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 Amsterdam University Press
MICKERY THEATER
AN IMPERFECT ARCHAEOLOGY
MIKE PEARSON
REVIEWS BY JAC HEIJER
AND LOEK ZONNEVELD
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

MICKERY THEATER
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
 Amsterdam University Press
MICKERY THEATER
AN IMPERFECT ARCHAEOLOGY
MIKE PEARSON
REVIEWS BY JAC HEIJER
AND LOEK ZONNEVELD
Translated by Paul Evans
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
 CONTENTS

Acknowledgements 9

Foreword by Sijbolt Noorda 11

Probably not… an introduction 13

by Arthur Sonnen and Otto Romijn

Prologue
a) A short history 17
b) A task 20
c) A method 22
i) Analects 22
An action 22
A story 24
A photograph 24
Coda 25
ii) Archaeology 25
iii) Oral history 28
iv) All that remains… 29
d) Structure 32

1 Ritsaert ten Cate 34

2 In the attic 36
3 Otto Romijn 39
4 In the archive I 42
5 Frans de la Haye 46
6 In the archive II 50
7 Peter Schreiber 54
8 A building 59
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

9 Max Arian 65
10 A journal article 69
11 Failed conversations 71
12 Reviews 75
13 Jim Clayburgh 79
14 Reviews – The Performance Group 83
15 Photographs 87
16 Rob Klinkenberg 91
17 Reports 94
18 Erica Bilder 98
19 A lecture 102
 20 Titus Muizelaar 105
21 In his own words 108
22 Colleen Scott 113
23 A video 116
24 Janek Alexander 120
25 A production programme 124
26 Jan Lauwers 128
27 A letter 131
28 Peter Sellars 134
29 A research project 138
30 The producers
a Hugo de Greef 142
b Tom Stromberg 144
31 A workbook 147
32 Jan Zoet 150
33 A magazine 154
34 Marijke Hoogenboom 157
35 A book chapter 161
36 Early days
a Loek van der Sande 164
b Ruud Engelander 168
c Pip Simmons 173
37 Another video 173
38 A keynote 176
39 Epilogues 181

Postscript 186
A quest 187
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

The reviews of Jac Heijer

translated by Paul Evans

1970
1 La MaMa Repertory Company, USA, Rat’s Mass 191

1971
2 Traverse Workshop Company, UK, Our Sunday Times 193

1972
3 Grupo Tse, Argentina/France, The History of the Theatre 195
 4 The Pip Simmons Theatre Group, UK, The George Jackson 196
Black and White Minstrel Show
5 Tenjo Sajiki, Japan, Ahen–Senso (Opium War) 198

1973
6 The Combination, UK, Watch it all come down 200
7 Theaterschool, Netherlands, The Ignorant and the Insane 202

1974
8 Camera Obscura, Netherlands, Measure for Measure 203
9 Children of the Night, Netherlands/UK, Dracula 206

1975
10 Concept Theatre, USA/Netherlands, Fairground 208
11 The Pip Simmons Theatre Group, Netherlands/UK, An die Musik 209
12 ‘Jostling for Theatre in Nancy’ 211
13 ‘The Concise History of a World Theatre Festival:
Fear and Loathing in Nancy’ 216
14 Tenjo Sajiki, Japan 219
15 ‘Report of a Romance: 10 Years of Mickery’ 221
16 ‘Jac Heijer Shares Out Prize Amongst Theatre World’ 226

1976
17 The Pip Simmons Theatre Group, UK, The Dream of a
Ridiculous Man 227
18 Mickery, Netherlands, Folter Follies 229
19 Elephant Theatre, Hungary, De Drie Zusters
(Three Sisters) 231

1977
20 Squat Theatre, USA, Pig, Child, Fire! 232
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

21 Mickery, Netherlands, Vox Populi, Vox Dei 234

22 The Pip Simmons Theatre Group, UK, The Masque of 236
the Red Death

1978
23 Stuart Sherman, USA, Tenth Spectacle – Portraits of
Places 239

1979
24 La Maschera, Italy, Frühlingserwachen 239
25 Mabou Mines, USA, A Prelude to Death in Venice 241
 1980
26 The Wooster Group, USA, Point Judith 244
27 Theatre X, USA, Renovations 246
28 Mike Figgis, UK, Redheugh 248

1981
29 Stuart Sherman, USA, Hamlet 250

1982
30 The Wooster Group, USA, Route 1 & 9 252

1983
31 Het Trojaanse Paard/Jan Decorte, Belgium, King Lear 255

1984
32 Het Trojaanse Paard/Jan Decorte, Belgium, Scenes/Sprookjes
(Scenes/Fairytales) 257
33 Jan Fabre, Belgium, De Macht der Theaterlijke Dwaasheden
(The Power of Theatrical Madness) 259

1985
34 Mickery, Netherlands, Rembrandt and Hitler or Me 261

1986
35 Mel Andringa, USA, Sistine Floor Plan 263
36 The Wooster Group, USA, Road to Immortality (Part Two) –
L.S.D. (…Just The High Points…) 267
37 Mickery, Netherlands, Vespers 270

1987
38 Needcompany, Belgium, Need to Know 271
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

39 American National Theater, USA, Ajax 273

40 Taganka Theater/School of Dramatic Art, USSR, Cerceau 276

1988
41 ‘The History of the Mickery Theater in Photos’ – Mickery
Pictorial I: A Photographic History 1965–87 283

1989
42 John Jesurun, Shatterhand Massacre/Riderless Horse 286
 Touching Time and Moving with the Pressure of
the Times. On the last years of the Mickery Theatre
by Loek Zonneveld, translated by Paul Evans

1 Prologue – Peter Schumann’s garlic bread 289

2 A Man Says Goodbye To His Mother (from Bread and
Puppet Theatre, 1969) 290
3 ‘The dead body gives instruction’ – Hess Is Dead 291
4 ‘There’s a hole in my budget’ – Everything that rises
must converge 293
5 Deshima, a ‘poetic documentary’ by Ping Chong 294
6 Am I here for them or are they here for me? – You –
The City, Fiona Templeton 296
7 The Welcomed Death – Julius Caesar by Needcompany 296
8 ‘She left no traces, like water on the sand’ – She Who WAS
Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife by Love Theatre 298
9 ‘No grave can save me from my youth’ – BAK-Truppen
performs When We Dead Awaken by Ibsen 299
10 ‘Work in progress’ is no longer a process, it is a product
–Touch Time, a sail past by Mickery, not a farewell,
May 1991 301
11 Anne Frank – The Exhibition, Toneelgroep Amsterdam 305
12 ‘Are you in character?’ ‘Oh, no, not at all!’ – Brace Up!
by The Wooster Group 306
13 Stay on a safety island or take part in the traffic – 308
epilogue

Index 310
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
 Acknowledgements

This book has been long in its development; the research and writing have
taken over three years to complete. During that period I have been assisted
and guided by many individuals whom I need to thank.
I owe a huge debt to all my conversation partners who generously gave
their time, not only to speak to me but also to amend and correct my ac-
counts of our meetings: Otto Romijn, Frans de la Haye, Peter Schreiber,
Max Arian, Jim Clayburgh, Rob Klinkenberg, Titus Muizelaar, Janek Al-
exander, Jan Lauwers, Peter Sellars, Hugo de Greef, Tom Stromberg, Jan
Zoet, Loek van der Sande; especially Ruud Engelander for his close read-
ing of the text and Erica Bilder who pursued leads and encountered dead
ends on my behalf. And to Arthur Sonnen, Otto Romijn and Sijbolt Noor-
da for their insightful opening words.
Mickery Theater. An Imperfect Archaeology includes a selection of the late
Jac Heijer’s reviews of Mickery productions translated into English for the
first time, and of Loek Zonneveld’s poignant accounts of the final period at
Mickery, for which my sincerest thanks is due. Paul Evans has provided
sensitive and eloquent translations of both sets of texts, without which
the volume would be much the poorer.
I am also delighted to incorporate many evocative photographs by Bob
van Danzig from his unique record of Mickery’s past. I appreciate the per-
mission to include these images, as well as those of the late Maria Austria
and Oscar van Alphen.
To Rob Klinkenberg for his efforts in reading and offering crucial sug-
gestions on the first draft. I am pleased to include several of his recom-
mended amendments.
To uk photographers Steve Allison and Pete Telfer.
To the staff of the Netherlands Theatre Institute (tin), particularly
Radboud Kuypers, for their assistance in making the Mickery archive
available and for preparing the majority of the photographs included here.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

To the staff of Rozentheater for allowing us to tour the premises search-

ing for traces of Mickery.
To Maaike Groot and publisher Anniek Meinders and the editorial staff
at Amsterdam University Press – desk editor Christine Waslander, copy
editor Stephanie Harmon and production manager Marianne de Raad –
for the tireless and substantial attention they have given to the publica-
tion of the book; and to designer Suzan Beijer for realising a beautiful ad-
dendum to the history of Mickery.
To Professors Marijke Hoogenboom and Maaike Bleeker for their con-
tinuing support – in many different ways – in bringing the work to frui-
tion. 9
 To Colleen Scott for her active and unswerving encouragement and of-
fer of guidance in the most difficult of circumstances.
And to Arthur Sonnen who proposed the idea and who, from the first to
last, with Otto Romijn, has never wavered in his singular commitment to
the project.

Mickery Theater. An Imperfect Archaeology is an initiative of Stichting

Mickery Memorial. Its publication is only made possible through funding
from Fonds Podium Kunsten, Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds, Theater In-
stituut Nederland and the Holland Festival, whose support I acknowledge
with gratitude.
Mickery Theater results from research completed during an academic
sabbatical funded by my institution Aberystwyth University and by the
uk Arts and Humanities Research Council. I gratefully acknowledge their
support also.

Mickery Theater remembers the producer Eva Diegritz who wrote a sig-
nificant report on Mickery in 1989, and who died suddenly in 2009.

Mickery Theater is dedicated to Ritsaert ten Cate who passed away dur-
ing its writing. It was a privilege to meet with him during his final months,
and to encounter once more a vision that remained undimmed and un-
compromised.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

10
 Foreword

Mickery with hindsight

The location is Loenersloot, the time a spring evening in 1968. Amsterdam
students are having a party here. I forget why, probably just for the fun
of it, and I have only vague memories of what went on. Later I deduced it
must have been at the Mickery place and the guy in charge must have been
Ritsaert ten Cate, who later became one of my dearest friends. The occa-
sion gained even more meaning: it was then and there that I met the wom-
an who was to become the mother of my daughters.
Mickery is well known in the Netherlands in the 70s and 80s. Well
known among aficionados, yet by no means popular in the usual sense, it
was a community experience for habitués, visitors and theatre makers
alike. It wasn’t a place that attracted huge crowds: I remember more shows
with an audience of tens rather than of hundreds. Probably more people
would have been fans and regular visitors, had they known that Mickery
would become one of those places where one ought to have been. Now
many people vocally regret having missed it, including local art authori-
ties, reviewers and sponsors.
By many of those who do attend, Mickery is valued for its foreignness,
or better stated: its internationality. It is almost the only place at the time
in Holland where international shows could be seen on a regular basis – to
get a break from traditional Dutch-language and standard repertoire the-
atre, where what was quite common in the movies and the music scene is
completely absent. In Mickery’s final years its international character was
the main reason the board (of which I then was a member) hesitated to
draw the line and stop trying to convince Ten Cate that there could be a
further future for Mickery. If this place were gone, where in Holland would
international theatre go? Yet with hindsight, he was right: even with the
right kind of money the Mickery international theatre workshop could
not exist now. Its lifetime was over.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

With hindsight, it’s no surprise that the grandson of a great stage actor
and of a rich industrialist who was also an art collector would become an
international theatre maker and entrepreneur. It came to him as a discov-
ery, a gift life brought to him. But the family tradition wasn’t a point of
departure, it was a counterpoint. Ten Cate’s background epitomised es-
tablished society and its received ideas and communications. He wasn’t
driven away from it by political or sociological analysis and motivation.
For him it was a matter of creating a life of his own, a life that reflected his
personal choice and values. Ideology had nothing to do with any of it.
That, I believe, is how he came to the theatre and why theatre suited him as
it did. His dedication to the theatre was truly and naturally linked to his 11
 personal trajectory. How else could his voice and his vision be so natural,
so true to life?
My own world is that of the university. In its core and scope, academia
knows no national boundaries. Science is an international endeavour, not
to be locked up in national languages on national stages. Its true practitio-
ners are motivated by inner drives, be they of curiosity or a quest for truth,
or rather for the other side of established convention. Their profession is
their life, not the other way round. As a university president, I have had
the privilege of knowing and working with scholars of this true variety.
In many conversations with Ritsaert ten Cate, both in his Mickery years
and at DasArts and later, in his studio, I was often struck by the parallels
between academia and the arts, in both their superficial and their pro-
found manifestations. With hindsight, understanding this has led me to
understand and even more greatly value his drive and his talents. And it
led me to admire the sprezzatura with which he did what he did: create a
life for himself while he created opportunities for many others to do like-
wise. Speaking for myself, he helped me to become a better man – some-
thing I could never have guessed would happen back in 1968 during that
spring evening in Loenersloot.
I welcome this book as much for its structure as for its message. The
archaeology metaphor is a quite suitable manner to evoke the Mickery ex-
perience and the Ten Cate creation. I congratulate the author on the artful
way in which he has kept his balance on many tricky paths. Well done.

