{"id":363,"date":"2021-11-27T07:53:10","date_gmt":"2021-11-27T07:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/?p=363"},"modified":"2021-12-05T19:26:29","modified_gmt":"2021-12-05T19:26:29","slug":"timelines-writings-and-conversation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/timelines-writings-and-conversation\/","title":{"rendered":"Timelines: Writings and Conversation"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Bonnie Marranca<\/strong>
299 pp. PAJ Publications<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reviewed by Patricia Keeney<\/strong>*<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shaped by a sensibility meticulously suited to its task, this collection of essays and interviews by American scholar and critic Bonnie Marranca\u2014co-founder and editor of Performing Arts Journal <\/em>(best known as PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art<\/em>)\u2014brims with ideas, passion and intellectual conscientiousness, bringing together what for her has been lost and gained in the transformative arenas of art and performance over the last forty years. Examined with empathy, alarm and genuine excitement, this is also a very personal collection about what for Marranca works in the arts, what doesn\u2019t, what\u2019s changing and, most intriguingly, why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Built around conversations with leading avant-garde artists, 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. Even the current pandemic does not escape her view: a \u201cnew slow time\u201d which demands a revaluation of artistic impulses in all their manifestations. Her conversations and writings throughout highlight risk, individual integrity and fearless imagination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her preface, Marranca explains why she embraces the essay as her preferred form of writing. It is the mind thinking, simultaneously personal and judicious. She recognizes how language and voice play a crucial role in her own long engagement with the performing arts (PAJ <\/em>began in 1976). She praises writing that feels musical and speaks with the changing accents of intimacy. The Theatre of Images<\/em>, she says, is simply \u201canother way of looking at the poetics of language.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marranca articulates how PAJ <\/em>has always sought primarily to feature the direct voice of the artist on the subject of creative process, a personal voice free of academic restrictions. In her open-ended texts\u2014influenced by Roland Barthes, Gertrude Stein, Susan Sontag, as well as by Robert Wilson\u2019s \u201cdramaturgy as ecology\u201d and the \u201cThe Mus\/ecology\u201d of John Cage\u2014theatre writing itself becomes her preferred way of experimenting with voice, staying true to her own questing, highly perceptive style, one informed by decades of personal engagement. Her goal is to \u201ctrack the sensibility of our time,\u201d its inclusivity and changing forms. She also calls for a multi-disciplinary training of arts writers that goes beyond the visual arts and theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDrama\u2019s current decline coincides with the diminishing role of the voice in everyday personal communication,\u201d she writes at one point. Today\u2019s culture, she says, seems to value the public life of an individual over the private. YouTube itself has created a new \u201cdemocratization of performance.\u201d We have reached a point,\u201d she wryly observes, when \u201cordinary people want to be more like artists, and artists want to be less like them.\u201d Nevertheless, she applauds a new noticeable interest in \u201ctext-making and writing experiments . . . a new poetics,\u201d (particularly evident in contemporary dance) that draws from \u201cfiction, poetry and creative prose.\u201d As for the language of criticism, it too, she says, must continue to make its value judgements, judgements based on the history of the form itself and the development of each writer\u2019s work within that form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Imagination of Catastrophe\u201d is her discussion of Caryl Churchill\u2019s two plays, Escaped Alone<\/em> and Far Away<\/em>. Marranca speaks of Churchill\u2019s precise imagery, grotesque humour and \u201cferocious new dramatic language,\u201d noting that the playwright\u2019s work is tuned to contemporary rhythms engendered by a \u201cnew social reality.\u201d Without psychologizing, Churchill creates \u201ca ferocious new dramatic language\u201d commensurate with our own catastrophic times. Again and again, Marranca returns to language as the imaginative engine of drama recognizing in it \u201cthe truth of poetry . . . more primal than fact.\u201d The catastrophic imagination of Ariane Mnouchkine\u2019s Les \u00c9ph\u00e9m\u00e8res<\/em>\u2014expressing itself in the disappearance of the human race\u2014Marranca describes as \u201can ode to ordinary people that focuses on their interior lives and relationships.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her conversation with Meredith Monk about Songs of Ascension<\/em> connects this \u201cmusic-theatre\u201d piece to Mayan, Incan and Buddhist cultures that go \u201cup\u201d to worship but also \u201cgo around.\u201d Monk says she wants to wake people up to the moment because it\u2019s all we have, an idea that Marranca so often finds missing in the vocabulary of contemporary work, increasingly focused on political content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her discussion with German writer and dancer Raimund Hoghe, an artist who regards performance as \u201ca kind of purification,\u201d we find again Marranca\u2019s abiding interest in the spirituality of art, gesture as expression of inner reality. Their conversation closes with the discomfiting conclusion that audiences seem to accept violence in performance more easily than emotion and beauty. Marranca wants theatre to retrieve its \u201cemotional gravitas and laser-sharp penetration into the inner life of human beings.