Performance Ideas – serie

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.”

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. The portfolios offer a remarkably intimate look into the creative process that transforms drawing into the art of performance.

"newARTtheatre's greatest value may be that of a historical document of the understanding of a specific set of performance practices in its own time of making. The fresh and speculative perspective of these artists grappling with the evolving paradigm of the tightening entanglement between performance and visual artist is worth a read now and may be rich material for historians to come." —Jess Wilcox, The Brooklyn RailOne of the hotly debated current issues is the turn by visual artists towards theatre as a way of working, by using plays, acting and rehearsal techniques for their art. The first of the new "Performance Ideas" books by PAJ, this volume includes playwright and curator Paul David Young in dialogue with many crossover artists, including Pablo Helguera, Liz Magic Laser, David Levine, Janet Cardiff, Alix Pearlstein, and Michael Smith, who offer wide-ranging views on performance, video, photography, and sound.