Sijbolt Noorda
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

12
 Probably not… an introduction

The introduction to these archaeological excavations must, of course,

­begin with Ritsaert ten Cate’s mantra: ‘Probably not…’ which denotes
the progressive character of his work. Every experience in his Mickery
Theatre was an invitation for further exploration. No final conclusion was
ever trotted out, at most a direction, a clarification, an approach; what was
important in his work was an inventory of possibilities. Even a possible
scenario for treating a certain problem was shunned; challenge was the
aim. The jury report of the Sphinx Culture Prize, which he won in Maas-
tricht in 1996, stated: ‘Ten Cate’s methods are both remarkable and indi-
rect, but this is not that strange if you consider that the translation of the
Greek word “methodos” is: “detour”. The “Ten Cate method” has a great
deal in common with this original Greek meaning. A direct answer is a
rarity with Ten Cate. He is more inclined to complicate an issue. He pro-
vides many possibilities, directions and formulations in an approach to a
problem. The inquisitor is personally responsible for the next step in the
reasoning. And gradually the eyes are opened.’
Actually, it is just the same with this book: it offers discoveries, causes,
surprises and insights, but also creates an intense need to plough further
into Mickery’s theatrical realm, which stretches out over all continents;
the avant-garde from Britain and America was able to survive in Loener-
sloot and on the Rozengracht in Amsterdam, and there was space for de-
velopments from Kenya to Iceland, from Hawaiian dancers to Welsh land-
scape artists. The Japanese avant-garde presented an entirely different
view of the audience. In the famous Fairground projects, the audience was
hauled through the space, to be confronted here or there by a scene or tab-
leau. This all contributed to transformations that took place in Dutch the-
atre between 1966 and 1991. Mickery initiated a fundamentally different
representation. This was desperately needed at a time when a new manner
of thinking about the function of art, and particularly theatre, made its
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

appearance in society. This was something new in the Netherlands: get-

ting the audience to think. Everything that the proponents of theatre in-
novation championed in the theatre in the Netherlands in the 1960s and
1970s was put into practice in Mickery, without great ideological debates,
but in a practical way and commencing with the stimulation of people’s
imaginative capacity.
Ritsaert ten Cate and his Mickery are under threat of being forgotten,
including by Dutch theatre makers. This is unjust and suggests a careless
treatment of Dutch theatre history. And because the Erasmus Foundation
never awarded its most important prize to Ten Cate, and no book or study
existed on Mickery, it became essential to explore how to proceed with 13
 such a project, together with the most important international theatre
man that the Netherlands has ever produced.
Ritsaert ten Cate e-mailed about this on 5 September 2005:

Oh, maybe it’s really quite simple.

You just start with groups, a sort of railway junction of items,
each with a characteristic of a performance, but also groups that
are picked out with a key function for the time, you could put
different reliable figures on that, and primarily threaten that
they be short and concise, no new flood of criticism; if that’s the
guideline you just need to think up a few themes, your own pas-
sion relationship subsidisers, and last but not least relationships,
audience, presentation and performance constructions, just to
mention a few things and you can have your own group of those
dear to you write an essay, chapter or whatever. Plenty of photos
if needed.
In short, divided up like that, there still seems to be pleasure to
be had, in short, just see.
Once again, that Saturday was lovely, affectionately […], R

A short e-mail amongst many other items of correspondence:

8 February 2007
Just a thought: hasn’t that book already been around for ages?
You only have to translate Jac [Heijer]’s reviews and opinion
pieces and you’ll have the whole development.
It’s just an idea, but it really is a very good idea.
Affectionately, Ritsaert

It would take until 2007 before an actual plan was discussed over English
Tea, because with Ten Cate everything needed to have style.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

On 13 June 2007 he e-mailed:

Wonderful table, wonderful crockery, delicious tea, scones, clot-

ted cream, jam, flan, I mean worthy of a better cause, I sometimes
think. It is lovely to see you operate with love and conviction and
none of your cards on the table. You’ll have to forgive me if I
sometimes come across facetiously and pull out all the stops
with all that beautiful stuff, book, research, marathon inter-
views (two, my goodness), film, exhibition, I mean there’s no end
14 to it. You’ll have to forgive me if I say that you were right to sug-
 gest that you could probably confer a good deal quicker if I were
not there. Good idea, it seems. […]. Just see. Love and thanks, and
greetings to you both, Ritsaert

The dreamt-of author was finally Mike Pearson, who had both performed
in the theatre and collaborated with Mickery and in the meantime had
­become a professor at the University of Aberystwyth in Wales. The first
section of this book contains his archaeological excavations; the second
section consists of the reviews of Jac Heijer, supplemented in the last two
years by Loek Zonneveld. And in order to organise the entire project the
Mickery Memorial Foundation was established by Arthur Sonnen and Otto
Romijn, a former staff member of Mickery who received an appeal from
Ritsaert to keep that inspired lunatic Arthur Sonnen on the straight and
narrow.
Mickery was the first theatre that made internationalisation its most
important task, long before this was formulated as the policy objective by
the Ministry of Culture and set in the subsidy provisions. In 1969, Minis-
ter of Culture Klompé very clearly saw the importance of this and decided
to award Mickery a subsidy. She had been the first minister since the Sec-
ond World War who felt that culture cannot be viewed separately from so-
cial developments.
The conclusion of the jury report for the Sphinx Prize formulated
­R itsaert’s motivations: ‘Ten Cate attempts to bring clarity to that part of
the mystery of the Sphinx that is never asked for: the darkness that lies
between evening and morning. The part of man from which disasters
stem.’
When in 1991, after 25 years, the last Mickery project, Touch Time, was
announced, Ten Cate wrote about the changed relationships between the
government and the arts: ‘I have grave doubts about what the long-term
consequences of all this might be in regards to artistic, cultural growth, if
only wafer-thin backing is left behind. Whoever looks at producers and
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

presenters these days will see the faces becoming more expressionless. It
is becoming increasingly difficult to guess what is going on behind that
mask. We remember the themes, but they are no longer played.’
At his last appearance in Paris in January 2009, on the occasion of a gi-
gantic congress about the influence of the American avant-garde on Euro-
pean theatre, his speech was titled: American Theatre in Mickery 1965–1991.
The Chronicle of a Love Affair. In the presence of everyone who was of inter-
national importance in the theatre, Ritsaert ten Cate drew attention to his
last telephone conversation with [American artist and regular Mickery
performer] Stuart Sherman, who succumbed to aids: ‘At first I didn’t
know what to say, but then told him I loved him, and thanked him for all 15
 the beautiful work he’d given us, and for the good times, and yes, thanks
for the memories, that too.’
There is no better recommendation for this book.

Arthur Sonnen and Otto Romijn

Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

16
 Prologue

a) A short history
The bare bones…
In December 1965, Ritsaert ten Cate, a film and television producer and
member of a wealthy Dutch textile manufacturing family, opens a small
theatre in a disused cowshed next to the farmhouse where he lives at Loen-
ersloot, a small community in the countryside between Amsterdam and
Utrecht; it is also an art gallery and there are plans for a publishing house.
He calls it Mickery, a combination of his own name and that of his wife at
the time, Mik Staverman – Mi(c)k and (e)R(y).

His aim?

We want to do things here that have not happened or could not

happen anywhere else. We want to combine all art forms here.
Our theatre/exhibition room must become a laboratory where
artists can work together and where visitors can experience art
in the truest sense of the word. (RtC in Diegritz, 1989, p. 24)

His desire?

…to revivify a stultified Dutch theatre with imported ideas; to

give theatre a vitality that can be called ritual or mysterious or
spiritual rather than realistic; incorporate the visual arts at a
high level into decors and staging; to stimulate the imagination
of spectators and spur them to formulate a vision of their own;
to take on the chronically resistant class of actors and audience.
(Schwartz, 1996, p.44)

The theatre programme commences with Mickery’s own production of

Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

English playwright Johnny Speight’s controversial drama If There Weren’t

Any Blacks You’d Have to Invent Them – ‘an allegorical string of episodic vi-
gnettes confined to a graveyard’ – quickly followed by a concert by Ameri-
can singer Nina Simone.
In 1966 Traverse Theatre from London appears with the plays Rooted and
Grounded and The Local Stigmatic; they are Mickery’s first guests from
abroad.
In 1967 Mickery/Stichting Incidenteel Theater Experiment stages its
own productions of De Meiden (The Maids) and The Dwarfs both by Jean
Genet. Later that year, following an exploratory visit by its founder and
director Ellen Stewart in 1966, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club brings 17
 Tom Paine (Part I) to Loenersloot whilst on tour in Europe. It is the begin-
ning of an enduring relationship and a key moment in Mickery’s history:
thereafter it will adopt La MaMa’s commitment to experimentation. And
it will routinely present international work, primarily from the English-
speaking world. Over the next six years, many of the most important com-
panies of the nascent alternative theatre scene travel to the barn where the
hospitality is always fulsome but where the performing conditions – spa-
tial and technical – are makeshift and strictly limited. From Britain comes
The People Show, The Pip Simmons Group and the Freehold Company; and
from the usa, Bread and Puppet Theater, and La MaMa on several further
occasions.
In 1972, after a short residency in a rented church – Noorderkerk – in
Amsterdam, Mickery moves to the specially converted Rozen Theater, a
former cinema on Rozengracht, close to the Oud West area and the Jordaan
in the city centre. Over the next 20 years, this multi-functional space will
become a vital location for presenting and producing new forms of the-
atre, consequently nurturing the careers of significant practitioners and
companies including The Wooster Group and Needcompany. Here the in-
cidental discoveries and embryonic appreciation and understandings of
processes of production and staging, proceeding from the initial experi-
ences in Loenersloot, are formally acknowledged – they inform the struc-
tural conversion and subsequent occupancy and usage of the building.
In the 1970s, Mickery hosts touring productions. It is a major port-of-
call for in-coming work to Europe that is often transferred from, or en
route to, the World Theatre Festival in Nancy, France. From the outset, its
programme is catholic, but also biased and marked by absences. It favours
the politically inflected and actorly engaging; the idealist practices of the
young acolytes of Jerzy Grotowski and Eugenio Barba, for instance, rarely
appear. RtC is selective in his programming choices, reflecting the politi-
cal uncertainties and cultural upheavals of the period in favouring the
exuberant, the provocative and the inciting: Pip Simmons’s Superman
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

(1970) based on the comic book character features a live rock band; Sim-
mons’s production Do It! (1971), about the activities of Abbie Hoffman,
Jerry Rubin and the American Yippie movement includes long sequences
of group nudity; and in The George Jackson Black and White Minstrel Show
(1972), naked performers notoriously handcuff themselves to audience
members just before the interval. These performances expose Dutch audi-
ences to significant radical practices that demand of them equally new
ways of looking, experiencing and responding. Appearances at Mickery
help the companies themselves to establish and enhance their reputa-
tions, both internationally and in their home countries.
18 Mickery maintains a long-term commitment to several directors – no-
 tably Pip Simmons; Terayama Shuji with his group Tenjo Sajiki; Hungar-
ian Peter Halasz with Elephant Theatre (1976), Squat Theatre (1978, 1983),
Love Theatre (1986) – who utilise the flexible space to inspire and create
peripatetic and environmental performances such as The Masque of the Red
Death (Simmons, 1977) and Cloud Cuckooland, a visit/ Nuhikun (Terayama,
1978). Many visitors become leading practitioners in the field – Liz
LeCompte with The Performance Group and later The Wooster Group;
Ping Chong with Ping Chong and the Fiji Company, and later Ping Chong
and Company; Lee Breuer and JoAnne Akalaitis with Mabou Mines; Stuart
Sherman; Theodora Skipitares; and Peter Sellars who is a regular contrib-
utor to panels and audience talks. Mickery itself is renowned as a crucial
locale of innovation. Its committed support helps nurture that theatre
scene regarded initially as the ‘fringe’ (of the mainstream) but ultimately
as a set of distinct practices with its own aesthetic priorities and econom-
ic realities.
Over the winter months, performances are presented for periods rang-
ing from one week to a month; the opening night is Tuesday. Mickery is
attentive to its audiences, enhancing their understanding and apprecia-
tion through informative printed programmes and in-house journals,
and frequently involving them directly – through their varying location
and arrangement during performances and in the demand for their par-
ticipation – as part of an extended enquiry into ‘manipulating the audi-
ence’. Manipulated in what ways? As a physical, plastic and potentially
mobile entity; as witnesses to events that might turn out to be other than
they at first seem; as partners in a redrawn contract of the supply and re-
ception that might confound common conventions of theatre-going.
Mickery also creates its own productions and co-productions, includ-
ing Fairground (1975) with the near-legendary hovering seating units. In
1975, Theatre X from Milwaukee presents The Unnamed. Its performers will
subsequently perform in Mickery productions that figure increasingly in
the programme, culminating with Rembrandt and Hitler or Me (1985) and
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Vespers (1986), both directed by Ritsaert ten Cate as contributions to a sec-

ond extended enquiry – ‘theatre beyond television’. In these later highly
mediated productions and in the espousal in the 1980s of the new ‘Flemish
wave’ – the work of Jan Fabre, and Jan Lauwers with Epigonen and Need-
company – Mickery becomes one of that circuit of venues in which Han-
Thies Lehmann’s notion of ‘postdramatic’ theatre materialises (see Lehm-
ann 2006).
In 1987 Mickery’s administration moves to offices on Herenmarkt. The
premises in Rozengracht are renamed Frau Holle and given over to use by
local artists, in an act combining both magnanimous invitation and di-
rect challenge. 19
 In the final period of its existence, Mickery wanders, producing work
in other contexts – bringing Peter Sellars’s Ajax (1987) from the usa to the
Holland Festival, staging its own History of Theatre (Part II) (1988) in Rot-
terdam.
Mickery is now one amongst several similar European organisations,
including venues directly inspired by its programming and approaches to
production. Ritsaert ten Cate is a founding figure and leading voice in the
Informal European Theatre Meetings gathering; his opinions and judge-
ments are a frequent point of reference in the development of internation-
al collaboration and co-production.
In the late 1980s there are plans to reopen the building on Rozengracht
as a club; in 1991 it ceases operations with the Touch Time Festival, mount-
ed in the Leidseplein, in the very heart of Amsterdam’s theatre-land.
In 1993 Ritsaert ten Cate establishes DasArts (De Amsterdamse School,
Advanced Research in Theatre and Dance Studies), a post-graduate school
offering dedicated studio space to young artists and tuition by many
of the practitioners associated with Mickery’s history; he is its first direc-
tor.

b) A task
The flesh…
What is it then, this Mickery? A building or number of buildings; a
programme or sequence of programmes; a workplace; one man’s biogra-
phy; a single life’s wish; a shifting vision? For the outside world: a set of
rumours, an enigma, a chimera?
And are there any distinctions to be made between them, these guises?
What can I, as a foreign scholar, contribute to an assessment of its
meaning and worth?
How can I write a singular, authoritative history of a phenomenon that
meant so much to so many? Ominously, the automatic function on my
computer repeatedly changes ‘Mickery’ to ‘mockery’.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