\u201d Latvian director Alvis Hermanis agrees with Marranca that attention to the everyday and the intimacy of storytelling will be the future of theatre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, if performance is poetry, it is also fiction. \u201cIn discussion with the Romanian writer, Gianinia Carbunariu, Marranca explores work that is built around the endless transition from dictatorship to \u201cwild capitalism,\u201d a theatre fostering, through private language and even dry bureaucratic documents, its special rapport with the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most fascinating sections of the volume is about \u201cdrawing\u201d as performance. Her introduction here is as interesting as her conversations with Carolee Schneemann, a multi-media artist who, for Marranca, has developed a mode of \u201cperformance thinking\u201d and her own \u201cvisual art\u201d vocabulary. Marranca looks too at the work of Joan Jonas whom she calls \u201cthe most prominent exponent of drawing in performance.\u201d Marranca reminds us that<\/p>\n\n\n\n

drawing is one of the earliest languages, like dance. It has something to tell us about movement, from mind to hand to space, about following a line . . . both idea and image<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Early cave paintings and hieroglyphics knew that. Chinese ideogrammatic writing knows that. Japanese silk screen paintings and Ezra Pound knew that. Every \u201cimagist\u201d poet knows that. Performance drawing knows that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Marranca, such \u201cexpanded art processes and perceptions have redrawn the poetries of everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another essay, one dealing with \u201cthe mediaturgy of John Jesurun\u2019s Firefall<\/em>,\u201d Marranca addresses the digital world, a realm that has become more and more prominent in performance. She speaks of its \u201cidiosyncratic poetics . . . a new contemporary theatre language\u2014media-saturated\u2014that reflects the way ordinary people now think and speak, in a form of disassociated circuitry.\u201d Multi-tasking, she suggests, has itself become a performance style with competing images on the screen mimicking dramatic conflict and dramatic tension smoothing out to computer rhythms. This \u201chomo media<\/em>\u201d is clever and dangerous, a species, she warns, offering no alternatives to imaginative fragmentation and a numbing of sensibility.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Resolutely Marranca defends the integrity of art against the \u201cmass leveling of cultural life\u201d in which \u201cfood and wine embrace a connoisseurship that is denied to the arts,\u201d an idea specifically identified by Scott Timberg in his book, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class<\/em>. She is also concerned about \u201cthe new academic world order\u201d whose organization of theatre study and theatre training \u201cis largely outmoded for the twenty-first century.\u201d Continuing to affirm PAJ\u2019s <\/em>interest\u2014and her own\u2014in works not necessarily about politics or culture or the realization of some theory, she is committed to other kinds of imperatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The many essays and interviews contained in Timelines <\/em>are rich with Marranca\u2019s sensitive observations, both wise and generous. 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. <\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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*<\/a>Patricia Keeney<\/strong> is an award-winning Canadian literary and theatre critic as well as a widely published and translated poet and novelist. Her most recent books are the novel One Man Dancing<\/em> (Inanna) based on the history of Uganda\u2019s legendary Abafumi theatre company and a collection of poetry and contemporary dialogues called Orpheus in Our World (NeoPoiesis)<\/em> based on the earliest Greek hymns. Keeney is a long-time professor of Literature, Humanities and Creative Writing at Toronto\u2019s York University. Website: wapitiwords.ca<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2021 Patricia Keeney
Critical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Creative<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This work is licensed under the
Creative Commons Attribution International License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":364,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-363","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/CSBks-Timelines-cover.jpg?fit=259%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":178,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/the-global-role-of-iti-interview-with-tobias-biancone\/","url_meta":{"origin":363,"position":0},"title":"The Global Role of ITI: Interview with Tobias Biancone","author":"Patricia Keeney","date":"October 26, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"by Savas Patsalidis* Tobias Biancone is a Swiss citizen residing in Switzerland, France and China. An award-winning poet; his poetry and story books have been published in Germany, Switzerland, Russia and Bangladesh. After being active as a member of ITI in the Swiss Centre and worldwide, he accepted the position\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Interviews"","block_context":{"text":"Interviews","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/interviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/10\/image4-4.