Bonnie Marranca - Böcker

In addition to his work as visual artist, publisher, poet, and composer, Dick Higgins (1938–98) was also a genuine man of the theater. A founder of Fluxus, he was a major figure in artistic communities in downtown New York City, across Europe, and in Japan. Yet as important as Higgins’s work has been to historians of the American avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to his radical theatrical vision. Alchemies of Theater brings together a broad selection of Higgins’s writings and theater-related work, much of it unpublished or long out of print, including plays and performance scores, drawings, and writings on theater and performance. In addition, Bonnie Marranca's introductory essays offer wide-ranging theatrical context for the works included in the volume. As the book demonstrates, Higgins deconstructed the drama long before it became a project of theater; undercut the traditional roles of author and director; created what is now considered “devised” theater; pioneered the use of media in theater, writing the first electronic opera; and was a precursor in deconstruction and “postdramatic” avant-garde traditions. His Intermedia manifesto offered a sweeping view of interdisciplinarity—in effect, a new arts ecology.

In addition to his work as visual artist, publisher, poet, and composer, Dick Higgins (1938–98) was also a genuine man of the theater. A founder of Fluxus, he was a major figure in artistic communities in downtown New York City, across Europe, and in Japan. Yet as important as Higgins’s work has been to historians of the American avant-garde, relatively little attention has been paid to his radical theatrical vision. Alchemies of Theater brings together a broad selection of Higgins’s writings and theater-related work, much of it unpublished or long out of print, including plays and performance scores, drawings, and writings on theater and performance. In addition, Bonnie Marranca's introductory essays offer wide-ranging theatrical context for the works included in the volume. As the book demonstrates, Higgins deconstructed the drama long before it became a project of theater; undercut the traditional roles of author and director; created what is now considered “devised” theater; pioneered the use of media in theater, writing the first electronic opera; and was a precursor in deconstruction and “postdramatic” avant-garde traditions. His Intermedia manifesto offered a sweeping view of interdisciplinarity—in effect, a new arts ecology.

Includes: Motherhood 2000 by Adrienne Kennedy, The Law of Remains by Reza Abdoh, Pangean Dreams: A Shamanic Journey by Rachel Rosenthal, Enter The Night by Maria Irene Fornes, Two Altars, Ten Funerals (All Souls) by Erik Ehn, A Girl's Guide to the Divine Comedy by Shelley Berc, Frank Dell's The Temptation of St. Antony by The Wooster Group, The Mind King by Richard Foreman and Cellophane by Mac Wellman.

This collection of essays and interviews by the editor of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art covers a wide range of current topics, such as avant-garde legacies, performance and ethics, art as spiritual practice, and the theater of food. The volume features individual commentaries on the plays of Wallace Shawn, The Wooster Group oeuvre, Robert Wilson and Gertrude Stein, and international theater, with extended reflections on performance in downtown New York City.

New Europe: Plays from the Continent is a collection of seven plays that explore issues of terrorism, immigration, youth, globalization, families, and post-communist culture in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall and expansion of the European Union. It includes: Igor Bauersima, norway.today (Switzerland); Malgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk, The Death of the Squirrel-Man (Poland); Goran Stefanovski, Hotel Europa (Macedonia); Petr Zelenka, Tales of Ordinary Madness (Czech Republic); Roland Schimmelpfennig, Push Up 1-3 (Germany): Juan Mayorga, Hamlyn (Spain); Jon Fosse, Sa ka la (Norway).

This collection of essays elaborates a new perspective on performance that links ecology and art practice. From the play of landscape in Gertrude Stein's theatre and the mus/ecology of John Cage, to Robert Wilson's dramaturgy as an ecology. Other essays cover Meredith Monk, Maria Irene Fornes, Spalding Gray, Heiner Muller, world events and cultural forms of expression.

The fourth volume in PAJ’s Performance Ideas series, The Sun on the Tongue unfolds in an expanding universe of philosophical reflections on love, art, war, nature, and human existence. Etel Adnan, the internationally renowned Arab American writer and visual artist, crosses genres and continents and centuries in her literary texts, plays, poems, and art. Her plays At A Certain Hour of the Night, Crime of Honor and Tolerance are featured here, along with essays on Pina Bausch and Paul Klee, and an interview on her life and work. Her texts have been performed or adapted for theatre, opera, and radio in the U.S. and Europe. Robert Wilson invited her to write the French section of his multi-country opera, the CIVIL warS: a tree is best measured when it is down, in 1984.

NOW UPDATED TO INCLUDE DISCUSSION OF HER LATEST MUSIC-THEATRE WORK  This expanded edition of Conversations with Meredith Monk offers a fascinating portrait of the internationally renowned composer, performer, director, and filmmaker, from her early years to the present.  The five long conversations that comprise the volume part of PAJ’s “Performance Ideas” series generate invaluable insights into artistic process, the human voice, interrelationships of time, space, and music, and the complexity of artistic legacies. What is a “contemporary” work? How does an artwork retain its integrity of form over time? In these deeply engaging conversations, Monk speaks in great detail on her creation of music-theatre works, operas, and films, reflecting on the large-cast theatrical works and the more recent poetically distilled, abstract pieces.  In her preface to the new edition, Bonnie Marranca writes: “Now, against the background of life in extremis, it is evident that Monk had already acknowledged both the always unknown future and the resilience of human beings.”

In Timelines: Writings and Conversations, Bonnie Marranca turns to far-ranging subjects that include the catastrophic imagination, landscape and writing, performance drawing, cultural history, as well as issues of emotion, beauty, and the spiritual in art. Her perspectives on performance, visual arts, media, and drama in the work of Joan Jonas, Caryl Churchill, Raimund Hoghe, Dick Hig­gins, and Meredith Monk highlight the artist in the world and ar­tistic process. Includes personal reflections on the loss of influential artists Carolee Schneemann, Sam Shepard, and Maria Irene Fornes.

An in-depth look at the creative processes of the 20th century's most groundbreaking multidisciplinary artistsThe Theatre of Drawing highlights 42 American artists from the 1960s to the present, featuring individual portfolios for such prolific theatre figures as Robert Wilson, Meredith Monk, Ann Hamilton, Julie Mehretu, Trisha Brown, Gyun Hur, Annie-B Parson, Raven Chacon, Ralph Lemon, Jibz Cameron, Laurie Anderson, and Joan Jonas. The first book to present such an expansive theatrical perspective, the portfolios cover a wide range of genres—theatre, dance, music, installation, performance art—with each offering three to six pages of full color drawings.The artists in this volume make use of multiple materials to create pieces that take on the forms of map, chart, storyboard, notation, score, notebook entry, character study, and works for exhibition. For theatre practitioners, this varied collection can serve as a valuable resource to consult for future events and performances.