My sole qualification – I was there, at the time, if infrequently, at that

particular place. The history of Mickery on Rozengracht mirrors my own
professional career, in what we could at the outset, without irony, term
‘experimental’ theatre. In 1973, I performed at Mickery as a member of rat
Theatre. In 1989, in the final period of its activities, Mickery produced
­Gododdin, the large-scale, site-specific performance of my company Brith
Gof in Leeuwarden in Friesland. Unsurprisingly, in the writing I tend to
favour instances of direct contact; predictably, there will be a biographi-
cal cast to this narrative. As historian Karl Schlögel states: ‘Whenever we
follow a trail of evidence into the past, we are also on the trail of ourselves’
20 (2005, 9).
 Whilst I am no kind of a theatre historian, I can perhaps offer first-hand
experiences and perceptions of a certain period, and of processes of the-
atre making now almost disappeared. We are – as Wooster Group member
Jim Clayburgh remarked to me – the last of a breed: ‘The last who may
know how to use memory’.
As an outsider, I am not embroiled in old arguments and local disputes.
And I am ill-equipped to understand what one conversation partner
termed ‘the “Dutchness” of it all’: that unique combination of artistic lib-
eralism, bureaucratic facility and international entrepreneurship, less
apparent perhaps since – as another partner stressed – the rise of the cen-
tre-right in politics following the parliamentary election of 2002. It’s dif-
ficult, too, for me to appreciate the implications for, and impact upon, a
regional history of theatre lacking an avant-garde tradition. Or the ways in
which Mickery was complemented by the nearby Shaffy Theater (1968–88)
in Felix Meritis on Keizersgracht, where under Steve Austen’s direction
Dutch artists and companies from Will Spoor to Maatschappij Discordia
and Dogtroep were more likely to be presented – though Shaffy’s very
presence may have been less evident without the popular and critical pro-
file for alternative theatre growing around Mickery. Or the by-ways of na-
tional policies of cultural sponsorship…
What I do remember is the impassioned optimism of the late 1960s and
a period when Amsterdam was the place to be, to be seen.
If then Mickery was of its time, what was that time? My time – mine,
and that of those others I will eventually seek out and meet.
What more might be said beyond a naked chronology of produc-
tions?
Something perhaps about the special nature of the relationships built
with artists, a respect that enabled them to develop and flourish, and
about the unique combination of ‘the artistic’ and ‘the political springing
from the cultural’ that transcended conventional party political align-
ments. Something too about the lack of a broader appreciation of Mick-
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

ery’s achievements – particularly those of its own productions – largely

because they were rarely seen outside Amsterdam.
How can I avoid this becoming a biography of Ritsaert ten Cate? He
himself warned me against it. And Gary Schwartz’s Ritsaert ten Cate now
(1996) – that coincided with the award of the Sphinx Prize to him – already
serves the purpose admirably; readers are referred to it. Schwartz’s inclu-
sion of interviews with close associates has informed my own approaches.
Ten Cate’s own writings (see Scott 1996) are illuminating on background
and motive, and for those encounters and events of personal and profes-
sional significance – the last word even, one might suppose. Nevertheless,
it is, I’m advised by another correspondent, ‘necessary to see the man’: 21
 – To recognise the single-mindedness of his endeavour;
– To sense his purpose, sustained over 25 years: an individual who be-
came trapped in a professional institution, who became frustrated as
relationships with artists turned more business-like;
– To demonstrate his preferences. I recall colleagues from Cardiff Labo-
ratory Theatre trying to plead our case in Rozengracht as I sat discon-
solately in the van outside, realising the futility;
– To extol his foresight – it was he who saw the growing political impor-
tance of Europe, even as European partners with new drives and bet-
ter access to sponsorship were surpassing his own project. Uncon-
cerned, he was already elsewhere, realising new opportunities in
education.
Where does Mickery’s story reside?
– In the physical traces of production: the documentation of concep-
tion, negotiation, production and assessment preserved in public ar-
chive and on private bookshelf…
– In the multitude of individual voices – of artists, administrators and
audiences alike – which in concert, conflict and contradiction might
illustrate the complex experiences of, and responses to, Mickery’s
modes of operation.
– In the reviews of Jac Heijer (who died in 1991) and Loek Zonneveld,
translated into English for the first time by Welsh poet Paul Evans,
that illustrate not only the range of performances presented there but
also how, in sensitive and receptive hands, a critical discourse flour-
ishes around the work, legitimises it, makes a place for it in the world.
How to go about telling it?

c) A method
I begin with thoughts on foundational experiences of the discipline in
which I was trained. As with many of my contemporary theatre makers in
the 1970s, it was not in theatre.
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i) Analects
It is 11 December 2008 and I’m delivering a guest lecture at the invitation of
Professor Maaike Bleeker at the University of Utrecht on my aim to write a
history of Mickery. In explaining my intended approach, I reflect on the
nature of archaeology. I commence with an action, a story and a photo-
graph…

An action
It’s October 1968 – I begin in Utrecht – and I am an archaeology student in
22 University College, Cardiff. We are on a first-year course in artefact con-
 servation. We are each given a red, earthenware flowerpot by the lecturer
– I hold up a flowerpot – that we insert into a brown paper bag – I place it in a
bag. He then smashes it with a hammer – I break it.

And perhaps I should finish there; all that remains of this action
will be some potshards and your memories…

He then puts his hand into each bag, removes several pieces and throws
them into the rubbish bin – I do likewise.
Over the following academic term, we were invited – in the lecturer’s
own words – to reconstruct ­the pot. We were, I surmise, working with
analogy, trying to create something similar to those things we’d seen be-
fore, knew to exist from other times and places – flower pots. Otherwise,
we might have made a ceramic chicken or an abstract sculpture, or as-
sumed that individual pieces were crude knives or triangular nose-guards
– I demonstrate options. Without the base and its drainage hole, we might
have fashioned a drinking bowl.
The process took several weeks: sticking the pieces together correctly,
filling in the gaps with white plaster of Paris, then painting them red – a
red not too closely matched, to show the extent of my own handiwork, as
if there were any doubt. What he didn’t reveal was that flowerpots are pres-
sure-moulded; break them and the molecules are released cataclysmical-
ly, chaotically. This was never going to work; the final edges would never
meet. Our efforts would always be confounded; reconstruction is impos-
sible, an empty notion.

And then in Utrecht, I tip the contents of the rubbish bin onto the table. Old cof-
fee cups, used tissues, discarded lecture notes, plastic bottles and fragments of
flowerpot spill out, mixed together.

What he didn’t tell us is, that it’s these pieces that usually survive.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

And then I pick up the hammer:

Or more likely just this: something that bears – to misquote

Michel Foucault from the introduction to The Order of Things –
no trace of having ‘just broken the flowerpot’.

What can we ever tell from the hammer?

A series of crude metaphors for my Mickery project: about piecing to-
gether the past; and differentials of survival; and the perils of over-enthu-
siastic interpretation. A small performance of theory. 23
 A story
Same period, same place...
We are on a first-year course entitled ‘History, Principles and Methods’.
In an inaugural session, our professor makes a proposal. At that time, the
department in Cardiff possessed many rare and valuable books on archae-
ology – antiquarian volumes such as Camden’s Britannia, first published
in 1573. Most were leather-bound folio editions, with small blocks of print-
ed text at the centre of a large white page. Given the growing popular inter-
est in archaeology and as there were now so many of us – fifteen in my year
– he informed us that there was desperate need for more space in the de-
partment. So there was a plan to split the books, cut off the white from the
pages and then rebind them as smaller volumes.
‘Is that alright?’ he asked provocatively, ‘After all, it’s only empty space.’
We quickly learned about context – the conditions in which something is
placed, and from which it derives meaning; about ethical responsibilities;
and about the deformations that may already have occurred in the things
that come to us from the past.
At the time, we had little else theoretically to go on. Only the ‘law of
superposition’ – the deeper one goes the older it gets; and the ‘ladder of
inference’ – from an artefact one can infer a lot about technology (how it
was made), far less about belief (its symbolic status, what function it
played in original cognitive systems).
More crude metaphors...

A photograph
It is 12 January 1973 and rat Theatre is performing Blindfold in Cardiff.
This photograph is one of only 72 existing images of the production.
The programme of the World Theatre Festival in Nancy would say of us
in May that year: ‘It is “Poor Theatre” and “Theatre of Cruelty” taken to
their furthest extremes.’ [...] ‘Few could like them, legitimately, lay claim
to Artaud, at least with regard to the manifesto on cruelty.’
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Referenced here, to provide context for festival-goers, is the ‘poor

theatre’ of Polish director Jerzy Grotowski whose Theatre Laboratorium
had astonished audiences in Western Europe when it first appeared in
1968; and the writings of French visionary Antonin Artaud, at that time an
influence not only on alternative theatre but also mainstream practices –
in 1964, Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz staged the ‘Theatre of Cruelty’
season with the Royal Shakespeare Company. But this was idiosyncratic,
aggressive, disturbing, preposterous, ugly stuff – form and content locked
in one semi-coherent outburst of violent energy. We were proto-punks,
fuelled by a set of attitudes to the body physical and to the body politic, our
24 mouths full of Situationist slogans – ‘What are you against?’ ‘What have
 you got?’ If we’d been able to play guitars, we would have formed a band;

rat Theatre, Blindfold, 1973

instead, we made physical theatre. It was our only option: arrogance, bad
attitude, disrespect for theatre tradition, and confrontation with audi-
ences – theatre as traffic accident.
In Nancy, a man from Amsterdam seems to appreciate what we are do-
ing in theatre – and in the name of libertarian politics – and invites us to
his place. In December 1973, we appear at Mickery.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Coda
In the discussion that follows the lecture in Utrecht, individuals recount
the haziest memories of events in Loenersloot. Some are turned almost
fabulous – ‘They had fish, big fish, hitting each other’; ‘...holding up sticks,
red sticks, white sticks, to determine the ending’; ‘There was a large poster
in a field’…

ii) Archaeology
It’s difficult to recollect a time before video. A world that we were not si-
multaneously recording: for future reference; for posterity; as anticipato-
ry aide-memoire. To keep hold of the present, as something to do whilst 25
 present. Now, we have an abiding urge to document ourselves constantly;
any public event generates multiple replicas of itself. Simply hold up your
mobile telephone. It’s difficult, too, to recall a time before digital technol-
ogy and its pervasive domestic adoption: now, we can access Internet in-
formation on every stage in the manufacture of the flowerpot; we can even
reassemble it on screen, virtually.
But in 1973 why would we want to document, even if we had the equip-
ment? What for, when alternative theatre professed and asserted its live-
ness in performance – its very existence predicated upon the co-presence
and direct interaction of performer and spectator, in an instance of ‘here
and now’? For publicity maybe, but even then better to remain guarded
about what we looked like, what we intended to do.
Yet both intentionally and accidentally, any process of production gen-
erates debris and detritus, irrepressibly. From the theatre of that period,
these are the kinds of things that survive – a few slides, the odd photo-
graphic contact sheet, fragments of audio tape, scribbled drawings on
slips of paper, indecipherable notes, diaries, reviews, injuries, scars, half-
remembered experiences, faint recollections. Metaphorically at least, ar-
chaeology does appear useful in helping us appreciate these remains. But
the material record is always and invariably fragmentary and partial. Giv-
en the unpredictability of long-term archaeological formational process-
es – with various modes of documentation being lost or decaying over dif-
ferent timescales, as paper wears, metal staples rust, photographs fade,
tapes stretch, memory malfunctions and the equipment on which to play
obsolete formats disappears – it is hubris to believe otherwise.
There is, however, more. Conventionally, we think of archaeology as
something to do with digging up the past. We have a romantic notion of
the dusty archaeologist, delving, burrowing and discovering priceless ar-
tefacts. Although excavation is an essential recovery procedure, it is not,
in and of itself, the discipline. We can better regard archaeology as a prac-
tice set in the present, that works on, and with, the traces of the past. What
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

archaeologists do is to work with evidence in order to create something – a

meaning or narrative or story – that stands for the past in the present. Rather
than being a reconstruction of the past from its remains, this is a reconstitu-
tion.
Archaeology, then, is the relation we maintain with the past; it consists
of a work of mediation with the past. It is contemporary interest that sends
us to the past; we produce the past in the present.
It was long felt that the past somehow speaks to us – as if every artefact
were a purposeful message to us – and that all we have to do is listen and
decipher in order to understand. But archaeological knowledge has to be
26 produced, and interpretation is always informed by present interests,
 needs, desires and values, be they personal, political or academic. The past
‘as it was’ or ‘as it happened’ is an illusion, not something stable, some-
thing homogeneous; and there is no possibility of a final and definite ac-
count of things. In this sense, archaeology is something that each of us
routinely does: this we could call ‘the archaeological imagination’. In con-
sequence, the past may become a place of contemporary contention – of
conflicting interpretations, of power struggles over ownership, of claim
and counter-claim. About what this or that really meant; about the inten-
tions and beliefs of this or that individual, at that time...
In thinking and writing archaeologically about devised performance,
and about its sites of exposition such as Mickery, we should acknowledge
the importance of process – there is always more to be said and done; plural-
ism – there are always different ways of describing and representing the
same event; indefinite series – one event (performance) generates further
practices (documentation) that inform this book that inspires new re-
search and so on...; absence and uncertainty – the space between materials,
documents and narratives generates insight.
Archaeology is about interpretation, about work being done in the gaps,
about making an intelligent assessment of happenings that were never
that certain or sure in the first place! Traces and relics are drawn together
in a creative project in the present and not as a speculation on original
meaning or intention, since that very meaning was already indistinct and
multiple.
In proposing an archaeology of theatre these questions arise:
– What remains and why? And what went where? What to the archive,
what to the personal library, what to the rubbish dump?
– What is lost, and how might this shortfall be addressed?
– What is remembered and why? Are memories primarily those of
when the performance went well, or are they of all those doubts, con-
flicts and traumas of the production period, or of accidents, mishaps
and failures – the time when the set fell over – during presentation? Is
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it ever possible to remember extended passages of performance – to

