and in pantomime, "after studying with French mime master Etienne Decroux, R.G. Davis founded the Troupe in 1959" as an experimental project of the Actor's Workshop, "creating pieces, some silent, some with words, that were considered avant-garde. Today it would be called performance art. So, in fact, the first year of our long history we did perform pantomime." In their earlier performances the troupe was named the R.G. Davis Mime Troupe.

In fact, it was R.G. Davis's arrest mid-performance that "thrust the Troupe onto the stage of the Bay Area arts community" on August 7, 1965. "The Mime Troupe's performance of Peter Berg's adaptation of "Il Candelaio" by Giordano Bruno was stopped in mid-performance by San Francisco police on orders of the Recreation and Park Department. The Mime Troupe's permit had been revoked on grounds of obscenity. After the police arrest Director R.G. Davis, subsequent organizing efforts thrust the Troupe onto the stage of the Bay Area arts community." The subsequent benefit either to raise bail bail or pay for court costs attracted the attention of promoter Bill Graham, and so began a long relationship between the SF Mime Troupe and Graham. The Mime Troupe won the lawsuit, establishing the right of artists to perform uncensored in city parks.

Unlike most theater companies around the world, the Mime Troupe took its politics seriously. Even in the 1960s, Mime Troupe shows were not just busted for “indecency” and “obscenity.” The performances most often harassed were the most controversial like the devastating civil rights parody that was A Minstrel Show and the biting anti-war farce L’Amant Militaire, which a Des Moines, Iowa critic slammed as “shocking”, “unpatriotic”, “blasphemous”, before confessing “I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed an evening of theater more.”

(From Mission Local
The S.F. Mime Troupe Turns 50
by Mark Rabine
December 10, 2009)
http://www.sfmt.org/company/archives/50anniversary/articles/missionlocal12_10_09.html
Retrieved: 7.26.11

In early 1966, the SFMT was taking the show on the road. Sandy and R.G. also had another place to live in across the Bay and had been maintaining the keys to this cottage for occasional use. A fellow Mime Troupe actor, Darryl Henriques, knew of this pleasant, quaint, infrequently occupied, and most desirable Berkeley cottage and suggested that Ronnie and Sandy turn it over to a friend of his who was moving into the area and needed a place to live, which they did do. Darryl's compelling argument to convince Ronnie and Sandy was their having use of two houses was "bourgeois".

Another visitor to the estate during this same period was Julian Beck, founder of The Living Theater. I recall seeing the Living Theater present "Frankenstein" in Berkeley. But long before that performance, I was shown a black and white photograph of Ronnie and Julian standing together in conversation on the great patio near the mansion.

It's probably because I associated with some of these people back in the mid-sixties and being steeped in moving through the same times that I find myself relishing these memories.




http://www.facebook.com/pages/Sandy-Archer/134897503226235
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Mime_Troupe
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/21/obituaries/etienne-decroux-is-dead-at-92-master-of-modern-french-mime.html
Retrieved: 7.18.11


Audioclip of Ron Davis in 1998 in the interview by Celine Deransart and Alice Gaillard for the film "Les Diggers de San Francisco".
Contains actual footage of Mime Troupe Bust in San Francisco
http://www.diggers.org/mime_troupe_bust.htm
Retrieved: 7.18.11
http://www.sfmt.org/company/archives/minstrel/minstrel.php
Retrieved: 7.18.11

Staging the Revolution: Guerrilla Theater as a Countercultural Practice, 1965-1968
By Michael William Doyle
[First published in Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and '70s, New York: Routledge, 2002]
http://www.diggers.org/guerrilla_theater.htm
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Beck
Retrieved: 7.18.11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_theater
Retrieved 7.16.11

The purpose behind the Mime Troupe, according to founder R.G. Davis:

"The radical stuff we did in the '60s was a combination of avant-garde and rejection of bourgeois theatrical stuff. Anyone, especially Joan Holden, who talks about the Mime Troupe talks about it as if it was a political entity and not an art entity. And we were art people, avant-garde people. We did events and happenings and I performed with other artists who were also breaking rules, Tape Music Center and dancers and young painters from the Art Institute. I then got political, but that was because I thought that political people were more interesting. People joined us because we were ready to open up to ideas, anything that was subversive, radical, disruptive, entertaining and freewheeling. Then I left the Actors' Workshop and decided to play to audiences that seemed to be volatile, people who were active. I would say that's the definition of a radical theatre group. Otherwise you're playing to the bourgeoisie and telling them that they're stupid, or what the Mime Troupe does now, tells the middle class that they're really sharp and that the stupid people are in government."

(Encore: R.G. Davis
by Sam Hurwitt)

Ronnie Davis when discussing agit-prop:

"When the Mime Troupe first went to the streets to do short skits, crankies (paper movies a la Pete Schumann), and puppet plays, we didn't try to insult or assault people; we decided to teach something useful. We began by teaching general city-folk how to stuff parking meters with tab-tops, using a simple puppet-and-actor skit to inform them of the.free use of parking meters. Another skit in this vein, telephone credit cards, was also designed to teach people something useful."

R.G. Davis, "1971: Rethinking Guerilla Theater", in Performance (1), Vol. 1, No. 1, December 1971

The New Radical Theatre Notebook
by Arthur Sainer
1975 p. 50