Editorial: Looking Ahead and Looking Back

In January PAJ published its 100th issue, celebrating the event with a special theme for the occasion, "Performance New York." It was a time for us to reflect on thirty-five years of publishing from the vantage point of a vastly different cultural and political landscape than the one we entered at PAJ's founding, in 1976. In numerous contributions by artists, curators, presenters, and critics representing several generations, and exploring multiple art forms, we focused on central themes such as Belief, Being Contemporary, Performance and Science, and Writing and Performance. Other conversations on working downtown, and on crossovers between theatre and visual art, highlighted important issues on what is at stake today in establishing a career, an institution, or a company outside the mainstream. Portfolios of drawings by several artists are also included the issue.

PAJ 100 was also an occasion for us to enhance our Website (www.mitpressjournals.org/paj) with podcasts of several artists speaking their responses to the journal's main themes, and additional links to the public talks we held at Location One, the SoHo gallery, organized around some of the issue topics. Over the last two years PAJ has been engaged in building an archive of audio and video clips for the journal's Website, in conjunction with the MIT Press staff. Free access to the interviews in PAJ has already been readily available, along with much of the supplementary media. We will continue to add media to many of the features in the journal as each new issue is published.

Now we move forward with PAJ 101, which underscores our ongoing support of plays in translation, including here Peter Handke's panoramic work on the Yugoslav war and its aftermath, Voyage by Dugout or The Play of the Film of the War, an addendum to the controversial political views he espoused that caused an uproar in Europe. Another text, World War III Just the Highlights, is the libretto for solo voice by composer Robert Ashley. Two contrary perspectives of worlds at war, one in the grand tradition of modern drama, the other presenting new forms of notation. This issue also features extended commentary on the thoughtful writings of visual artist Suzanne Lacy and the extensions of Fluxus in the recent Performa Biennial, as well as a new look at Elizabeth Streb through the poetry of Italo Calvino's idea of "lightness." Other topics of exploration are durational performance as global effort and The Wooster Group take on Tennessee Williams's Vieux Carré. PAJ 101 highlights our interests in writing and the engagement with new work set against a historical perspective.

It is with sadness that I report the death, on February 13, 2012, of Daniel Gerould, one of our beloved long-time contributors to PAJ. He was a member of the journal's original editorial board and began publishing the first of a long list of translations in our second issue, Fall 1976, with the play Birth Rate, by Polish poet Tadeusz Rózewicz. Over the decades he published many of his translations of Slavic and French authors, who include Valerii Briusov, Tadeusz Kantor, Miroslav Krleža, Leonid Andrejev, Andrzej Bursa, Prosper Mérimée, Vasily Aksyonov, Madame Rachilde, Stanislaw I. Witkiewicz, Andrei Bely. There were also numerous essays on general themes, such as his "In Praise of the Anthologist's Craft." Indeed it was all about care and craft in the superb way the editions of plays and essays Dan compiled fit together in a single volume, the work of a keen editorial eye. There was not simply a bunch of gathered texts but a community of writers. His wide-ranging essays illuminated the life and work of every author he wrote about, opening wider to the world beyond the text.

Dan published many essays and translations of plays in PAJ, and as an editor he contributed several volumes to our book division, such as The Beelzebub Sonata by Witkiewicz; Gallant and Libertine: Divertissements & Parades of 18th Century France; Doubles, Demons and Dreamers: An International Collection of Symbolist Drama, which is now a classic in the field, bringing together more than...