remember durations of activity sequentially in real time – or does rec-
ollection of an event inevitably collapse into a few resonant images?
– And is there a tension between the official version of events – pre-
served in perpetuity in the archive – and the remembrance of flashes
of euphoria and uneasy experiences by those present at the time? In
the cuttings library, press reviews endure tenaciously as, we assume,
evidence from reliable witnesses. To assert the equal veracity of scraps
of experience retained in those who were present, and the flotsam and
jetsam of performance is the task of theatre archaeology.
27
 iii) Oral history
Performance endures not only as material remains, but also in the recol-
lections of its practitioners, and of its witnesses. Sometimes these former
exist as detailed testimony and elaborated narrative: more often as anec-
dotes – proudly aggrandising, exaggerating, romanticising occurrences
of biographical or artistic significance or impact. Occasionally they are
transformed into aphorisms or analects: instances of expert observation
and knowledge worked into parables of performance, and transmitted in
the essentially oral culture of theatre making.
And these we should encourage, these travellers’ tales from places few
academic commentators are likely to visit, or standpoints they are likely
to assume. In theatre scholarship, we concentrate too much on the analy-
sis of performance from positions of spectatorship; and on constructing
authoritative, external and frequently attenuated versions of ‘what actu-
ally happened’ – causing us to be rational and reasonable about work that
was none of these things at the time. There is too little focus on perfor-
mance as a contingent mesh of experiences: on feelings of ‘fight or flight’;
on histories written on and in the body; on accounts that might discom-
fort the past – secret histories; tall tales; personal revelations; stories of
awkwardness, pain, trauma, scarring…
Now that we have practitioners with longevity – 20 years, 40 years – in
alternative theatre, we can begin to examine, with them, the repercus-
sions of the longue durée of their protracted involvement. How, for in-
stance, do echoes of past performances inflect and rebound in their cur-
rent work? How does the personal bodywork – or plain survival tactics – of
one performance get carried forward into another? How is the work of one
company manifest in another, as performers shift their allegiance?
This examination will require close critical attention to procedures of
genealogy and historiography; it will entail enquiring into details of life
history, group culture, and individual and collective oeuvres; into bad
practice – accident, chance, ‘pushing your luck’, banal ‘makings do’, the
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

low points; into drunken nights and improprieties; into effluent and
murky discharge rather than the usual concerns of scholarly enquiry –
author, genre, period – or the manicured life stories of hagiography.
This process explores a history of practices and ‘ways of going on’ that
were transmitted face-to-face and mouth-to-mouth then; these have be-
come voices and reminiscences, in chorus and cacophony, in quiet reflec-
tion and apparent contradiction, now.
‘He was political; he wasn’t political. He was very Dutch, he wasn’t
Dutch at all.’

28
 iv) All that remains…
A wooden model, a book of pictures, a performance programme,
a scientific report, a neon sign, a chair, a video, a photocopy, an
obituary…
The reminiscences of former staff, visiting directors and per-
formers, audience members…
The published articles and books of reviewers, critics, academic
researchers…
These are the remains of Mickery.
My approach will be part archaeology, part oral history, part
memoir…

My basic strategy is to choose a number of ‘things’ to represent Mickery,

both archival documents and physical objects: to describe them and to
use them as an entrée into discussion of broader aspects of its history; and
to undertake a series of conversations with key individuals who have per-
ceptions of particular periods in its history
An assemblage of physical remains and memories; a concatenation of
images and reflections, of documentary accounts and personal revela-
tions – purposefully preserved, casually called to mind – that stands in for
Mickery, in its absence.
It is an imperfect archaeology: imperfect because my method is not rig-
orous. I speak no Dutch. So as I haunt the Mickery archive at the Nether-
lands Theatre Institute, I am drawn inexorably to companies and produc-
tions that I witnessed – this document or that photograph acting as a
mnemonic, awakening experiences, a source of pleasure in the present.
And a source of regret too, as I recognise the faces of those already depart-
ed.
Imperfect too: in my understanding of fragments themselves. Some I
identify immediately. With others I need help to discern their signifi-
cance, largely from those who were there then. And others – Dutch pieces
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

in the main – to continue my analogy, I admit: ‘I don’t even know which

way up they are, let alone where they fit.’
And an imperfect oral history: I drift from one conversation to another
with no formal understanding of interview technique – taking what I am
told at face value, listening to tales coloured by nostalgia and hindsight
and filtered through present perceptions. Trying to catch the sub-texts,
the innuendoes and the counter-narratives: to pay proper attention to
what individuals say. Rather than including the conversations verbatim, I
write an account of each encounter. I realise that, often, the same events
are referenced. I decide to leave in any repetitions and reiterations, for
these may truly constitute ‘just the high points’ of Mickery’s history. 29
 A Mickery chair, 2010

After writing, I send the texts to my conversation partners for review,

approval and correction: to edit and clarify; to elaborate further; and to
remove any indiscreet comments, what upon reflection appears impru-
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

dent or over-inflated. One well-known director withdraws permission to

publish, citing displeasure with the format and content of the account of
our conversation. Is it something that was said, something revealing that
undermines a closely policed history; or simply the standard of my writ-
ing, and my failure to relate our conversation appropriately? What to do:
to make some sanctimonious critical comment by leaving several pages
blank in this volume, or by writing a further speculation on likely reasons
for the failure of the original? Better perhaps to leave the absence as un-
marked, as a further imperfection, as a lacuna in the manuscript to be
filled by supposition and conjecture.
30 Archival research, oral history and field observation are then com-
 bined. There is no claim to completeness: fragments of differing types are
assembled to create a partial picture, a glimpse of creative aspirations.
The project is as much about method as Mickery.
It resembles a meandering journey, in a land dimly familiar. Or a per-
sonal quest – a search in which everyone I meet recommends someone else
who might supply a missing viewpoint, or offers tantalising hints of oth-
er material that might orientate me – a manuscript that Sijbolt Noorda
possesses on the first years of Mickery; the metres-high audience research
documents of Professor Henri Schoenmakers; the revealing letters to
scholar Don Rubin, founding editor of Canadian Theatre Review; the de-
signs in his sketchbook for unrealised productions. Mickery remains a
Grail, always slightly beyond my reach.
The more I read and visit and listen, the more the story of Mickery be-
comes a palimpsest, a page written over, written around and written
through but from which the central text – the text that Ritsaert ten Cate
might have provided – is already indistinct or erased.
My account is ramshackle, provisional, built from the information
available to me at the time. My hope – given what on re-reading appears to
be a long apologia – is that it will enhance wider appreciation of the his-
torical, cultural and aesthetic significance of Mickery.
And evoke a period of fervent creativity in theatre. And recover, reassess
and activate some of the artistic gains made.
And celebrate an energy and intelligence that might just inspire a new
generation of practitioners.
And stimulate further initiatives...
My question (and hope): Is all that was once possible still possible, al-
beit in altered forms?
And I hope too that this small beginning will inspire both scholars and
practitioners to enquire further: into the archives of Mickery in the Neth-
erlands Theatre Institute; into material dispersed by Ritsaert ten Cate to
places where it might prove most stimulating – to the puppet company
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Hotel Modern in Rotterdam, to Peergroup in Veenhuizen. Into all that re-

mains…
The title I decide upon is Mickery Theater. An Imperfect Archaeology. Ar-
thur Sonnen calls it ‘a detective movie with only circumstantial evidence’.
Regard this, then, as a prologue to further work. And only one reconsti-
tution of the material – yours may well be other.
My one regret is that my tone may appear too elegiac – unavoidable in
looking back to a period when we had, in British director Albert Hunt’s
words, ‘hopes for great happenings’. Written from a perspective few of us
ever thought we’d achieve. In Pete Townsend’s words in The Who’s My Gen-
eration – ‘Hope I die before I get old’. 31
 d) Structure
This is a volume in two distinct sections.
In the first section, conversations and descriptions alternate. Through-
out, photographs and line drawings are included to illustrate productions
mentioned and to help reveal the workings of Mickery itself, though few
visual documents exist of its interior architecture, the scenic layout of
productions or its audience.
The ordering of material is largely chronological, though the trajecto-
ry will often enter wormholes in time, with the same stories reappearing;
or, thinking geologically, stories becoming folded and faulted, brought
into unexpected juxtapositions.
With the general reader in mind, I have avoided excessive citation; quo-
tations, in general, refer directly to the publications under consideration
in each short chapter. In this, it is informed by the recent work of anthro-
pologists Daniel Miller (The Comfort of Things 2008) and Kathleen Stewart
(Ordinary Affects 2007), who try to capture and express the affects of their
encounters with material and with others.
I have avoided including a comprehensive gazetteer of companies, pro-
ductions and dates. For some readers – those, in the main, who were there
at the time – the names and images I include will occasion instant recog-
nition, serving as a prompt for experiences past. For others, having a com-
puter and search engine close at hand may be desirable. Some companies
and individuals are even now just two clicks away on the Internet – Need-
company, Mabou Mines, The Wooster Group. Others remain indistinct –
phantom presences: to recover them is where the further research begins.
Despite the title – included to make my subject matter explicit in li-
brary catalogues and on bookshelves – I refer throughout to ‘Mickery’
without further qualification, though others use ‘the Mickery’ and ‘the
Mickery Theater’. Mickery was the single word on the neon sign.
And for conciseness, I call Ritsaert ten Cate ‘RtC’, the style he adopted
in his own correspondence. I never knew him, as did others, by the famil-
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

iar Rits.
The second section includes 42 reviews of productions staged at or by
Mickery and other critical texts by Jac Heijer, arranged from 1970 to 1989
and refer in the main to the productions I reference as well. It concludes
with 13 reviews and thought-pieces by Loek Zonneveld that cover the final
peripatetic period of Mickery’s existence with descriptions of the work of
John Jesurun, Ping Chong and Fiona Templeton, as well as Needcompa-
ny’s Julius Caesar and Mickery’s own final production Hess Is Dead.

32
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
 1 Ritsaert ten Cate
Ritsaert ten Cate, Loenersloot Mickery Gallery, 1966

(In his own words – founder/artistic director, Mickery, 1965–91; founder/

artistic director DasArts, 1965–2000)

December 2007, Amsterdam

It is a shaky start. I am casual in my attention to note taking and recording.
I assume that our conversations will go on, and that over the months he
will guide and direct me in writing the history of Mickery – his concept,
his place, his achievement. I do not realise how ill he is, how fleeting our
contact will be.
It is on a visit with Arthur Sonnen to Touch Time, RtC’s studio and gal-
lery that we meet for the first time in a long time. Also present is Erica
Bilder, who is helping to sort and catalogue his collection. He is reticent
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and potters in the background, searching for this or that, as Erica explains
her connection with Mickery, expressing opinions on its significance
within his earshot that he neither interrupts nor contradicts.
She had been given tremendous responsibilities for her age, multi-
tasking in contemporary parlance. But not too young to realise how RtC
had an ability to skirt existing rules – of funding, production and presen-
tation – through a combination of personality and class, and the support
of a board of influential individuals. And how he developed a corporate
approach, diverse in its discourses – business-like in relation to sponsors,
pre-emptive in producing official reports, attentive to audiences in offer-
34 ing an extended programme of performances, with associated talks and
 films. ‘Everything was possible in the Mickery’, she concludes.
He searches for one of the books of photocopies of photographs that he
gave to the performers in preparation for work on his production Rem-
brandt and Hitler or Me (1985). He finds the model of Tenjo Sajiki’s Cloud
Cuckooland, a visit/Nuhikun (1978), a folding wooden box with a handle that
opens like some archaic board game. ‘Oh my God, is it really?’ she ex-
claims. And together, as they arrange and push around the blocks that
represent the hovercraft units and their audiences – pointing and specu-
lating, figuring out what went where – they remember and summon up
Mickery.
Finally he expresses an opinion. ‘It was an accident in time. We started
something we didn’t know anything about, didn’t know the rules of what
was to be done.’ From my notes, I see someone then says, ‘My house is Mick-
ery’. It could have been anyone present.

19 March 2008, Amsterdam

Our second meeting is on ‘Woonboot Diogenes’, the canal houseboat he
shares with his wife Colleen Scott; I do not think to bring a tape recorder.
He is visibly weaker. In my notes, perhaps as a result of my shorthand or
his lack of energy, he appears terse and epigrammatic – ‘Mickery was an
attitude not a space. The work always came first.’
He remembers Loenersloot: half the audience in evening dress crying
during Nina Simone’s performance; the important synergy that came
from the presence of gallery and theatre. And Rozengracht too: challeng-
ing the complacency of audiences by constantly shifting the point of ori-
entation, both physically and thematically; creating new forms of drama-
turgy in the ‘Making theatre beyond television’ experiments. With
hindsight, he reflects – ‘It was a day-to-day dealing with a different cul-
ture.’ But he makes no overall assessments, no grand claims, no neat con-
clusions. I tell him of my plan to interview others. ‘Trust no-one’, he re-
sponds, helpfully.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

17 December 2008, Amsterdam

Later, after his passing on 5 September 2008, I meet Colleen again on the
houseboat, to collect the large book of birds he has left me. His absence is
profound. And she is candid: about herself – ‘He chose me because I’m not
Dutch’; about relationships with certain colleagues and artists to whom I
might speak that were now broken and had turned bitter – ‘They invali-
date themselves’; about the obstinacy and tenacity in his booking policy
– ‘He kept bringing them even though audiences didn’t like the work’; and
above all about his seriousness of intent – ‘Ritsaert was not playing tid-
dlywinks!’ 35
 2 In the attic
It begins for me in the attic, with a battered green suitcase. In unsteady
torchlight, I open it. And here are the surviving scraps of youthful ambi-
tion, all that I once considered important, thought worth keeping: under-
graduate essays; archaeology textbooks; the programmes of student dra-
ma festivals; notes on Erving Goffman and R.D. Laing borrowed from a
friend and never returned; a ticket for a benefit concert for Chapter Arts
Centre featuring Pink Floyd; the first embarrassing attempt at writing a
book – in multi-coloured felt-tip pens! All that remains of the years 1968–
73 – random, jumbled, unstratified…
And here too a sheaf of yellowing typed A4 sheets. The cover reads: rat
Theatre, The Mickery Reviews, December 4th – December 23rd, 1973. Am-
sterdam. The first page is headed ‘Ritsaert ten Cate’s Justification’. He
writes:

RAT Theatre, Newcastle, is a completely new and unexpected

star in the English ‘Fringe’ firmament. The group’s first perfor-
mances, about a year ago in the annual n.u.s. Drama Festival
sponsored by The Sunday Times, placed it immediately on the list
of groups to be reckoned with.

