Dewey, Ken

Ken Dewey (1934-1972) was a performance artist, playwright, director, and an arts administrator who was active in the Happenings movement of the 1960s. He was born on August 30, 1934 in Chicago, Illinois and attended Columbia University in the City of New York where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1959. While at Columbia University, he studied sculpture with Oronzio Mandarelli and playwriting with Theodore Apstein. After college, Dewey moved to San Francisco where he studied mime with R. G. Davis and dance with Anna Halprin. He became a member of the Actor's Workshop of San Francisco where he was an assistant director.

Dewey became interested in Happenings when he saw Robert Whitman's piece American Moon performed in 1962. Performative art like Happenings appealed to Dewey as he had always desired to take theater off of the stage and into the streets. Dewey used geography, social science, architecture, and technology in his work. His projects were often designed for a particular city and focused on that city's infrastructure, history, and culture. One of his first pieces was City Scale, a series of musical and theatrical events that took participants to various locations around San Francisco.

The majority of his early work focused on European cities where he lived from 1963 to 1964. He founded two companies to support his art, the American Cooperative Theatre (ACT) in 1961, and Action Theatre in 1965. ACT was a theater collective co-founded with Lee Breuer, R. G. Davis, and Anna Halprin. Action Theatre was a corporation formed solely by Dewey for the purpose of acting as a business entity through which to initiate and produce his projects. In addition to his Happenings, he wrote short stories, poems, and plays.

Notable works of Dewey included Summer Scene (1964) in Jyväskylä, Finland, where 1200 people played capture-the-flag in groups led by composers, and Street Piece (1963) in Helsinki, where he scored eighteen events that would happen in one hour in the center of the city. Dewey achieved notoriety through his piece at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival Drama Conference which challenged Britain's nudity laws by having a nude model pulled across the stage. In Dewey's first New York City production, Without & Within (1965) at the Palm Garden Ballroom, he divided audience members into two teams who played a giant game of tug-of-war. Though he traveled extensively, he remained in New York for the rest of his life.

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

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

From the guide to the Ken Dewey Collection, 1943-1987, 1959-1972, (The New York Public Library. Billy Rose Theatre Division.)