The powerful role of performativity in protest culture since the 1960s owes much to the rarified art of the Happening, introduced by Allan Kaprow in Greenwich Village in 1959. Kaprow, in turn, owed much to the historical avant-garde, having studied at Black Mountain College, where European émigré artists found refuge from fascism, bringing experimental techniques of Bauhaus and absurdist theater along with them in the 1930s. Inspired by Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism, Kaprow’s first Happenings invited a select group of connoisseurs to participate in tightly scripted scenarios designed to provoke curiosity, confusion, anxiety, and other responses—emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic—with highly unpredictable results. From the controlled environments of lofts and galleries, Happenings spread quickly into the streets, inspiring the “guerilla theater” tactics of Bread and Puppet, Living Theater, and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker (at right). Across the Atlantic, Dutch Provos and Vienne...