Performance in the Culture

Performance in the Culture PAJ 16 inaugurates a new volume of issues, and more significantly from our perspective, the combination of articles articulates in a dynamic way the role of the performing arts in their cultural setting, and all that that implies in terms of aesthetic, social and political awareness. More than any issue we've ever published, PAJ 16 defines the kind of thinking about the arts that we hoped would find its way into the public forum that we have been striving to create. It's not that we are taking a completely new approach to publishing: anyone who has followed our work can find a continuity in our writers, and in what we've chosen to emphasize. Our stronger focus on issues simply reflects and brings together the resources we have been developing in our relationships with writers and artists in the last six years. That, added to the widespread disenchantment and depression among theatre artists and audiences who are slowly beginning to express these feelings makes us want to explore why this is so. If journals-like people-have lives that mature and are influenced by their surroundings, then we are in a new phase of our development, responding to a crisis that exists in the theatre world that has to be confronted. The new design of PAJ emphasizes in clearer visual detail-gives high definition to-the more precise, focussed voice we want to dominate the journal. This is the first time we've put an individual on the cover, but Philip Glass represents to us more than the image of a person, he represents the ideals of passion, lyricism and emotional straightforwardness in theatrical art that we want to celebrate. The major part of this issue, "Backtalk," centers on the responses to 4 Richard Schechner's "The Decline and Fall of the (American) Avant-Garde," a two-part essay which appeared in PAJ 14 and 15. Widely discussed in the theatre community, Schechner's article raises many questions about the trends of experimentation in the last dozen or more years. In our new "Backtalk" section his views are challenged by the artists who respond to him, and by one of PAJ's editors who sets the argument in a more specific cultural context. As we put this issue together we began to see that it was not only in this "Backtalk" section that aesthetics, criticism, American culture, funding, politics, theatrical tradition, and the role of the audience were discussed. The "politics of performance" was all over the issue-in Philip Glass's reflections on his opera Satyagraha and Gautam Dasgupta's personal view of its Gandhian ideals, in Gitta Honegger's thoughtful analysis of a dying world order set against the Minneapolis landscape, in Ihab Hassan's attempt to define the impulses in contemporary culture, in Roger Planchon's description of theatre in French society, in Roger Copeland's dissection of reality and representation, and in the reports on recent international festivals. Even the play by Andreyev criticizes conventional assumptions about theatre and audiences. The reasons why so many topics and so many names of artists and critics echo and bump against each other in PAJ 16 is obvious: these are the people and the ideas shaping the way we think about contemporary art. All those who are seriously thinking about the performing arts are asking similar questions. Thankfully, they are not finding the same answers. PAJ exists to frame the questions no one is addressing elsewhere in the media. That artists as much as critics are initiating the discussion in PAJ is our way of keeping open the channels of dialogue in the theatre community. We want to continue to do that as provocatively as we can to evolve a continuing critique of art and its audience, In its historical setting. The Editors Publication of Performing Arts Journal has been made possible in part by public funds received from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. 5 ...