Instead of perfectly rehearsed shadow-fights, the phenomenon

of a group who literally attacked each other with sticks and clubs,
had never been seen before, and was received with mixed feelings.
The opponents used the old argument that you cannot do things
like that on stage, that it is’nt [sic] theatre (where have we heard
that before). Supporters had trouble placing the new phenom-
enon and most had to be satisfied with the admission that
they did not know what it was all about, but that it had made a
great impression. What was more indicative for the international
fringe was that the group was immediately placed on the menu
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for the Nancy Festival, went on to the festival in Palermo, played

in Rome, Belgrade and Ljubljana and toured throughout
England. The ‘cruel, sado-masochists’ turned out, in the mean-
time, to be perfectly gentle, friendly, merry people – even though
they were sometimes suddenly covered in plasters – who take
their work very seriously and work peacefully together […].
In Wroclaw we came across the most threatening figure of the
whole group, the blond bully from blindfold. He had left the
group for a time to do some theatre with the children from his
neighbourhood. (He will be playing his character again when
36 they come to Mickery).
 Mickery originally planned that the group should play blind-

rat Theatre, Hunchback, 1973

fold for a week, which forced rat to phone us to tell us that,
as we should have known, six performances of blindfold, one
after the other, was physically impossible. Yet another demon-
stration of how quickly, once over the first shock, you accept a
new phenomenon and slot it in as a show that must be seen,
without stopping to think of what, for this group, is an obvious
practical aspect. Whether rat’s acting method can or should
lead to a new form of theatre is debatable; what is certain is that
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

the work-method they are exploring is completely new: and a lot

must happen if this is still to be possible in Mickery.

RtC had seen us at the World Theatre in Nancy in May 1973, in the early
years of a liaison in which he would consult with Monique Lang every year
several months before the festival, to identify what work might pass
through or transfer to Mickery. In Nancy we scandalised; he invited us to
Amsterdam.
There we are – young, confident, uncompromising. And there I am –
that ‘blond bully’ – persuaded by RtC to return, though I needed little per-
suasion: to perform at Mickery was already both aspiration and accolade 37
 for my generation of theatre-makers. What strikes me is how many of the
attitudes of Mickery are contained in this single document: that RtC
writes a ‘justification’ – taking care – clear in a responsibility to nurture a
critical framework for, and popular understanding of, emerging practic-
es, fostering a context for work, a way of seeing, attending closely to audi-
ence and press alike. That he is guarded in his opinions – I’m not sure he
liked our rough-hewn physical style but he appreciated our seriousness.
That he is fully aware of the English scene. That he is ‘doing the rounds’ of
the festival circuit, meeting me in November in Wroclaw.
And then in the document there are translations of the reviews, RtC
equally mindful of a responsibility to support the practitioners, taking
care. From Het Parool –‘Those who want to keep abreast of new develop-
ment must not miss rat Theatre’; from NRC Handelsblad; and from Jac
Heijer in Haarlems Dagblad – ‘A completely different experience from the
play you just sit and look at; aesthetic pleasure, enjoyment but also insight
gained through intelligent reasoning.’
In November 2006 we meet in Aberystwyth for a rat Theatre reunion.
A colleague, greyer but still vital, brings two fragile ‘Gestetnered’ sheets:
a map and an itinerary of the subsequent ‘Mickery–Circuit Tour of Judas’
– Amfitheater th-Twente in Enschede, Theater de Lantaren in Rotterdam,
Minitheater in Dordrecht, Casimir in Amstelveen. And somewhat worry-
ingly – ‘Means of Transport: Mickery-van.’ Mickery is already an importer
and promoter, evangelical in spreading the message more widely.
And he brings too rat Theatre’s subsequent publicity brochures, pep-
pered with quotes from the Dutch press – even Twentsche Courant’s ‘a
wretched experience’ is included. The Mickery engagement is crucial to
enhancing our status in Britain, helping to secure further work and fund-
ing through a reputation – albeit gilded and embroidered – won abroad.
rat, as with other groups, begins to refer to itself as ‘international’.
I bring a three-minute film of rat Theatre in Nancy discovered in the
Institut National de l’Audiovisuel’ (ina) archive in Paris. Here is what RtC
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

saw, but which those semi-naked figures – in their blindfolds – never

could. Now, men in their late fifties look at themselves – in motion, in co-
lour – finally appreciating something of the effect they had.
And at the bottom of the suitcase is a single black-and-white photo-
graph taken in May 1975: of Jac Heijer leaning against a car – RtC’s sports
car – in the main square in Nancy. RtC had persuaded a group of Dutch
critics to accompany him to the festival, nurturing the critical discourse
– taking care.

38
 3 Otto Romijn

Mickery Loenersloot exterior, mid-1960s

(Independent coach/consultant; deputy director Mickery, 1970–5)
Conversation: 13 May 2009, Amsterdam
Report: Workshop One, April 1971

At Loenersloot, his first two tasks were ‘to clean up the mess and to clean
out the youth hostel’. To identify, to reassemble, to rearrange and to dis-
card discretely the pieces of art that had accumulated around the farm, in
a process that took many weeks and included much misunderstanding.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

And to evict workshop members who were still in residence months after
the event – ‘Nobody is doing anything. Free food and drink. It’s a bit too
much.’ And RtC? ‘He was not able to send them away.’
Workshop One, the first in a planned series of ‘experimental theatre
projects’, had commenced in November 1970. Over three months, the cho-
sen participants would be provided with ‘civilised living conditions, a
certain amount of money to sustain us and the opportunity to a) develop
new techniques in connection with our work in the theatre […and] b) to
work from the beginning on a piece that could ultimately be realised in
performance’. The proposal was to create a ‘screenplay’ – a term coined sig-
nificantly from media production – for Pandora informed by sessions with 39
 companies that visited on a fortnightly rotation: Moving Being, Portable
Theatre, Els Joglars. The final report, that includes personal diaries and
individual evaluations, describes increasing squabbles and disaffections.
The tension was caused by two irreconcilables. That between ‘the creation
of two interwoven communities – a domestic community and a working
community’. And the uneasiness between long-standing staff and pre-
sumptuous incomers who note – ‘a sense of threat of theirs becoming
ours, of Mickery changing, evolving into something living rather than a
shell’.
There were problems from the outset. Work was initially confined to
the bar/foyer area ‘with cushions from the theatre seats as mats’, and to
daytime because of the on-going theatre programme. Physical prepara-
tion began to take up half the day, revealing the paradox of placing the
accent on ‘self-exploration and self-discovery’ in a planned context of col-
lective creativity. Without leadership, it became difficult to find ‘concrete,
tangible forms and shapes and structures’. Most telling is a shortfall in
method and approach. The exercises noted are the familiars of the period
– theatre games; Grotowski’s ‘Cat’; breathing ‘as the source of all move-
ment and basic stimulus for action’; activities eliciting ‘organic intuitive
impulses and responses’… But the stated proposal is for a confrontation
with media and communication hardware, television, radio, sound, pro-
jection – ‘We can learn how to cope with media, how to understand media,
how to implement media, how to utilise media, how to discard media and
how to evolve new media.’ In an unrealised exercise titled Pandora Real-
time, blindfolded participants are to be transported to a mediatised envi-
ronment and there – unmasked – asked to improvise within a pre-arranged
array of cameras, monitors, projectors and audio speakers. Involving four
video cameras, four 16mm film projectors and four-channel sound, this is
a portent of future theatre practices and concerns at Mickery, though it is
difficult to know whether Pandora Realtime was only ever a concept or a
practical reality.
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

On Saturday, 6 February 1971, the first and only performance of Pandora

was presented for an invited audience. But the ‘mayhem’ continued, in a
local manifestation of that phase when alternative theatre and alternative
lifestyle fused and ‘free’ expression expected ‘free’ accommodation.

I don’t think anyone intentionally wanted to use the Mickery as a

hostel or home for strays – but gradually more and more guests
kept arriving, more and more space was occupied.

So he cleared them out – ‘That was not a very popular job.’ He brought an
40 air of professionalism, of pragmatic realism, to an important phase of
 change and reorganisation at Mickery. But he would never become a mem-
ber of the small core group that for him resembled a family, in a family
home – ‘They could not live without each other.’ He would plan the move
to Amsterdam. And as he had a suit, he could ‘dress to impress’ the city
bureaucrats.
At Loenersloot the audience also resembled a family – drawn from lo-
cal wealthy inhabitants, originally from Amsterdam but now living in
rural surroundings – in which everyone knew each other. Mickery was
chic and highbrow – ‘It was a place for the rich and great.’ Even so: ‘It some-
times happened that there were more people on the stage.’

Ritsaert knew how fashionable, sophisticated, Mickery in Loon-

ersloot was. That was one of the reasons he liked a change. What
he missed was the connection with the theatre schools and artis-
tic theatre world in Amsterdam.
His idea was to be the theatre for everybody; in those times, there
was that feeling [about]…

So a date was set to move to Amsterdam. RtC insisted: ‘We start on that
date; doesn’t matter where.’ The makeshift solution was to open at the
Noorderkerk, then under renovation. He recalls:

The acoustics were terrible. It was very, very cold – we started in

winter. There was nothing. It must have cost a fortune. We put
lights in. We put everything in – huge heaters, generators. It was
quite a circus.

Eventually installed in the converted cinema on Rozengracht, the flexi-

bility of the ‘black box’ auditorium they constructed meant it was as if
they could ‘buy for every group a new theatre.’ Such a singular environ-
ment – complete with knowledgeable technical crew and increasingly
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

knowledgeable audience – surely came as a surprise to companies famil-

iar with coping with the limited facilities and eccentricities of university
refectories and of those studios annexed to main stages that constituted
their touring circuit, in Britain for instance. For Dutch audiences, it was
an almost unique opportunity to see imported work – ‘London was the
place where it happened. Mickery symbolised that.’
On Rozengracht they erected a canopy to connect the theatre with the
street, to signal a different attitude to theatre presentation – ‘Everybody
can come in.’ And in the programming they chose ‘not very verbal plays’,
performances with music to attract new audiences – ‘I liked Pip Simmons.’
He now appreciates the work achieved with the public, though at the 41
 time he quickly learned not to sit in the first three rows! His favourite per-
formance was Joint Stock’s adaptation of Heathcote Williams’s The Speak-
ers (1974) in which the audience shifted between performers mounted on
soapboxes in emulation of Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park, a
functioning tea-bar standing at the centre of the theatre.
I myself saw The Speakers sited awkwardly on the main stage of the
Sherman Theatre in Cardiff, my attention constantly wandering to the
darkened peripheries as I peered into the ‘wings’. At Mickery, it occupied
the unitary space that lacked either substantial offstage or backstage
without any distraction – ‘That was the real moment, the way it was done;
a play about meeting people.’ Performance, performers, audience – all in
plain view...

4 In the archive i
Location: Netherlands Theatre Institute (tin), Herengracht 168,
Amsterdam

The inventory has been intimidating: a complete record, in Dutch, of the

deposit of the ‘Stichting Mickery Workshop 1965–1991’. Fifty-five pages of
lists of correspondence alone: to and from a ‘who’s who’ of alternative the-
atre. I decide to go with what I can recognise, the names of well-known
artists and companies listed under ‘Produkties: Uitgevoerd’. I sit in the li-
brary overlooking the canal, snow in the air: in front of me a row of brown
boxes and a pair of scissors. Each box bears a barcode and the label ‘Hulshoff
Archiefbeheer’. I select ‘Mickery 1178–1180’ and cut the black plastic strip.
Inside are four bundles of documents, each wrapped in grey paper and
bound with a brown and cream herringbone cord: the record of Mickery
production Sweet Dreams (1982). I untie the cords…
I am astonished. They have kept everything. Here are the ground plan
(Design: R. ten Cate); lighting plot; technical requirements (‘fish tank
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

holds 6–12 medium carp and one carp is killed and cleaned for each perfor-
mance’); programmes; Polaroids; budgets; schedules; industrial cata-
logues; business letters; telexes; contacts; workbooks; cast photographs;
scribbled ideas; full scripts; production notes. I proceed carefully, con-
cerned that there may be meaning in the stratigraphy. Is the ordering of
material in each bundle chronological? Enough here to appreciate the
care and labour of practices often marginal to theatre historiography; to
re-imagine the performance, to restage it even, given the time and the
will. What has perished, of course, is the world in which it had meaning.
After that, I open packages in a kind of frenzy, seeking out the famous,
42 and those I know: stern letters concerning The Wooster Group; petrol re-
 ceipts from Pip Simmons, and ‘cut-and-paste’ scripts that show how the
structures of productions were gradually assembled over time; candid
notes from RtC to notable artists – ‘I think it stinks’ – and rebuffs for un-
reasonable demands; tough contracts with Tenjo Sajiki; and Terayama’s
drawings of the ‘human milking machine’ for Cloud Cuckooland, a visit/
Nuhikun (1978), with rehearsal timetables and lists of rules and traffic
maps for those who will move the audiences in their boxes. Evidence of
day-to-day working: pragmatically generated; conscientiously kept; in-
stitutionally stored.
Inevitably, I go looking for myself. Packets 1270 and 1271 are labelled
‘Gododdin yn Fryslan’ (1989). I am shocked. It’s mainly budgets. I gasp at

