Bonnie Marranca

The Wooster Group: A Dictionary of Ideas

This is the legacy of John Cage’s “library of sounds” and of Rauschenberg’s mixedmedia works. As an aesthetic strategy it takes for granted that in using the archives of art and culture as a database the issue is not one of ownership, but of distribution. Viewed in another light, the deterritorialization process of this kind of theatre, if extended into the world of cyberspace, changes the very nature of the way we think of art and authorship, composition and interpretation, and the notion of boundaries between art forms, art and everyday life, one culture and another, the created and the ready-made. This approach highlights process—the artwork and the work of art.

Performance and Ethics: Questions for the 21st Century

One of the most prolific and multifaceted contemporary artists, Peter Sellars in recent years has directed a wide range of works in theatre, opera, television, film, and video, in Europe and the U.S. He is well-known for his highly original earlier stagings of Mozart’s operas Cosi Fan Tutte, The Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni, as well as premieres of John Adams’s Nixon in China, The Death of Klinghoffer, and El Nino. He has been Director of the American National Theatre in Washington, Artistic Director of the 1990 and 1993 Los Angeles Festivals, and is currently a Professor in the Department of World Arts and Cultures at UCLA. Sellars has collaborated with The Wooster Group, created radio episodes for The Museum of Contemporary Art’s “The Territory of Art” series, and directed the feature film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. His productions have been commissioned by the major opera houses and theatres in Europe, appearing also in many festivals abroad. Among the recent works he has staged are Olivier Messaien’s St. Francoise d’Assise, Stravinsky’s The Story of a Soldier, Paul Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler, Tan Dun’s Peony Pavilion. He also worked with Bill Viola on the 25th year survey of the video artist’s work. Sellars’s latest theatre piece, Children of Herakles, is one of the many classics he has staged throughout his career, a project created with the participation of refugees, government officials, writers, and immigrants in several European cities and in the U.S., in Boston. Sellars is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize Fellowship and was awarded the Erasmus Prize for his contributions to European culture. This interview was taped during the run of Children of Herakles at Teatre Lliure as part of Forum Barcelona 2004, on June 16, 2004.

The Universal: The Simplest Place Possible

Romeo Castellucci, with Claudia Castellucci and Chiara Guidi, founded Societas Raffaello Sanzio, one of Italy’s most radical-thinking contemporary theatres, in 1981. Since that time the group has created many productions, including provocative stagings of the classics of Shakespeare and the Greeks, including Hamlet, Julius Caesar, the Oresteia, as well as mythic texts, such as Gilgamesh. Societas Raffaello Sanzio also sustains a unique children’s theatre, a school, and produces books and conferences on their work. Based in the Adriatic city of Cesena, Italy, the company artists bring together theatre and the visual arts— and often, animals, children, actors, and non-actors—in productions that draw upon philosophical, literary, and visual ideas. Performed in nearly a dozen European cities, each as a singular creation, is the latest project, Tragedia Endogonidia, which unites art and science for a new reading of tragedy in the contemporary age. This interview was conducted in Italy, in June 2002.

Writing at the Edge of Time

Writing an editorial at this juncture of American life is a daunting task. Simply to rant about the degradation of culture, political corruption, spiritual bankruptcy, and the rise of far-fight nationalism is to duplicate the already prolific commentary on these themes. I would rather write about the quality of human spirit that the life and death of Sam Shepard offers as a model from the last months of his life. Reprinted in this issue is the first piece he ever wrote for PAJ, in 1977, which was decided on as an homage after his death last summer. The December 4, 2017 New York Times article by Alexandra Alter, which details Shepard’s struggle to finish his last book, Spy of the First Person, appeared just as the proofs for the new PAJ had arrived.

Afternoon at the Villa Panza

I am standing in a room of twenty-three video portraits of snowy owls at the Villa Panza in Varese. What comes to mind is a recent exchange with Robert Wilson, who noted in passing that he had learned a lot about acting from animal behavior. We thought about doing an interview on this subject in the future. Time passed and now the animals that populate his work travel the paths of memory instead. Installed throughout the elegant classical rooms of Villa Panza are his video portraits that include Renée Fleming, Zhang Huan, Brad Pitt, and the Lady Gaga series, among those of Quincy, a fox, and Ivory, a black panther, joining Kool, as the snowy owl multiples are titled. Remember the fish tank on the edge of the stage, a frog at the dinner table, a sky full of sheep?—the forest, the beach, and ever the moon. Some time ago I had written about the Wilson bestiary and varying climates that partake of this melding of cultures and artifacts across centuries: the sense of dramaturgy as an ecology. If genre is akin to species, biodiversity is the dreamlife of artworks, a new enlightenment: human history + natural history + art history. Here now is the realm of the mythopoetic, fable. Did I mention the exhibition is called Tales?

