Beyond Text: Theater and Perfor Mance in Print After 1900 by Jennifer Buckley (review)

The cover image of Jennifer Buckley's groundbreaking monograph shows the artist Carolee Schneemann reading from a book, one of her be loved cats staring at the camera from her lap. The photograph obliquely echoes the cover from one of Schneemann's own handprinted books, a reproduction of a sketch she made as a 4-year-old. As described by Buckley, "[t]he young artist sketched two figures separated by a rectangular plane, which could be a window, a mirror, or a frame. Each figure extends her arm under the plane's bottom edge, reaching toward the face of the other. … Around the image, Schneemann has sketched a second rectangle, which draws the eye to a third comprised by the edges of the page. … [H]er bookwork enables women artists to metaphorically and materially reach toward one another" (154). Schneemann diagrams a book's relationship beyond text—reader reaching to maker—but also to the body of the book itself. Buckley's cover replaces those unseen arms with the wide-eyed cat, revealing how books act as somewhat domesticated but very much alive nonhuman others, before and with which we perform.

In its celebration of ephemerality and contingency, theatre and performance studies scholarship has long neglected the rich fields of book and print history. Following critiques of liveness that recognize the lasting liveliness of documentation and other materialities, Beyond Text shows how printed matter acts with readers and how artists in the twentieth century have taken up these affordances to further their performative investigations. As Buckley succinctly puts it, "I wrote this book to show what theater and performance artists have done with books in a period that was supposed to be done with the book" (xiv). Indeed, her preference for the term "bookworks" (from the Mexican artist Ulises Carrión) reminds us to think not only about how books do things with words, but also how they act materially.

Following an introduction surveying conceptions and misconceptions of the relationship between text and performance, the book moves chronologically through the twentieth century, with each of five chapters centered on the case study of a particular artist or collective. With one exception, these protagonists are familiar figures from the twentieth-century European and American avantgarde, here revealed in exciting new ways through their extensive, largely unexamined engagements with work on paper. The research throughout is impeccable, backed by visits to archives and special collections, sources in several languages, and a thorough familiarity with the technologies of printing that makes for a fascinating introduction. For example, Buckley begins by making a strong case for how Edward Gordon Craig's xylography, or wood engraving, defined the terms and possibilities of his visual theatre. In a lucid overview of printing technologies, she argues that lines carved out of woodblock—marks that translate into white space on the printed sheet—become analogues for the light describing the contours of Craig's staged screens and forms. Focusing on Cranach Press's famous 1930 edition of his Hamlet, Buckley sees the woodcuts that interpenetrate the blocks of text as "a wordless drama that rests, in a material sense, on Shakespeare's play and on its sources" (59). Engraving enabled Craig to realize complete control of his stage apart from the vagaries of human actors, an insight that invites us to reconsider the visual theatre of a fellow auteur like Robert Wilson in terms of his own lithographic and intaglio printmaking.

The next two chapters on the German expressionist Lothar Schreyer and the Living Theatre, respectively, offer divergent visions of how collectives have utilized bookworks to account for performances that decenter dramatic text and the single auteur. Splintering off from the Bauhaus to pursue a spiritual form of communal theatrical creation, Schreyer conceived of a notational system for recording the many dimensions of embodied performance. Buckley shows how the company's rejection of modern technologies of the stage and self are disavowed not only in their...