Alchemies of Theater: Plays, Scores, Writings by Dick Higgins, 2024
Alchemies of Theater brings together a broad selection of Higgins’s writings and theater-related work, much of it unpublished or long out-of-print. As Bonnie Marranca demonstrates in several essays in the volume, Dick Higgins deconstructed the drama long before it became a project of theater; he undercut the traditional roles of author and director and created what is now considered “devised” theater; he pioneered the use of media in theater, writing the first electronic opera, and was a precursor in deconstruction and post-dramatic avant-garde traditions.
Dick Higgins (1938-1998) was a visual artist, publisher, poet, composer, filmmaker, playwright. A founder of Fluxus, he wrote many books as well as the influential “Intermedia” manifesto.
Published by University of Michigan Press
Timelines: writings and conversations, 2021
Timelines turns to subjects that include the catastrophic imagination, cultural history, landscape and writing, as well issues of beauty, emotion, and the spiritual in art. Bonnie Marranca 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 from the last dozen years. A chapter entitled "Performance and Drawing" focuses on this special art practice. “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.
Conversations with Meredith Monk - Expanded Edition, 2020
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. Five long conversations comprise the volume. 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. For decades her body of work has been rooting itself in the recurrent themes of spiritual quest (Songs of Ascension), healing (The Politics of Quiet), compassion (mercy), plague (Book of Days), fragility of life (impermanence), cultural identity (Ellis Island), historical trauma (Quarry), ecology (On Behalf of Nature), and community (Cellular Songs).”
The Sun on the Tongue, 2018.
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.
New Europe, 2009.
Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Malgorzata Semil, with an Introduction by Bonnie Marranca. 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. Includes works by Igor Bauersima (Switzerland), Małgorzata Sikorska-Miszczuk (Poland), Goran Stefanovski(Macedonia), Petr Zelenka (Czech Republic), Roland Schimmelpfennig (Germany), Juan Mayorga (Spain), and Jon Fosse (Norway).
Performance Histories, 2008.
Essays and interviews on performance and ethics, art as spiritual practice, the theatre of food, avant-garde legacies in theatre and visual art performance. Featuring commentaries on Wallace Shawn, Maria Irene Fornes, The Wooster Group, Robert Wilson and conversations with Susan Sontag, Robert Jay Lifton, Peter Sellers.
A Slice of Life: Contemporary Writers on Food, 2003.
Edited with a Preface by Bonnie Marranca. Contributions by Susan Sontag, Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes, M.F.K. Fisher, Alice Walker, Calvin Trillin, Wole Soyinka, Isabel Allende, Wendell Berry, and others.
Conversations on Art and Performance, 1999.
Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, with an Introductory by Bonnie Marranca. More than two-dozen talks gathered from PAJ, with influential figures in contemporary arts and culture, including Edward Said, Charles Mee, Susan Sontag,Trisha Brown, John Cage, Richard Foreman, Robert Jay Lifton, Philip Glass, Mac Wellman, John Ashbery, and Laurie Anderson.
Ecologies of Theater, 1996.
Perspectives on performance, text, and landscape, including concepts on dramaturgy as an ecology; mus/ecology; autobiology. Essays on John Cage, Gertrude Stein, Robert WIlson, Meredith Monk, Rachel Rosenthal, Heiner Müller, and others.
Plays for the End of the Century, 1996.
Edited with an Introduction by Bonnie Marranca. Includes plays by Adrienne Kennedy, Reza Abdoh, Maria Irene Fornes, Erik Ehn, Richard Foreman, and others.
Hudson Valley Reader, 1995, paperback version of
Hudson Valley Lives, 1991.
Edited and introduced with biographical and historical notes by Bonnie Marranca. A collection of writings by people who lived in or traveled through the Hudson Valley from the 17th century to the present, including Frederic Church, Henry James, Andrew Jackson Downing, Alexander Hamilton, Robert Juet, Walt Whitman, John Burroughs, Robert Fulton, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Cole, and others.
Interculturalism and Performance: Writings From PAJ, 1991.
Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, with an Introduction by Bonnie Marranca. Contributions by Victor Turner, Richard Schechner, Tadashi Suzuki, Edward Said, Lee Breuer, and others.
American Garden Writing, 1988 (expanded 2003).
Edited with Preface and biographical and historical notes by Bonnie Marranca. Writings by George Washington, Michael Pollan, Jamaica Kincaid, Thomas Jefferson, Edith Wharton, Beatrix Farrand, Elizabeth Lawrence, and others.
Theatrewritings, 1984.
Recipient of the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Essays on Pirandello, Chekhov, Richard Foreman, Lillian Hellman, Sam Shepard, Meredith Monk, and on Nuclear Theatre, The Politics of Performance, The Wooster Group.
American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, 1981.
Edited with an Introduction by Bonnie Marranca. Essays and interviews by critics, actors, directors, and commentary by Shepard.
The Theatre of Images: Robert Wilson, Richard Foreman, Lee Breuer, 1977 (Updated with new Afterword in 1996).
Edited with Introductory essays by Bonnie Marranca.
Theatre of the Ridiculous: Jack Smith, Kenneth Bernard, Charles Ludlam, Ronald Tavel, 1979.
Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta. Plays and documents by Jack Smith, Ronald Tavel, Kenneth Bernard, Charles Ludlam.
Animations: A Trilogy for Mabou Mines by Lee Breuer, 1979.
Edited by Bonnie Marranca and Gautam Dasgupta, with an Introduction by Bonnie Marranca.