The Pip Simmons Theatre Group, Superman, 1970

Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

43
 the costs. Here clearly is the shift from the makeshift idealism of the 1970s
to the business of the late 1980s and the profound and fateful change in
Mickery’s operation – in both discourse and in dealing with artists – in
that short period when theatre miraculously attained super-heated value.
On a second visit, I am again drawn to the familiar – John Jesurun,
Needcompany, Squat Theatre… And to the British companies who came in
a rush in 1969–70 in what seems to constitute a ‘tipping point’ in Mickery’s
programme:
– The People Show – ‘Do not approach the People Show as a piece of
drama, but as a kaleidoscopic pattern of images, or a work of kinetic
sculpture’;
– The Pip Simmons Theatre Group – with Superman (1970) dedicated to
President Nixon and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins: ‘Whose efforts to recap-
ture the early 50s do not pass unnoticed!’;
– The Freehold Company – ‘The actor’s total instrument (his body, his
mind, his voice) is the starting point for all the work’.
In press releases and publicity, they make claims without yet quite know-
ing whom they are addressing, in what kind of voice, and to what end.
Packet 1169 contains material on Fairground (1975) – flaking, crumbling,
at risk of disintegrating in my hands. No one has demanded that I wear
cotton gloves; that this material is as yet that valuable. In a preliminary
scenario, scenes are listed in columns against a timeline down the left –
‘Box C, Scene: Autumn, Action: Shake box softly, Tape: storm (1’), Action:
switch fake break-down electroswitch’ [?]. But this is over-written in dif-
ferent hands, in different inks, as the performance is gradually brought
into focus. A later version lists what happens, where, and when, and shows
the choreography of the audience hovercraft boxes. Time becomes as sig-
nificant as story as an organising principle, and a new role is imagined for
the audience – ‘I beg you, just to give one hour of your life and let us play
with it’.
Packet 1171 is dedicated solely to Fairground ’84 (1984) – ‘A presentation
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

structure which utilizes 3 auditoria, each holding an audience of (rough-

ly) 65. Imagine these as Boxes. Airfilters are attached to the bottom of each
Box; through the use of compressed air, it is possible to move the Boxes
freely through the larger space. Think, therefore, of 3 theatres; or of 3 the-
atre performances manifested simultaneously in the same space.’ The
stated aim is to stimulate new theatre writing and to capitalise on past
experiments. Fairground ’84 is located historically: the presentation of dis-
crete ‘mini-plays’ created by three British venues – Chapter, ICA, Traverse
– harks back to early collaborations with the Traverse Theatre Club. The
technology is proven, developed in Fairground and Cloud Cuckooland, a vis-
44 it/Nuhikun.
 And the formal engagement of the audience continues – ‘a stimulating
counter-action’ to the blunting of personal faculties under threat from
media overload. They are once again put to work, called upon ‘to share the
responsibility for “the origin of what is new”’. Only through dialogue with
each other in the bar afterwards will they appreciate the complexity of
dramatic material experienced from different viewpoints.
In an unprovenanced essay included in Packet 1172, entitled MICKERY
1965–1984, Joost Sternheim, editor of Toneel Teatraal, assesses the drama-
turgical achievements to date of Mickery:

1. The emancipation of the actor – The actor himself: his body, his person-
ality, his own biography, the actor with his own abilities became the
decisive constituent element of the show.
2. The combination and integration of various arts (and artists!) into one
theatre performance
3. The exploration of space, the architecture of a theatre production – Space in
three senses: the space of the theatre as a building – the auditorium
with all the other rooms forming part of the theatre. Secondly, the
space outside the building, by which I do not simply refer to the
adjacent street, but to street life and life in general: on the one hand,
the rules, standards and form of our life in public, on the other hand,
the rituals behind the closed doors of the public road (this is the
source of Mickery’s long-standing interest in a medium like televi-
sion). Finally, the space within the production itself, by which I mean
the way in which each element of a production – text, acting, ‘ges-
ture’, setting, etc – reflects an awareness of its physical and spiritual
environment. It is no accident that we no longer talk of ‘the setting’,
but of ‘the stage design’ – the former acts as background, enclosure,
the latter refers to a special interpretation, to the visualised breath-
ing of the theatrical space.
4. New presentation structures – New presentational structures involve
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the emancipation of the reception of the production, rather than the

audience as such. This means that the audience is not primarily tack-
led about its awareness of, for example, injustice in the world, but
about its awareness of attending a performance in a theatre. By de-
ranging, changing and manipulating this awareness, one can broad-
en the rules of both theatre making and theatre going. This means
that the way in which theatre makers and audiences relate to the the-
atre and the relationship between makers and audiences are turned
into the subject matter of the production. See Fairground.
From the revolutionary modular seating system at Loenersloot to the
theatre-sized boxes of today, the chief aim is the deconditioning and 45
 Mickery Rozengracht, interior, mid-1970s
activation of our awareness of the reality of the theatre, of the impact
theatre may have on us.

This section is compiled from three files on my laptop computer; I find

that I still have twenty-two unopened. They are a reminder of the exten-
sive work yet to be done on the Mickery material; and that once one starts
digging, the bottom is always likely to be a very long way down. Archive
fever!

5 Frans de la Haye
(Industrial designer; designer of the Mickery modules and the Fair-
ground boxes and a number of productions)
Conversation: 14 May 2009, Amsterdam

At Loenersloot, a simple wooden platform or a couple of worn rugs

sufficed to mark off the performer’s space from the audience, who
in some cases surrounded the ‘stage’ on all sides.
At the Mickery, one was evidently in the same room with the ac-
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.
 tors – whom one met in the bar after the performance. This sense
of complicity, of entering into a conspiracy with the people on
stage, must have constituted one of the main attractions of going
to the Mickery in those early days. (Mickery Pictorial I 1988, ix)

‘It was very informal’, he recalls of the barn. ‘There were four columns sup-
porting the roof, it was a symmetrical roof. There was an open space; the
people were already seated around a playground, a stage, on chairs and on
ledges.’ But the move to Rozengracht presented a new challenge: how to
organise and position the audience in a large room; and how to preserve
intimacy.

I had little to do with theatre; I didn’t see theatre, not this fringe
theatre. I thought theatre was always on stage. It became clear to
me right away that it wouldn’t be the traditional theatre they
needed there. I thought if I were an actor I would like to move the
people where I wanted them basically. That was the basic thought.

As an industrial designer – ‘young, ignorant, highly motivated’ – he ap-

proached it as a practical brief. He explains:

You look at the lines of sight in different configurations. From

that you derive a certain matrix of dimensions: the space be-
tween seats not too far apart; people should be relatively close,
touching basically, because that creates also another effect in
the audience. And also it should be possible to remove the whole
thing and store it somewhere very compactly.

As usual there was little money – ‘There was never money.’ And even
though he was offered considerable freedom – ‘I didn’t want to touch that
beautiful empty space.’ His solution was the ‘Mickery module’, a folding
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

plywood box with hinges at the corners and a removable top, economic
and portable, constructed to the dimensions of ‘off-the-shelf’ materials.
Before the move, they had made a prototype at Loenersloot and thrown it
around the theatre. It proved strong and reliable, though RtC dropped one
on his foot and had to be taken to hospital.
The basic shape was to be a square, but this was eventually doubled to
make a rectangle 1.83 metres x 91 centimetres with a height of 30 centime-
tres including the lid. The resulting folding rostra were painted black,
with circular holes cut in the sides: for ease of handling; for feeding scaf-
folding tubes to build bridges; to affix steps for access. And these holes
could also serve a number of purposes – attaching railings, passing cables 47
 for lighting. The corner hinges protruded, facilitating the building of dif-
ferent heights and combinations as they slotted into the box below. For the
seats he used an existing plastic shell on a newly designed frame that en-
abled units of three chairs to be pressed together under tension and then
pushed down into specially drilled square holes, preventing movement
and ensuring rigidity.
The system was ergonomically efficient and ‘It looked great’. It would
become a standard feature of studio theatres worldwide, a practical and
durable solution to the question of flexibility – ‘It was meant for these ex-
perimental spaces where you want to have total control of where your au-
dience is. Is it seated? Is it standing? It was quite versatile.’ The audience
could then be arranged anew for each production. And this was the option
that was offered to visiting companies, who also began to include the
modules in their performances as staging units. Whilst few photographs
exist of audiences, we occasionally glimpse modules in use as temporary
platforms for performance. Its one drawback? ‘It was a manual, laborious
thing to build the stage. But it was doable, if you are not exceeding 200
seats!’
His approach is, he admits, Dutch Calvinist, favouring functionality,
durability and cost-efficiency. But the Fairground project posed an entirely
new set of questions. And RtC’s proposal?

We have a concept of this play where we move the people in

boxes, twenty-five in a box, split them up, put them in front of
plays, different small plays. We create a total disorientation and
also make people realise basically that following the order of
things is very important.

He appreciated immediately that simply putting wheels on the boxes and

pushing them around would not work. The combined weight of audience
and box would be two tons – ‘You will probably go through the floor.’ His
Copyright © 2011. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

solution was to enable the boxes to float on air – not as in a hovercraft

where the noise would be terrific, certainly too loud for theatre, and the
amount of downdraught required prohibitive – but on a film of com-
pressed air across the space: ‘We can have everything floating around. You
can push it with one finger, one person; doesn’t need more force to move it.’
The prototype was a contraption made from tyre inner tubes cut in half
‘like a doughnut’ and glued to a board. But it worked. It was a self-regulat-
ing system: air escaping through holes beneath the boxes met the resis-
tance of air on the floor – ‘It was very beautiful.’ The one essential was to
seal the floor, covering the whole area in thin boards to prevent air escap-
48 ing noisily, and potentially catastrophically, through cracks and at the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
provost-guard the quarry which he had hoped to share with his mess
that night.
In considering this question of foraging, it has not been my
purpose to put the soldiers of the Union armies in an unfair or
unfavorable position as compared with their opponents. It has been
claimed that Southerners on northern soil were more vindictive and
wanton than Northerners on southern soil; and the reason on which
this statement is based is that the South hated the Yankees, but the
North hated only slavery. Nor is it my intention to charge atrocities
upon the best men of either army. They were committed by the few.
And I do not wish to be understood as declaring foraging a black
and atrocious act, for, as I have shown, it had a legal warrant. I only
claim that when the order once goes forth it leads to excesses,
which it is difficult to control, and such excesses are likely to
seriously affect the unoffending, defenseless women and children
with woes out of all proportion with their simple part in bringing on
the strife. But so it always has been, and so it probably always will
be, till wars and rumors of wars shall cease.
 CHAPTER XIII.
CORPS AND CORPS BADGES.

“You’ll find lovely fighting

Along the whole line.”

Kearny.

What was an army corps? The name is one adopted into the
English language from the French, and retains essentially its original
meaning. It has been customary since the time of Napoleon I. to
organize armies of more than fifty or sixty thousand men into what
the French call corps d’armée or, as we say, army corps.
It is a familiar fact that soon after the outbreak of the Rebellion
Lieutenant-General Scott, who had served with great distinction in
the Mexican War, found himself too old and infirm to conduct an
active campaign, and so the command of the troops, that were
rapidly concentrating in and around Washington, was devolved upon
the late General Irvin McDowell, a good soldier withal, but, like every
other officer then in the service, without extended war experience.
His first work, after assuming command, would naturally have been
to organize the green troops into masses that would be more
cohesive and effective in action than single undisciplined regiments
could be. But this he was not allowed to do. The loyal people of the
North were clamoring for something else to be done, and that
speedily. The Rebels must be punished for their treason without
delay, and President Lincoln was beset night and day to this end. In
vain did McDowell plead for a little more time. It could not be
granted. If our troops were green and inexperienced, it was urged,
so were the Rebels. It is said that because he saw fit to review a
body of eight regiments he was charged with attempting to make a
show, so impatient was public sentiment to have rebellion put down.
So having done no more than to arrange his regiments in brigades,
without giving them any discipline as such, without an organized
artillery, without a commissariat, without even a staff to aid him,
McDowell, dividing his force, of about 35,000 men, into live
divisions, put four of them in motion from the Virginia bank of the
Potomac against the enemy, and the result was—Bull Run, a battle in
which brigade commanders did not know their commands and
soldiers did not know their generals. In reality, the battle was one of
regiments, rather than of brigades, the regiments fighting more or
less independently. But better things were in store.
 PLATE I.

McIndoe Bros., Printers, Boston.

