Gallery of images from party celebrating 40 years of PAJ @ Robert Wilson Loft in Midtown (2016).
After more than four decades since founding PAJ, I have decided to end my editorship of the journal, which will cease publication with this issue. As I write in the editorial, “working with many of the great theatre and literary minds, experiencing the work of the most influential contemporary artists, helping writers to establish an individual voice, and simply having the great good fortune of a public forum, the opportunity of editing the journal has given me a life of tremendous joy and enrichment.” It is my wish that you find in the pages of this issue new ways of writing and thinking, alongside the personal dimensions of many of our long-time contributors, that offer pieces from the heart.
Our book division will continue to be active, with nearly fifty titles still in print. It is my pleasure to announce that we have secured the rights to publish the long out-of-print classic, "The Antitheatrical Prejudice," by Jonas Barish, for release in November. A major step forward of the press is the recent acquisition of the PAJ Publications Archive and my Personal Papers by the Yale University Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, opening to researchers in early 2025.
Elsewhere in my editorial, I reflect: “The journal began with a strong desire to engage the developing new forms of theatre, performance and video art, dance, and music outside the mainstream. It is gratifying to know that over the decades the ecology of this community has evolved in its pages to contribute to the ongoing writing and documentation of theatre and performance histories. Editing PAJ has been a wonderful conservationist endeavor." - a note from Bonnie Marranca, Editor
Inside PAJ 107
Performance Drawing available on Kindle
Tony Orrico, Jonah Bokaer, Caroline Bergvall, Romeo Castellucci, George Quasha, Clifford Owens, Carolee Schneemann, Warren Neidich, and others — 17 portfolios featuring a text and drawings by each artist
Interview with Joan Jonas, U.S. artist in 2015 Venice Biennale
Graphis scores by Dick Higgins
Inside PAJ 100
Performance New York available on Kindle
Listen to podcasts here and read the editorial here
Several generations of artists, curators, critics, and presenters–a who's who of downtown performance–respond to the main themes of the issue: Belief, Being Contemporary, Performance and Science, Writing and Performance. Also includes artist portfolios by Laurie Anderson, John Kelly, Julie Mehretu, Ralph Lemon, and Brian Dewan. Three group dialogues on curating, producing, and working.
Gallery of images from party celebrating PAJ 100 @ Location One in SoHo (2012).
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PAJ's New TITLES
One of the great books in modern theatre studies, often described by readers as life-changing, is now available for a new generation of readers and scholars. This long out-of-print magisterial study, Jonas Barish’s The Antitheatrical Prejudice, features a new Foreword by Joseph Roach. He writes: “How to nominate a work of criticism as a classic? Testimony in support of The Antitheatrical Prejudice proliferates in the work of scholars in the field of drama, theater, and performance studies who have come back repeatedly to Barish to test their own ideas and predicate new arguments.”
The volume is essential reading today when theatricality, antitheatricality, and performativity are once again provocative issues playing out across contemporary culture and the arts.
ISBN 1-55554-168-2 514 pages $25
The new volume of essays and conversations by Bonnie Marranca, featuring her work of the last dozen years, turns to subjects that include the catastrophic imagination, cultural history, performance and drawing, landscape and writing, as well issues of beauty, emotion, and the spiritual in art. Thinking about the artist in the world and the nature of artistic process, she extends her longtime interests in theatre, visual arts, media, dance, and drama to the work of Joan Jonas, Caryl Churchill, Meredith Monk, Raimund Hoghe, Dick Higgins, Etel Adnan, and others in the thirty-four pieces in the volume. A chapter entitled “Editorial I,” focuses on the author’s long-time editorship of PAJ Publications and views on criticism and education. “Writing in the Landscape” explores new text and image approaches to short-form critical writing. There are also personal reflections on the recent loss of Carolee Schneemann, Maria Irene Fornes, and Sam Shepard.
“Over the years I have been drawn to Bonnie Marranca’s writings and to her sensibilities, which are always exquisitely informed, personally engaged, theoretically penetrating, and poetically illuminating. Her new book of reflections and conversations is a welcome arrival at this moment of great social and political change. The breadth of her interests originates in the cultural life of New York City and then spreads out into the world. She tosses a wide net across the cultural waters, giving us access to her conversations with and musings about some of the most compelling artists of the past several decades.” - Anne Bogart
“Marranca explores how the performing arts collaborate with one another not only through the visual and literary arts but also through the digital world, the natural world and even the psyche. Moving beyond borders of every type, she probes moments of both life and art that intersect and illuminate one another … These are the kinds of perceptions to be valued as we navigate late twentieth- and early twenty-first- century lines of performance and art in these complicated and turbulent times.” - Patricia Keeney, Critical Stages
IBSN: 9781555541675 300 pages $19.95
This new and expanded edition of Fefu and Her Friends celebrates the 40th anniversary of the beloved play by Maria Irene Fornes, one of the most influential American playwrights. The volume includes the original version of the play, which takes play in five different environments, as well as a one-set variation, conceived and directed by the author two decades after the 1977 premiere. Also featured is an interview with Fornes by Bonnie Marranca.
