Stuffed Bird at 48 Sharp

The idea, the director explained, is "a collage of music with action."

The music was electronic, but the action was clearly electrifying as Karlheinz Stockhausen's Originate was presented as the top event of Manhattan's second annual Avant-Garde Festival.

It all started when Cologne's small Theater am Dom commissioned Stockhausen, 36, Germany's leading exponent of nonmusical music, to do a play. Stockhausen had eight friends with artistic talents of sorts--a painter, a poet, an amateur moviemaker, a Korean composer, a newspaper vendor, a street singer and two musicians. He also had a 94-minute composition called Kontakte, which blended canned electronic sounds and instrumental music. He wrote a "score" in which his various friends were instructed to perform all or part of their specialties on a rigid time schedule coordinated to the composition. Scandalized city fathers, who had made all these goings-on possible through a subsidy to the arts, tried to ban the production.

Bearded Beats. No avant-gardist could resist a success like that, and when an English translation became available this year, the New York festival's sponsors leaped at it. Allan Kaprow, the inventor of "happenings," was signed up as director, and Allen Ginsberg, grand old man of the beats, was persuaded to take on the exacting role of the poet. The opening at Judson Hall could not have been more auspicious; it was picketed by a rival group calling itself "Fluxus," bearing signs: "Fight the rich man's snob art." Fluxus Leader Henry Flynt favors "compositions" in which a group of people assemble in a dark room while ether is blown through the air vents.

The New York production featured two white hens, a chimpanzee, six fish floating in two bowls suspended from the ceiling, a shapely model stripping to her black lace panties and bra, and a young man who squirted himself all over with shaving lather and then jumped into a tub of water.

Fish in Bowls. As the Kontakte musical score--a mixture of taped airport drones, traffic noise, radio static, mixed in with homemade sounds from drum, piano, saxophone and cello--unwinds, the performers follow carefully drawn stage directions. At 48 minutes sharp, for instance, the percussionist is instructed to "feed all animals, fish in bowls, birds and/or fowl in cages or wooden crates. A stuffed bird in cage is also fed." The director is told "to enter with an ape or with a pack of dogs on leash." At 68 minutes, the painter is instructed to "begin throwing nails on magnetic surface."

Cellist Charlotte Moorman, who had a concert to herself earlier in the festival in which she played a duet with a mechanized robot equipped with twirling foam-rubber breasts, is told at 36 minutes to "play and sing for four minutes." She can perform anything she likes, so one night she played a Boccherini piece, another night Bach. At 15 minutes, during "a long pause," she is free to do whatever she wants and made dark plans to give Poet Ginsberg a much needed shave, "if he does not resist too much."

Also Beans. Viewer participation was induced by bombarding the audience with leaflets, pink toilet paper, dried beans and rotten green apples. One thoroughly Stockhausened blonde thought apples were for eating, but the rest of the gardists in the audience knew better. They responded by pelting the actors with the fruit. The hall was packed for all five performances.

Back in Cologne, Stockhausen was unmoved either by the critical jeers or the audience's muffled cheers. "The play gave me an experience I should not want to miss. Everything else is of no interest to me," says he.

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