Bull Run, while comparatively disastrous as a battle-field, was a
grand success to the North in other respects. It sobered, for a time
at least, the hasty reckless spirits who believed that the South would
not fight, and who were so unceasingly thorning the President to
immediate decisive action. They were not satisfied, it is true, but
they were less importunate, and manifested a willingness to let the
authorities have a short breathing spell, which was at once given to
better preparation for the future.
All eyes seemed now to turn, by common agreement, to General
George B. McClellan, to lead to victory, who was young, who had
served with distinction in the Mexican War, had studied European
warfare in the Crimea, and, above all, had just finished a successful
campaign in West Virginia. He took command of the forces in and
around Washington July 27, 1861, a command which then numbered
about fifty thousand infantry, one thousand cavalry, and six hundred
and fifty artillerymen, with nine field batteries, such as they were, of
thirty guns. A part of these had belonged to McDowell’s Bull Run
army, and a part had since arrived from the North. The brigade
organization of McDowell was still in force on the Virginia side of the
Potomac. I say in force. That statement needs qualifying. I have
already said that there was originally no cohesion to these brigades;
but since the battle the army was little better than a mob in the
respect of discipline. Officers and men were absent from their
commands without leave. The streets of Washington were swarming
with them. But I must not wander too far from the point I have in
mind to consider. I only throw in these statements of the situation to
give a clearer idea of what a tremendous task McClellan had before
him. In organizing the Army of the Potomac he first arranged the
infantry in brigades of four regiments each. Then, as fast as new
regiments arrived—and at that time, under a recent call of the
President for five hundred thousand three years’ volunteers, they
were coming in very rapidly,—they were formed into temporary
brigades, and placed in camp in the suburbs of the city to await their
full equipment, which many of them lacked, to become more
efficient in the tactics of “Scott” or “Hardee,” and, in general, to
acquire such discipline as would be valuable in the service before
them, as soldiers of the Union. As rapidly as these conditions were
fairly complied with, regiments were permanently assigned to
brigades across the Potomac.
After this formation of brigades had made considerable headway,
and the troops were becoming better disciplined and tolerably skilled
in brigade movements, McClellan began the organization of
Divisions, each comprising three brigades. Before the middle of
October, 1861, eleven of these divisions had been organized, each
including, besides the brigades of infantry specified, from one to four
light batteries, and from a company to two regiments of cavalry
which had been specially assigned to it.
The next step in the direction of organization was the formation of
Army Corps; but in this matter McClellan moved slowly, not deeming
it best to form them until his division commanders had, by
experience in the field, shown which of them, if any, had the ability
to handle so large a body of troops as a corps. This certainly seemed
good judgment. The Confederate authorities appear to have been
governed by this principle, for they did not adopt the system of army
corps until after the battle of Antietam, in September, 1862. But
month’s had elapsed since Bull Run. Eighteen hundred and sixty-two
had dawned. “All quiet along the Potomac” had come to be used as
a by-word and reproach. That powerful moving force, Public
Sentiment, was again crystallizing along its old lines, and making
itself felt, and “Why don’t the army move?” was the oft-repeated
question which gave to the propounder no satisfactory answer,
because to him, with the public pulse again at fever-beat, no answer
could be satisfactory. Meanwhile all these forces propelled their
energies and persuasions in one and the same direction, the White
House; and President Lincoln, goaded to desperation by their
persistence and insistence, issued a War Order March 8, 1862,
requiring McClellan to organize his command into five Army Corps.
So far, well enough; but the order went further, and specified who
the corps commanders should be, thus depriving him of doing that
for which he had waited, and giving him officers in those positions
not, in his opinion, the best, in all respects, that could have been
selected.
But my story is not of the commanders, nor of McClellan, but of
the corps, and what I have said will show how they were composed.
Let us review for a moment: first, the regiments, each of which,
when full, contained one thousand and forty-six men; four of these
composed a brigade; three brigades were taken to form a division,
and three divisions constituted a corps. This system was not always
rigidly adhered to. Sometimes a corps had a fourth division, but such
a case would be a deviation, and not the regular plan. So, too, a
division might have an extra brigade. For example, a brigade might
be detached from one part of the service and sent to join an army in
another part. Such a brigade would not be allowed to remain
independent in that case, but would be at once assigned to some
division, usually a division whose brigades were small in numbers.
I have said that McClellan made up his brigades of four regiments.
I think the usual number of regiments for a brigade is three. That
gives a system of threes throughout. But in this matter also, after
the first organization, the plan was modified. As a brigade became
depleted by sickness, capture, and the bullet, new regiments were
added, until, as the work of addition and depletion went on, I have
known a brigade to have within it the skeletons of ten regiments,
and even then its strength not half that of the original body. My
camp was located at one time near a regiment which had only thirty-
eight men present for duty.
There were twenty-five army corps in the service, at different
times, exclusive of cavalry, engineer, and signal corps, and Hancock’s
veteran corps. The same causes which operated to reduce brigades
and divisions naturally decimated corps, so that some of them were
consolidated; as, for example, the First and Third Corps were
merged in the Second, Fifth, and Sixth, in the spring of 1864. At
about the same time the Eleventh and Twelfth were united to form
the Twentieth. But enough of corps for the present. What I have
stated will make more intelligible what I shall say about

CORPS BADGES.
What are corps badges? The answer to this question is somewhat
lengthy, but I think it will be considered interesting. The idea of
corps badges undoubtedly had its origin with General Philip Kearny,
but just how or exactly when is somewhat legendary and uncertain.
Not having become a member of Kearny’s old corps until about a
year after the idea was promulgated, I have no tradition of my own
in regard to it, but I have heard men who served under him tell
widely differing stories of the origin of the “Kearny Patch,” yet all
agreeing as to the author of the idea, and also in its application
being made first to officers. General E. D. Townsend, late Adjutant-
General of the United States Army, in his “Anecdotes of the Civil
War,” has adopted an explanation which, I have no doubt, is
substantially correct. He says:—
“One day, when his brigade was on the march, General Philip
Kearny, who was a strict disciplinarian, saw some officers standing
under a tree by the roadside; supposing them to be stragglers from
his command, he administered to them a rebuke, emphasized by a
few expletives. The officers listened in silence, respectfully standing
in the ‘position of a soldier’ until he had finished, when one of them,
raising his hand to his cap, quietly suggested that the general had
possibly made a mistake, as they none of them belonged to his
command. With his usual courtesy, Kearny exclaimed, “Pardon me; I
will take steps to know how to recognize my own men hereafter.”
Immediately on reaching camp, he issued orders that all officers and
men of his brigade should wear conspicuously on the front of their
caps a round piece of red cloth to designate them. This became
generally known as the ‘Kearny Patch.’”
 I think General Townsend is incorrect in saying that Kearny issued
orders immediately on reaching camp for all “officers and men” to
wear the patch; first, because the testimony of officers of the old
Third Corps to-day is that the order was first directed to officers
only, and this would be in harmony with the explanation which I
have quoted; and, second, after the death of Kearny and while his
old division was lying at Fort Lyon, Va., Sept. 4, 1862, General D. B.
Birney, then in command of it, issued a general order announcing his
death, which closed with the following paragraph:—
“As a token of respect for his memory, all the officers of this
division will wear crape on the left arm for thirty days, and the colors
and drums of regiments and batteries will be placed in mourning for
sixty days. To still further show our regard, and to distinguish his
officers as he wished, each officer will continue to wear on his cap a
piece of scarlet cloth, or have the top or crown-piece of the cap
made of scarlet cloth.”
The italics in the above extract are my own; but we may fairly
infer from it:—
First, that up to this date the patch had been required for officers
alone, as no mention is made of the rank and file in this order.
Second, that General Kearny did not specify the lozenge as the
shape of the badge to be worn, as some claim; for, had such been
the case, so punctilious a man as General Birney would not have
referred in general orders to a lozenge as “a piece of scarlet cloth,”
nor have given the option of having the crown-piece of the cap
made of scarlet cloth if the lamented Kearny’s instructions had
originally been to wear a lozenge. This being so, General Townsend’s
quoted description of the badge as “a round piece of red cloth” is
probably erroneous.
As there were no red goods at hand when Kearny initiated this
move, he is said to have given up his own red blanket to be cut into
these patches.
 Soon after these emblems came into vogue among the officers
there is strong traditional testimony to show that the men of the
rank and file, without general orders, of their own accord cut pieces
of red from their overcoat linings, or obtained them from other
sources to make patches for themselves; and, as to the shape, there
are weighty reasons for believing that any piece of red fabric, of
whatsoever shape, was considered to answer the purpose.
These red patches took immensely
with the “boys.” Kearny was a rough
soldier in speech, but a perfect dare-
devil in action, and his men idolized
him. Hence they were only too proud
to wear a mark which should
distinguish them as members of his
gallant division. It was said to have
greatly reduced the straggling in this
body, and also to have secured for the
ST. ANDREW’S CROSS.
wounded or dead that fell into the
Rebels’ hands a more favorable and
considerate attention.
There was a special reason, I think, why Kearny should select a
red patch for his men, although I have never seen it referred to. On
the 24th of March, 1862, General McClellan issued a general order
prescribing the kinds of flags that should designate corps, division,
and brigade headquarters. In this he directed that the First Division
flag should be a red one, six feet by five; the Second Division blue,
and the Third Division a red and blue one;—both of the same
dimensions as the first. As Kearny commanded the First Division, he
would naturally select the same color of patch as his flag. Hence the
red patch.
The contagion to wear a distinguishing badge extended widely
from this simple beginning. It was the most natural thing that could
happen for other divisions to be jealous of any innovation which, by
comparison, should throw them into the background, for by that
time the esprit de corps, the pride of organization, had begun to
make itself felt. Realizing this fact, and regarding it as a
manifestation that might be turned to good account, Major-General
Joseph Hooker promulgated a scheme of army corps badges on the
21st of March, 1863, which was the first systematic plan submitted
in this direction in the armies. Hooker took command of the Army of
the Potomac Jan. 26, 1863. General Daniel Butterfield was made his
chief-of-staff, and he, it is said, had much to do with designing and
perfecting the first scheme of badges for the army, which appears in
the following circular:—

Headquarters Army of the Potomac.

Circular.
March 21, 1863.
For the purpose of ready recognition of corps and divisions
of the army, and to prevent injustice by reports of straggling
and misconduct through mistake as to their organizations, the
chief quartermaster will furnish, without delay, the following
badges, to be worn by the officers and enlisted men of all the
regiments of the various corps mentioned. They will be
securely fastened upon the centre of the top of the cap. The
inspecting officers will at all inspections see that these badges
are worn as designated.
First Corps—a sphere: red for First Division; white for
Second; blue for Third.
Second Corps—a trefoil: red for First Division; white for
Second; blue for Third.
Third Corps—a lozenge: red for First Division; white for
Second; blue for Third.
Fifth Corps—a Maltese cross: red for First Division; white
for Second; blue for Third.
 Sixth Corps—a cross: red for First Division; white for
Second; blue for Third. (Light Division, green.)
Eleventh Corps—a crescent: red for First Division; white for
Second; blue for Third.
Twelfth Corps—a star: red for First Division; white for
Second; blue for Third.
The sizes and colors will be according to pattern.
By command of
Major-General Hooker,
S. Williams, A.A.G.

Accompanying this order were paper patterns pasted on a fly-leaf,

illustrating the size and color required. It will be seen that the
badges figured in the color-plates are much reduced in size. Diligent
inquiry and research in the departments at Washington fail to
discover any of the patterns referred to, or their dimensions; but
there are veterans living who have preserved the first badge issued
to them in pursuance of this circular, from which it is inferred that
the patterns were of a size to please the eye rather than to conform
to any uniform scale of measurement. A trefoil which I have
measured is about an inch and seven-eighths each way. It is a copy
of an original. The stem is straight, turning neither to the right nor
left.
The arms of the Fifth Corps badge are often figured as concave,
whereas those of a Maltese cross are straight. This is believed to be
a deviation from the original in the minds of many veterans who
wore them, and they are changed accordingly in the color-plate.
The Sixth Corps wore a St. Andrew’s cross till 1864, when it
changed to the Greek cross figured in the plate.
 PLATE II.

McIndoe Bros., Printers, Boston.

That this circular of Hooker’s was not intended to be a dead letter
was shown in an order issued from Falmouth, Va., May 12, 1863, in
which he says:—
“The badges worn by the troops when lost or torn off must be
immediately replaced.”
And then, after designating the only troops that are without
badges, he adds:—
“Provost-marshals will arrest as stragglers all other troops found
without badges, and return them to their commands under guard.”
There was a badge worn by the artillery brigade of the Third
Corps, which, so far as I know, had no counterpart in other corps. I
think it was not adopted until after Gettysburg. It was the lozenge of
the corps subdivided into four smaller lozenges, on the following
basis: If a battery was attached to the first division, two of these
smaller lozenges were red, one white, and one blue; if to the
second, two were white, one red, and one blue; and if to the third,
two were blue, one red, and one white. They were worn on the left
side of the cap.
The original Fourth Corps, organized by McClellan, did not adopt a
badge, but its successor of the same number wore an equilateral
triangle prescribed by Major-General Thomas, April 26, 1864, in
General Orders No. 62, Department of the Cumberland, in which he
used much the same language as that used by Hooker in his circular,
and designated divisions by the same colors.
The badge of the Seventh Corps was a crescent nearly encircling a
star. It was not adopted until after the virtual close of the war, June
1, 1865. The following is a paragraph from the circular issued by
Major-General J. J. Reynolds, Department of Arkansas, regarding it:
—
 “This badge, cut two inches in diameter, from cloth of colors red,
white, and blue, for the 1st, 2d, and 3d Divisions respectively, may
be worn by all enlisted men of the Corps.”
This was an entirely different corps from the Seventh Corps, which
served in Virginia, and which had no badge. The latter was
discontinued Aug. 1, 1863, at the same time with the original Fourth
Corps.
The Eighth Corps wore a six-pointed star. I have not been able to
ascertain the date of its adoption. There was no order issued.
The Ninth Corps was
originally a part of the Army of
the Potomac, but at the time
Hooker issued his circular it
was in another part of the
Confederacy. Just before its
return to the army, General
Burnside issued General Orders
No. 6, April 10, 1864,
announcing as the badge of his
corps, “A shield with the figure
nine in the centre crossed with
AN ORIGINAL NINTH CORPS BADGE.
a foul anchor and cannon, to
be worn on the top of the cap
or front of the hat.” This corps
had a fourth division, whose badge was green. The corps
commander and his staff wore a badge “of red, white, and blue, with
gilt anchor, cannon, and green number.”
December 23, 1864, Major-General John G. Parke, who had
succeeded to the command, issued General Orders No. 49, of which
the following is the first section:—
“1. All officers and enlisted men in this command will be required
to wear the Corps Badge upon the cap or hat. For the Divisions, the
badges will be plain, made of cloth in the shape of a shield—red for
the first, white for the second, and blue for the third. For the Artillery
Brigade, the shield will be red, and will be worn under the regulation
cross cannon.”
This order grew out of the difficulty
experienced in obtaining the badge
prescribed by General Burnside. The
cannon, anchor, etc., were made of
gold bullion at Tiffany’s, New York
City, and as it was scarcely practicable
for the rank and file to obtain such
badges, they had virtually anticipated
the order of General Parke, and were
wearing the three plain colors after
the manner of the rest of Potomac’s
army. The figures in the color-plate,
however, are fashioned after the
direction of General Burnside’s order.
The annexed cut is a fac-simile of one ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CORPS
BADGES COMBINED.
of the original metallic badges worn
by a staff officer. This corps had a
fourth division from April 19 to Nov.
29, 1864.
The Tenth Corps badge was the trace of a four-bastioned fort. It
was adopted by General Orders No. 18 issued by Major-General D.
B. Birney, July 25, 1864.
The Eleventh and Twelfth Corps have already been referred to, in
General Hooker’s circular. On the 18th of April, 1864, these two
corps were consolidated to form the Twentieth Corps, and by
General Orders No. 62 issued by Major-General George H. Thomas,
April 26, “a star, as heretofore worn by the Twelfth Corps,” was
prescribed as the badge.
The annexed cut shows the manner in which many of the corps
combined the two badges in order not to lose their original identity.
 PLATE III.

McIndoe Bros., Printers, Boston.

