Arthur Magazine proudly presents
PARADISE NOW: A Collective Creation of The Living Theatre DVD
In 1968, the Living Theatre troupe returned to America with that unforgettable psychedelic mystery play based on the Kabbalah and the I Ching–PARADISE NOW. They had become a traveling commune, the not-so-secret agents of a comsic alternative. Wherever they went they turned whole cities upside down just by their presence. We would never be the same.
From THE LIVING THEATRE: ART, EXILE AND OUTRAGE by John Tytell (Grove Press, 1995):
“Doors singer Jim Morrison and poet Michael McClure actively participated in performances of Paradise Now at the [San Francisco Bay Area’s] Nourse Auditorium…. McClure brought Morrison to visit at [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti’s office. Julian [Beck, of the Living Theatre] was on and off the telephone to New York, frantically worried about the money to get the troupe back to Europe where engagements has been scheduled. Quietly, Morrison offered to assist with money.
“Morrison–who had read Artaud and Ginsberg in college–saw himself as a revolutionary figure. Agreeing that repression was the chief social evil in America and the cause of a general pathology, he was typical of the sectors of support The Living Theatre had received in America. His long improvisational song ‘When the Music’s Over’ was a basic statement of apocalypse. Another of his songs proclaims, as in Paradise Now, ‘We want the world, and we want it now.’ Morrison had seen every performance in Los Angeles and followed the company up to San Francisco.
“On the day after his visit with McClure, Jim Morrison have Julian twenty-five hundred dollars for the trip home…”
“PARADISE NOW: A Collective Creation of the Living Theatre” features rare, never-before-distributed films and revolutionary multimedia documents from The Living Theatre’s historic and influential ’68-’69 American tour. A fulminating art-meets-life installation brought to you by Arthur Magazine in collaboration with The Living Theatre and Universal Mutant, Inc.
LIMITED EDITION OF 1,000.
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