Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Bonnie Marranca Unplugged

Performance Histories
By Bonnie Marranca

Performance Histories is a new collection of writings by Bonnie Marranca, co-founder of the Obie Award-winning PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, which she continues to edit. The essays and interviews in this volume cover a wide range of current issues such as performance and ethics, art as spiritual practice, the theatre of food, and avant-garde legacies in theatre and visual art performance. There is also extended commentary on Wallace Shawn, Maria Irene Fornes, The Wooster Group, and Robert Wilson and Gertrude Stein. Also featured are the author’s interviews with Susan Sontag, Robert Jay Lifton, and Peter Sellars.

Performance Histories is the author’s third collection of critical writings. Her volume entitled Theatrewritings received the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism. Reviewing the book in the New York Times, Mel Gussow wrote: “In a critical field that is itself burdened with special interests, she is a free spirit.” The playwright Mac Wellman stated of her Ecologies of Theatre “she has articulated a whole new landscape. “ Edited volumes include: Plays for the End of the Century, American Dreams: The Imagination of Sam Shepard, and The Theatre of Images, one of the seminal books of contemporary theatre. The author’s writings have been translated into fifteen languages. Performance Histories is her fourteenth book.

Bonnie Marranca is a Guggenheim Fellow and Fulbright Senior Scholar who has taught and lectured in many universities here and abroad, including Columbia University, Princeton University, New York University, Duke University, the University of California-San Diego, Free University (Berlin), and Institute for Theatre (Barcelona). She is Professor of Theatre at The New School/Eugene Lang College.

PERFORMANCE HISTORIES
By BONNIE MARRANCA

ISBN: 978-155554077-7    $18.95
Published by PAJ Publications
P.O. Box 532, Village Station
NY, NY 10014 
tel/fax: 212-243-3885
Distributed by Theatre Communications Group (www.tcg.org)

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