In a production directed by the author, Fefu and Her Friend opened in 1977 at the Relativity Media Lab in downtown Manhattan, and then moved to the American Place Theatre, where it ran from January 8-February 5, 1978. The cast features eight distinctive women's roles. Fornes always intended the play to be available for more productions by theatres that did not have the facilities for multiple environments.
A new documentary on the author, entitled The Rest I Make Up, directed by Michelle Memran, is nearing completion.
"The Fornes oeuvre is one of American drama's most important achievements." - Tony Kushner
ISBN: 9781555541637 88 pages $16.95
Other PAJ Publications titles of the author's plays include Maria Irene Fornes: Plays, Promenade and Other Plays, What of the Night?: Selected Plays, and Letters from Cuba.
PAJ's New Performance Ideas Series
Performance Ideas explores performance that crosses boundaries of all live art forms and media. In this series PAJ Publications extends its long-standing editorial commitment to bringing together the histories of performance in theatre and visual arts.
Seventy artists engaged in art as performance say what art is in these intimate portraits, accompanied by single-frame images. Artists in the volume include Marina Abramović, Carolee Schneemann, Robert Wilson, Laurie Anderson, Jonah Bokaer, Robert Ashley, Pauline Oliveros,Thurston Moore, Gary Hill, Vito Acconci, Archie Shepp, Joan Jonas, Anthony Braxton, Ann Hamilton, Yayoi Kusama, Joy Mboya, Caroline Bergvall, and many more.
One of the hotly discussed issues of today is the turn by visual artists to theatre. Many artists have become interested in the collaborative processes of theatre, auditions and rehearsals, dramatic texts, and the use of professional actors. newARTtheatre by Paul David Young explores the important strategies that artists are using in performance, painting, video, sculpture, photography, installation, and conceptual projects.
Click Here for the Brooklyn Rail's Review
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 writer and visual artist, crosses genres and continents and centuries in the volume’s literary texts, poems, plays, and interview. A selection of her paintings and drawings is also included. Among her many books are The Arab Apocalypse, Journey to Mount Tamalpais, Seasons, Master of the Eclipse, and Night, in addition to artworks exhibited worldwide. “It seems to me that I write what I see, paint what I am,” she says.
A fascinating portrait of the internationally renowned composer, performer, director, and filmmaker, from her early years to the present. The volume, first published in 2014, now includes an eight-page color insert and has been updated to feature discussions of Monk's latest music-theatre work, Cellular Songs, and a work-in-progress, Indra’s Net, in addition to the recent revival of ATLAS: an opera in three parts, at the Los Angeles Philharmonic—a work that the New York Times critic called “her masterpiece and one of the defining operatic experiments of the 20th century”—and the showing of the remastered film of Monk’s great work Quarry.
PAJ was founded in 1976 by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta to publish important, original works in the arts and the critical commentary about them, as an ongoing dialogue between art, artists, and the public. PAJ is internationally recognized as a pioneering force in arts publishing, influencing the university curriculum, performance scholarship and documentation, and the theatrical repertoire. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art (formerly called Performing Arts Journal) is a tri-annual periodical under the editorship of Bonnie Marranca. PAJ is committed to serious, innovative thinking on performance, dance, video, writing, technology, sound, and music, focusing all live arts in provocative cultural dialogue. PAJ issues bring to an engaged global readership a forum of critical essays, artists' writings, interviews, notations, and plays, with extended coverage of performances, festivals, and books. Podcasts, video and audio clips appear on PAJ's online home. The journal is published by special arrangement with MIT Press Journals and is distributed worldwide in a print version and online in color at https://direct.mit.edu/pajj
PAJ Publications – More than 150 titles in drama, criticism, and history have appeared under the PAJ imprint. Since its inception PAJ has published more than 1000 plays and performance texts, translated from 20 languages. PAJ titles are widely represented in all major university and national library collections, and arts archives around the world. Its international readership of critics, scholars, and artists crosses the borders between art forms, and the arts and humanities and science/technology. Titles can be ordered through Indie Pubs. In 2016, PAJ Publications will celebrate 40 years of journal and book publishing.
Book Series in Special Interest Areas: Performance Ideas – explores performance that crosses boundaries of all live art forms and media in titles on themes or individual artists, Art+Performance – focuses on major contemporary figures whose work in performance, video, installation, dance, music, and filmmaking explore the frontiers of performance, visual, and electronic art. The heavily illustrated volumes, edited by major critics, include a selection of critical writing and interviews covering the artist’s career, writings by the artist, chronology, and bibliographic material. Drama Contemporary – features new plays in translation, organized by country or region. Modernist Performance – texts and documents from the modern and avant-garde European repertoire, covering major movements and artists, and linking the fields of theatre, visual arts, and writing. Criticism/History –volumes of criticism, historical studies, documents on 20th century performance and the drama. Plays and Performance texts– single volumes and anthologies of important plays by American authors and dramatists from the world repertoire in translation. Includes six volumes of the Wordplays series.