Editing Happening (section)

===Difference from plays===

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| footer = Argentine artist [[Marta Minujín]] in a 1965 happening, ''Reading the news'', in which she got into the [[Río de La Plata]] wrapped in newspapers.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.marta-minujin.com/happenings_performances.html |title=HAPPENINGS AND PERFORMANCES |access-date= 25 July 2013|work=Marta-minujin.com}}</ref>
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Happenings emphasize the organic connection between art and its environment. Kaprow supports that "happenings invite us to cast aside for a moment these proper manners and partake wholly in the real nature of the art and life. It is a rough and sudden act, where one often feels "dirty", and dirt, we might begin to realize, is also organic and fertile, and everything including the visitors can grow a little into such circumstances." 
Happenings have no plot or philosophy, but rather are materialized in an improvisatory fashion. There is no direction thus the outcome is unpredictable. "It is generated in action by a headful of ideas...and it frequently has words but they may or may not make literal sense. If they do, their meaning is not representational of what the whole element conveys. Hence they carry a brief, detached quality. If they do not make sense, then they are acknowledgement of the sound of the word rather than the meaning conveyed by it."<ref>{{cite book |last1=Kaprow |first1=Allan |title=Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life: Expanded Edition |date=2003 |publisher=University of California Press |isbn=978-0-520-24079-7 |page=19 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HMKyDQr4kHEC&pg=PA19 |language=en |chapter=Happenings in the New York Scene (1961)}}</ref>

Due to the convention's nature, there is no such term as "failure" which can be applied. "For when something goes "wrong", something far more "right", more revelatory may emerge. This sort of sudden near-miracle presently is made more likely by chance procedures." As a conclusion, a happening is fresh while it lasts and cannot be reproduced.{{r|Wardrip-Fruin Montfort 2003|p=86}}

Regarding happenings, [[Red Grooms]] has remarked, "I had the sense that I knew it was something. I knew it was something because I didn't know what it was. I think that's when you're at your best point. When you're really doing something, you're doing it all out, but you don't know what it is."<ref name="Early Years"/>

The lack of plot as well as the expected audience participation can be likened to Augusto Boal's [[Theater of the Oppressed]], which also claims that "spectator is a bad word". Boal expected audience members to participate in the theater of the oppressed by becoming the actors. His goal was to allow the downtrodden to act out the forces oppressing them in order to mobilize the people into political action. Both Kaprow and Boal are reinventing theater to try to make plays more interactive and to abolish the traditional narrative form to make theater something more free-form and organic.<ref>Augusto Boal, "Theater of the Oppressed", in {{harvnb|Wardrip-Fruin|Montfort|2003|pp=341–52}}</ref>

The combine performance mixes the four-dimensional elements of performance with the three-dimensional elements of happening; much us is the case with performance "living" sculptures.<ref>RoseLee Goldberg, ''Performance Now: Live Art for the Twenty-First Century'' (Thames & Hudson, 2018): p.&nbsp;137. {{ISBN|0500021252}}.</ref>