In 1969, the Mark Taper Forum was the location for the Los Angeles Festival of Performing Arts's most unique offering: a movement experiment between Studio Watts and celebrated choreographer Anna Halprin's San Francisco Dancers’ Workshop. The piece they created, Ceremony of Us, set itself the goal of making a dance happening of a healing encounter between conflicting races.

Only months after publishing The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon wrote an account of life in Watts for the New York Times Magazine. On May 7, 1966, a Los Angeles police officer had shot and killed Leonard Deadwyler, a black man whose name could easily have been plucked from Pynchon’s novel. Ruled an “accident,” Deadwyler’s death was salt in the wound of a neighborhood still smarting from its last fight with the cops. The author spoke, as he expressed in The Crying of Lot 49, of a fundamental inability to communicate—this time between black and white cultures. If, as Pynchon—an outsider himself, albeit a highly critical one—noted, “white values [were] displayed without let-up on black people’s TV screens,” what were the available tools for blacks to communicate the realities of their existence? For local black activists and educators, including Noah Purifoy and Judson Powell, the answer to Pynchon’s conundrum was art.