Ken Dewey

Kenneth Sawyer Goodman Dewey (1934-1972) was an American performance artist, playwright, and director who was active in the happening and action theatre movements in the U.S. and throughout Europe in the 1960s and early 1970s.

[1] Dewey studied sculpture with Oronzio Maldarelli and writing with playwright Theodore Apstein while attending Columbia University as an undergraduate.

Dewey lived and worked in European cities from 1963 to 1964, where he staged several happenings and action theater pieces, collaborating with Terry Riley, Chet Baker, Erkki Kurenniemi, Henrik Otto Donner, members of Anna Halprin's San Francisco Dancers' Workshop and the Living Theater, among others.

Nam June Paik played the piano outside while Yoko Ono did a "silent dramatic movement expressing agony".

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