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/10\/image4-4.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/10\/image4-4.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/10\/image4-4.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":719,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/franchised-recycled-performance-as-a-theatre-of-ecology\/","url_meta":{"origin":363,"position":1},"title":"Franchised\/Recycled Performance as a Theatre of Ecology","author":"Patricia Keeney","date":"December 21, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Ivan Medenica* Abstract There could be different manifestations of a \u201ctheatre of ecology\u201d: from new versions of a so-called poor theatre with the use of reduced and\/or recycled materials, including set design, props and costumes, to the concept of an eco-dramaturgy with stories that are not centred only on human\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Conference Papers"","block_context":{"text":"Conference Papers","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/conference-papers\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-1.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":599,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/aural-oral-dramaturgies-editors-introduction\/","url_meta":{"origin":363,"position":2},"title":"Aural\/Oral Dramaturgies: Editors\u2019 Introduction","author":"Patricia Keeney","date":"December 18, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Photo: Giudi di Gesaro (Silvia Mercuriali\u2019s Swimming Home) Du\u0161ka Radosavljevi\u0107* and Flora Pitrolo** It is, perhaps, particularly suitable to our topic of dramaturgies of speech and sound that the process of putting together a special journal issue functions on the principle of call and response. In our Call for Papers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/Silvia-Mercuriali-Swimming-Home-photo-credit-giudi-di-gesaro.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":763,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/capturing-hong-kong-and-theatre-through-stage-photography\/","url_meta":{"origin":363,"position":3},"title":"Capturing Hong Kong and Theatre Through Stage Photography","author":"Patricia Keeney","date":"December 21, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Bernice Kwok-wai Chan* Abstract Theatrical works can now be documented with a range of new technologies; however, photography is still the most expressive and means of recording theatre. This essay reflects the curatorial progress of an exhibition about theatre photography and highlights some images which could illustrate a few memorable\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "National Reports"","block_context":{"text":"National Reports","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/national-reports\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image6-2.jpeg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":372,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/anatomy-mon-amour\/","url_meta":{"origin":363,"position":4},"title":"Anatomy, Mon Amour","author":"Patricia Keeney","date":"November 28, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Johannes Birringer* and Mich\u00e8le Danjoux** Abstract In the anatomy theatre of human bodies, contemporary art can be penetrating and distressing, performing its exhibition into haunting pataphysical occurrences, where color, figuration, shapes seep into our imagination like infectious slime. Looking at The Loneliness of the Soul, featuring works by Tracey Emin\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Critics on Criticism"","block_context":{"text":"Critics on Criticism","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/critics-on-criticism\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/featured-1.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/featured-1.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/featured-1.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/11\/featured-1.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":521,"url":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/staged-installation-reported-speech-and-syndemic-images-in-blindness-and-caretaker-2020\/","url_meta":{"origin":363,"position":5},"title":"Staged Installation, Reported Speech, and Syndemic Images in Blindness and Caretaker (2020)","author":"Patricia Keeney","date":"December 9, 2021","format":false,"excerpt":"Georgina Guy* Abstract This essay attends in detail to the\u00a0specific\u00a0verbal techniques used in the construction of two installation-based performances presented in London in 2020:\u00a0Blindness, a socially distanced\u00a0sound installation,\u00a0adapted by playwright Simon Stephens from Jos\u00e9 de Sousa Saramago\u2019s 1995 novel\u00a0Ensaio sobre a Cegueira,\u00a0staged at the Donmar Warehouse;\u00a0and Caretaker, a\u00a0durational installation by\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Special Topic"","block_context":{"text":"Special Topic","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/category\/special-topic\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/25\/2021\/12\/image2.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=363"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":452,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/363\/revisions\/452"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/364"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=363"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=363"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/24\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=363"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}