As a sculptor, photographer, playwright and director, Michael Kirby has been and is still an articulate proponent of the interanimation of the arts. As a practitioner as well as a theoretician of several arts, he has made and defended work that not only mixes media but also transposes forms and preoccupations of one art to others. Kirby’s commitment to the lively cross-fertilization of the arts partially accounts for the rise of Structuralist Theatre since that movement, in certain respects, appears to have been influenced in important ways by the tendency of Minimalist Art referred to as systemic painting.

Some of Kirb’s Structuralist plays, like Revolutionary Dance and Identity Control, are composed of a series of dramatic, narrative vignettes that have no apparent causal or chronological relation. Kirby created his dramatic incidents as a painter might choose a color or shape, i.e., with an eye to its place in the overall formal structure.