Happenings were loosely structured theatrical pieces from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s, which shared qualities of unexpectedness (a large margin for improvisation), variety of means, and chaos, with the reactions of the audience potentially influencing the action under way. Although there are elements of theatricality involved in happenings, they took place without traditionally theatrical participants or environments, and resulted from an evolution in modernist art in which the outside edges of the work are blurred, broken, or nonexistent. This trend sprang from artists' reaching for the means of establishing more direct relationships between artist and audience, and between art and life, simultaneous with their rejection of the market's control of art. A happening might take a political or sociological direction, but it could also take a poetic or playful one. Other terms referring to a happening might make it more of an event, a concert, a performance, or an action.