The Thirteenth Corps had no badge.
The badge of the Fourteenth Army Corps was an acorn. Tradition
has it that some time before the adoption of this badge the
members of this corps called themselves Acorn Boys, because at one
time in their history, probably when they were hemmed in at
Chattanooga by Bragg, rations were so scanty that the men gladly
gathered large quantities of acorns from an oak-grove, near by
which they were camped, and roasted and ate them, repeating this
operation while the scarcity of food continued. Owing to this
circumstance, when it became necessary to select a badge, the
acorn suggested itself as an exceedingly appropriate emblem for
that purpose, and it was therefore adopted by General Orders No.
62, issued from Headquarters Department of the Cumberland, at
Chattanooga, April 26, 1864.
The badge of the Fifteenth Corps derives its origin from the
following incident:—During the fall of 1863 the Eleventh and Twelfth
Corps were taken from Meade’s army, put under the command of
General Joe Hooker, and sent to aid in the relief of Chattanooga,
where Thomas was closely besieged. They were undoubtedly better
dressed than the soldiers of that department, and this fact, with the
added circumstance of their wearing corps badges, which were a
novelty to the Western armies at that time, led to some sharp tilts,
in words, between the Eastern and Western soldiers. One day a
veteran of Hooker’s command met an Irishman of Logan’s Corps at
the spring where they went to fill their canteens. “What corps do
you belong to?” said the Eastern veteran, proud in the possession of
the distinguishing badge on his cap, which told his story for him.
“What corps, is it?” said the gallant son of Erin, straightening his
back; “the Fifteenth, to be sure.” “Where is your badge?” “My badge,
do ye say? There it is!” said Pat, clapping his hand on his cartridge-
box, at his side; “forty rounds. Can you show me a betther?”
 On the 14th of February, 1865, Major-General John A. Logan, the
commander of this corps, issued General Orders No. 10, which
prescribe that the badge shall be “A miniature cartridge-box, one-
eighth of an inch thick, fifteen-sixteenths of an inch wide, set
transversely on a field of cloth or metal, one and five-eighths of an
inch square. Above the cartridge-box plate will be stamped or
worked in a curve ‘Forty Rounds.’” This corps had a fourth division,
whose badge was yellow, and headquarters wore a badge including
the four colors. Logan goes on to say:—
“It is expected that this badge will be worn constantly by every
officer and soldier in the corps. If any corps in the army has a right
to take pride in its badge, surely that has which looks back through
the long and glorious line of ... [naming twenty-nine different
battles], and scores of minor struggles; the corps which had its birth
under Grant and Sherman in the darker days of our struggle, the
corps which will keep on struggling until the death of the Rebellion.”
The following correct description of
the badge worn by the Sixteenth
Army Corps is given by the assistant-
inspector general of that corps,
Colonel J. J. Lyon:—“The device is a
circle with four Minie-balls, the points
towards the centre, cut out of it.” It
was designed by Brevet Brigadier-
General John Hough, the assistant
adjutant-general of the corps, being
FIRST AND FIFTH CORPS
BADGES COMBINED.
selected out of many designs,
submitted by Major-General A. J.
Smith, the corps commander, and, in
his honor, named the “A. J. Smith Cross.” It is easily distinguished
from the Maltese cross, in being bounded by curved instead of
straight lines. No order for its adoption was issued.
The badge of the Seventeenth Corps, said to have been suggested
by General M. F. Ford, and adopted in accordance with General
Orders issued by his commander, Major-General Francis P. Blair, was
an arrow. He says, “In its swiftness, in its surety of striking where
wanted, and its destructive powers, when so intended, it is probably
as emblematical of this corps as any design that could be adopted.”
The order was issued at Goldsboro, N. C., March 25, 1865. The order
further provides that the arrow for divisions shall be two inches long,
and for corps headquarters one and one-half inches long, and
further requires the wagons and ambulances to be marked with the
badge of their respective commands, the arrow being twelve inches
long.
A circular issued from the headquarters of the Eighteenth Army
Corps June 7, 1864, and General Orders No. 108, from the same
source, dated August 25, 1864, furnish all the information on record
regarding the badge of this body. While both are quite lengthy in
description and prescription, neither states what the special design
was to be. It was, however, a cross with equi-foliate arms. The
circular prescribed that this cross should be worn by general officers,
suspended by a tri-colored ribbon from the left breast. Division
commanders were to have a triangle in the centre of the badge, but
brigade commanders were to have the number of their brigade
instead; line officers were to suspend their badges by ribbons of the
color of their division; cavalry and artillery officers also were to have
distinctive badges. The whole system was quite complex, and
somewhat expensive as well, as the badges were to be of metal and
enamel in colors. Enlisted men were to wear the plain cross of cloth,
sewed to their left breast. This order was issued by General W. F.
Smith.
General Orders 108 issued by General E. O. C. Ord simplified the
matter somewhat, requiring line-officers and enlisted men both to
wear the plain cross the color of their respective divisions, and
enlisted men were required to wear theirs on the front of the hat or
top of the cap.
 PLATE IV.

McIndoe Bros., Printers, Boston.

By General Orders No. 11 issued by General Emory Nov. 17, 1864,
the Nineteenth Corps adopted “a fan-leaved cross, with an octagonal
centre.” The First Division was to wear red, the Second blue, and the
Third white—the exception in the order of the colors which proved
the rule. The badge of enlisted men was to be of cloth, two inches
square, and worn on the side of the hat or top of the cap, although
they were allowed to supply themselves with metallic badges of the
prescribed color, if so minded.
The Twenty-First Corps never adopted a badge.
The Twenty-Second adopted (without orders) a badge
quinquefarious in form, that is, opening into five parts, and having a
circle in the centre. This was the corps which served in the defence
of Washington. Its membership was constantly changing.
The badge adopted by the Twenty-Third Corps (without General
Orders) was a plain shield, differing somewhat in form from that of
the Ninth Corps, with which it was for a time associated, and which
led it to adopt a similar badge.
The following General Order tells the story of the next Corps’
badge:—

Headquarters Twenty-Fourth Army Corps,

Before Richmond, Va., March 18, 1865.
[General Orders No. 32.]
By authority of the Major-General commanding the Army of
the James, the Heart is adopted as the badge of the Twenty-
Fourth Army Corps.
The symbol selected is one which testifies our affectionate
regard for all our brave comrades—alike the living and the
dead—who have braved the perils of the mighty conflict, and
our devotion to the sacred cause—a cause which entitles us
 to the sympathy of every brave and true heart and the
support of every strong and determined hand.
The Major-General commanding the Corps does not doubt
that soldiers who have given their strength and blood to the
fame of their former badges, will unite in rendering the
present one even more renowned than those under which
they have heretofore marched to battle.
By command of Major-General John Gibbon.
A. Henry Embler, A. A. A. General.

This corps was largely made up of re-enlisted men, who had

served nine months or three years elsewhere. Here is another
General Order which speaks for itself:—

Headquarters Twenty-Fifth Army Corps, Army of the James,

In the Field, Va., Feb. 20, 1865.
[Orders.]
In view of the circumstances under which this Corps was
raised and filled, the peculiar claims of its individual members
upon the justice and fair dealing of the prejudiced, and the
regularity of the troops which deserve those equal rights that
have been hitherto denied the majority, the Commanding
General has been induced to adopt the Square as the
distinctive badge of the Twenty-Fifth Army Corps.
Wherever danger has been found and glory to be won, the
heroes who have fought for immortality have been
distinguished by some emblem to which every victory added
a new lustre. They looked upon their badge with pride, for to
it they had given its fame. In the homes of smiling peace it
recalled the days of courageous endurance and the hours of
deadly strife—and it solaced the moment of death, for it was
a symbol of a life of heroism and self-denial. The poets still
sing of the “Templar’s Cross,” the “Crescent” of the Turks, the
 “Chalice” of the hunted Christian, and the “White Plume” of
Murat, that crested the wave of valor sweeping resistlessly to
victory.
Soldiers! to you is given a chance in this Spring Campaign
of making this badge immortal. Let History record that on the
banks of the James thirty thousand freemen not only gained
their own liberty but shattered the prejudice of the world, and
gave to the Land of their birth Peace, Union, and Liberty.
Godfrey Weitzel,
Major-General Commanding.
[Official.]
W. L. Goodrich,
A. A. A. General.

This corps was composed wholly of colored troops.

In the late fall of 1864, Major-General W. S. Hancock resigned his
command of the Second Corps to take charge of the First Veteran
Corps, then organizing. The badge adopted originated with Colonel
C. H. Morgan, Hancock’s chief-of-staff.
The centre is a circle half the diameter of the whole design,
surrounded by a wreath of laurel. Through the circle a wide red
band passes vertically. From the wreath radiate rays in such a
manner as to form a heptagon with concave sides. Seven hands
spring from the wreath, each grasping a spear, whose heads point
the several angles of the heptagon.
Sheridan’s Cavalry Corps had a badge, but it was not generally
worn. The device was “Gold crossed sabres on a blue field,
surrounded by a glory in silver.”
The design of Wilson’s Cavalry Corps was a carbine from which
was suspended by chains a red, swallow-tail guidon, bearing gilt
crossed sabres.
 The badge of the Engineer and Pontonier Corps is thus described:
“Two oars crossed over an anchor, the top of which is encircled by a
scroll surmounted by a castle; the castle being the badge of the U.
S. corps of engineers.” As a fact, however, this fine body of men
wore only the castle designed in brass.
The badge of the Signal Corps was two flags crossed on the staff
of a flaming torch. This badge is sometimes represented with a red
star in the centre of one flag, but such was not the typical badge.
This star was allowed on the headquarters flag of a very few signal
officers, who were accorded this distinction for some meritorious
service performed; but such a flag was rarely seen, and should not
be figured as part of the corps badge.
The Department of West Virginia, under the command of General
Crook, adopted a spread eagle for a badge, Jan. 3, 1865.
The pioneers of the army wore a pair of crossed hatchets, the
color of the division to which they belonged. Then, the Army of the
Cumberland have a society badge. So likewise have the Army of the
Potomac. There are also medals presented for distinguished
gallantry, worn by a few. They are not numerous and are seldom to
be seen—for this reason, if for no other, they are of precious value
to the owner, and are therefore carefully treasured.
In nearly every corps whose badge I have referred to, the plan
was adopted of having the first three divisions take the national
colors of red, white, and blue respectively. These corps emblems
were not only worn by the men,—I refer now to the Army of the
Potomac,—but they were also painted with stencil on the
transportation of a corps, its wagons and ambulances. And just here
I may add that there was no army which became so devotedly
attached to its badges as did the Army of the Potomac. There were
reasons for this. They were the first to adopt them, being at least a
year ahead of all other corps, and more than two years ahead of
many. Then, by their use they were brought into sharper comparison
in action and on the march, and, as General Weitzel says, “they
looked upon their badge with pride, for to it they had given its
fame.”
These badges can be seen in any parade of the Grand Army, worn
on the cap or hat, possibly now and then one that has seen service.
I still have such a one in my possession. But at the close of the war
many of the veterans desired some more enduring form of these
emblems, so familiar and full of meaning to them, and so to-day
they wear pinned to the breast or suspended from a ribbon the dear
old corps badge, modelled in silver or gold, perhaps bearing the
division colors indicated, in enamel or stone, and some of them
inscribed with the list of battles in which the bearer participated.
What is such a jewel worth to the wearer? I can safely say that,
while its intrinsic value may be a mere trifle, not all the wealth of an
Astor and a Vanderbilt combined could purchase the experience
which it records, were such a transfer otherwise possible.
 PLATE V.

McIndoe Bros., Printers, Boston.

 CHAPTER XIV.
SOME INVENTIONS AND DEVICES OF THE
WAR.

That “necessity is the mother of invention” nothing can more

clearly and fully demonstrate than war. I will devote this chapter to
presenting some facts from the last war which illustrate this maxim.
As soon as the tocsin of war had sounded, and men were
summoned to take the field, a demand was at once made, on both
sides of Mason and Dixon’s line, for a new class of materials—the
materials of war, for which there had been no demand of
consequence for nearly fifty years. The arms, such as they were,
had been largely sent South before the outbreak. But they were
somewhat old-fashioned, and, now that there was a demand for new
arms, inventive genius was stimulated to produce better ones. It
always has been true, and always will be, that the manufactured
products for which there is an extensive demand are the articles
which invention will improve upon until they arrive as near perfection
as it is possible for the work of human hands to be. Such was the
case with the materials of warfare. Invention was stimulated in
various directions, but its products appeared most numerous,
perhaps, in the changes which the arms, ammunition, and ordnance
underwent in their better adaptation to the needs of the hour.
The few muskets remaining in the hands of the government in
1861 were used to equip the troops who left first for the seat of war.
Then manufacturing began on an immense scale. The government
workshops could not produce a tithe of what were wanted, even
though running night and day; and so private enterprise was called
in to supplement the need. As one illustration, Grover & Baker of
Roxbury turned their extensive sewing-machine workshop into a
rifle-manufactory, which employed several hundred hands, and this
was only one of a large number in that section. Alger, of South
Boston, poured the immense molten masses of his cupolas into the
moulds of cannon, and his massive steam-hammers pounded out
and welded the ponderous shafts of gunboats and monitors. The
descendants of Paul Revere diverted a part of their yellow metal
from the mills which rolled it into sheathing for government ships, to
the founding of brass twelve-pounders, or Napoleons, as they were
called; and many a Rebel was laid low by shrapnel or canister hurled
through the muzzle of guns on which was plainly stamped “Revere
Copper Co., Canton, Mass.” Plain smooth-bore Springfield muskets
soon became Springfield rifles, and directly the process of rifling was
applied to cannon of various calibres. Then, muzzle-loading rifles
became breech-loading; and from a breech-loader for a single
cartridge the capacity was increased, until some of the cavalry
regiments that took the field in 1864 went equipped with Henry’s
sixteen-shooters, a breech-loading rifle, which the Rebels said the
Yanks loaded in the morning and fired all day.
I met at Chattanooga, Tenn., recently, Captain Fort, of the old First
Georgia Regulars, a Confederate regiment of distinguished service.
In referring to these repeating rifles, he said that his first encounter
with them was near Olustee, Fla. While he was skirmishing with a
Massachusetts regiment (the Fortieth), he found them hard to move,
as they seemed to load with marvellous speed, and never to have
their fire drawn. Determined to see what sort of fire-arms were