The Artist in the World

In a moving retelling of her trip to Stockholm to perform at the 2016 Nobel Prize ceremony (The New Yorker, December 14), Patti Smith details preparations for her appearance on the morning of the event. Rehearsal with the orchestra. Tea and warm soup in her dressing room. She thought of her mother who first bought her a Bob Dylan album, when she was sixteen or so. Her favorite song was “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” She played it over and over then, and performed it in the years to come with her late husband. Now she was to sing the celebrated song at the Award presentation, before the King and Queen, many well-dressed guests, and Nobel laureates. But not Bob Dylan, winner of the literary prize this year. Smith thought of past honorees in Literature, in particular, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Albert Camus.

Life and Death Matters

Where should I begin? It’s been a difficult stretch in the weeks leading up to completing PAJ 114. Suicide bombings, the Orlando massacre, refugees floating in the sea, Brexit, police shootings, and the death of my beloved mother. As I look over the contributions to this issue, I have before me reflections on the incandescent achievement of Tadeusz Kantor, who wrought his great work from the shards of World War II and communism; an essay that finds avant-garde spiritual vanguardism in the act of a Buddhist monk who, in 1963, startled the world with his self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam war; Aleister Crowley’s fierce anti-fundamentalist play, written against the background of World War 1; and, closer to our own time, notes on the use of Greek plays in their healing effects on veterans of Middle East wars complete the historical touchstones.

Marketplace CultureScott Timberg, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015.

Over the last year there have been numerous articles in the national print media on developments in American culture and intellectual life brought about by vast technological, social, and economic transformations. On this list are “The Death of the American Dance Critic” by Madison Mainwaring (Atlantic), William Dereziewicz’s “The Neoliberal Arts” (Harper’s), and “Among the Disrupted” by Leon Wieseltier (The New Republic), while several other authors of literary, performance, and art reviews have also commented on cultural issues. Scott Timberg’s Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class is worth paying attention to for the disconcerting picture it creates of the decline in industries across the arts. He gathers a litany of facts that mark the decimation of bookstores, record stores, and video rental stores along with their “knowledge workers” and curatorial service, and the impact on alternative and classical radio, graphic artists, photographers, and arts journalists, in addition to the reported 260,000 jobs that were lost in traditional publishing and journalism in the three years after 2007.

after the red army faction: gender, culture, militancy by Charity Scribner (review)

The intersections of politics and aesthetics and the neo-avant-garde form an important theme in this volume, with Frankfurt School theories and Adorno drawn into debates on feminism as it developed a radical critique of social norms, as well as the then new postmodern critique of Jürgen Habermas. Scribner also sets the RAF in relation to the Situationists, as did Guy Debord himself, emphasizing that both groups understood the potential of the image in capitalist society. Meinhof and the others were savvy in the use of media to promote their ideology, whereas the Situationists were more critical of mediatized culture. Scribner also makes the fascinating observation that concrete poetry and language experiments seem to have influenced the grammar and writings of the terrorist organization. What this study confirms is the long life of twentieth-century avant-garde debates centered in politics and art and revolutionary ideals.The intersections of politics and aesthetics and the neo-avant-garde form an important theme in this volume, with Frankfurt School theories and Adorno drawn into debates on feminism as it developed a radical critique of social norms, as well as the then new postmodern critique of Jürgen Habermas. Scribner also sets the RAF in relation to the Situationists, as did Guy Debord himself, emphasizing that both groups understood the potential of the image in capitalist society. Meinhof and the others were savvy in the use of media to promote their ideology, whereas the Situationists were more critical of mediatized culture. Scribner also makes the fascinating observation that concrete poetry and language experiments seem to have influenced the grammar and writings of the terrorist organization. What this study confirms is the long life of twentieth-century avant-garde debates centered in politics and art and revolutionary ideals.

Lines of Thought: The Graphis Series of Dick Higgins

Writer, composer, visual artist, performer, publisher, and a founder of Fluxus, Dick Higgins expended a great deal of energy thinking about performance and drama. Beginning in 1958, over the next decade he created a series of nearly 150 Graphis notations to be performed, three of which are published in this issue. In his Selected Early Works, 1955–1964, Higgins describes his concept: “All of the series is used to provide movements and sounds which can be produced by or with the human body . . . Props can be used when they are affected by the body directly eg. stilts, artificial limbs, motorcycles, shoes, or tied legs, but not tables, hats, or remote control instruments such as organs, pianos, radios etc., at any rate not