Project MUSE®: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art.daily12026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (1976) - vol. 46 (2024)
Latest Articles: PAJ: A Journal of Performance and ArtTWOProject MUSE®PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art1537-94771520-281XLatest articles in PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Singular Moments of Being
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938359
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In a recent interview, the actress Tilda Swinton, when asked what she looks for in a script or a project, said, “I feel I am much less interested in story than I am in experience, and in atmosphere.”An overused trope or buzzword in the American theatre is about how our primary job is to tell stories. This shorthand description of what we do has become a cliché and has almost lost its meaning. Of course, humans are inherently storytellers. We create narratives to make sense of the existential blips and bleeps of our daily lives. The construction of narrative, in conjunction with the attendant feelings and the emotions, generated in the receiver, is what leads to the creation of shared meaning and culture. But I feel
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallSingular Moments of Being2024-09-29text/htmlen-USSingular Moments of Being2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®127942026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29I Am Pina
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938360
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I passed the Bausch Haus the other day. On my way to see my friend Katerina who lives next door. It’s early summer on this Cycladic island and all the way down the hundred or so steps that pass the house and lead to Katerina’s gate the path was lined with poppies and wild cistus and strewn with broken stones and bits of rubble washed down in winter rains. Few people walk down these steps now, and there’s no other way to get to the Bausch Haus than down this stairway from the road or up from the village below. I say the Bausch Haus as if that was its official name but of course it isn’t. It’s just that it is where I met Pina Bausch one late summer morning in the early 1990s. It has been the Bausch Haus to me ever
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallI Am Pina2024-09-29text/htmlen-USI Am Pina2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®132362026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Tell Me about the Worms!
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938361
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For more than three decades, I have taught an occasional graduate seminar on Samuel Beckett and the theatre art he both seeded and directly inspired. My seminar has had various insufficiently inspired titles related to heritage, afterlife, and “the Beckettian” (I’ve never hit on the right variant of “I’ll go on”), and its syllabus is fluid, absorbing a shifting cast of younger artists who I think are significant and whose work could never have existed without Beckett. These are generally major figures whose innovations seem to me unimaginable without his precedent, but some lesser-knowns find their way in too. Questions of direct influence are unimportant in this course, for the simple reason that Beckett’s impact
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallTell Me about the Worms!2024-09-29text/htmlen-USTell Me about the Worms!2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®256272026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Sketches from Moby Dick
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938362
<p></p>
For the concept, I see Ishmael being played at times as an old man, played by a young actor, Kilian Ponert.Ishmael is mostly seen as the young man, and only from time to time as the old storyteller.The main character is The Boy, played by Christopher Nell. I worked with him mainly in Berlin for my production of Shakespeare’s SONNETS and I WAS SITTING ON MY PATIO THIS GUY APPEARED I THOUGHT I WAS HALUCINATING.Anna Calvi is writing the music. She composed the music for DER SANDMANN, which I did in 2017. Most of the story is told through Anna’s songs. At times we have the text from Melville. And sometimes a short text that I wrote and Eli Troen, who was my former assistant.As in all my work, all you see is what you
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallSketches from Moby Dick2024-09-29text/htmlen-USSketches from Moby Dick2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®91392026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29German in PAJ: A Coda
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938363
<p></p>
Gliding for miles and miles along Heiner Müller’s despoiled shores.The coverage in PAJ of German-language theatre, arts, and politics began almost at the beginning. The second issue of Performing Arts Journal, published fall 1976, very nearly fifty years ago, included Alvin Goldfarb, child of Holocaust survivors, on “Theatrical Activities in Nazi Concentration Camps” (only thirty years after the liberation of those camps). The research became Goldfarb’s dissertation at the CUNY Graduate Center, and much later, in 1999, contributed to the important book Theatrical Performance During the Holocaust, co-edited by Goldfarb with Rebecca Rovit, and published by PAJ Publications. This issue also presented a memoir by Czech
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallGerman in PAJ: A Coda2024-09-29text/htmlen-USGerman in PAJ: A Coda2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®322282026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29The Long View: Talking Band Turns Fifty
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938364
<p></p>
The year 2024 marked the fiftieth anniversary season of New York-based theatre company Talking Band. Founded in 1974, the company has created over fifty new works of theatre since its inception. Made up of founding members Paul Zimet (the company’s artistic director), Ellen Maddow, and Tina Shepard, these artists met while working in Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre and formed Talking Band in the year after Chaikin disbanded his own company. Together, they write, perform, choreograph, compose, and direct original pieces, often collaborating with other artists in the process, including Taylor Mac, Anne Bogart, and 600 Highwaymen to name only the most recent examples.This year, the company staged three full-scale
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallThe Long View: Talking Band Turns Fifty2024-09-29text/htmlen-USThe Long View: Talking Band Turns Fifty2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®240582026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29On Criticism: Seven Meditations
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938365
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It was the British playwright Sarah Kane who first drew me to PAJ when I was a young writer. Previously I’d been studying English drama and Shakespearean tragedy especially. Then, as so often happens, Brecht, Artaud, and Pirandello arrived in my second and third years of college to uproot my conception of theatre. Next Beckett captivated me, first from the page, then in the rehearsal studio. He was the only author I knew who could create a disorientation in me that rivaled Kafka’s stories. Soon Caryl Churchill was starting to seem at home within this aesthetic constellation. When I encountered Kane’s work later that year, I was so hungry to know.The summer before my junior year, I’d visited London and gone to a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallOn Criticism: Seven Meditations2024-09-29text/htmlen-USOn Criticism: Seven Meditations2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®292692026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Portrait of the Critic as a Young Seeker
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938366
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For most of my life, I have been obsessed with two things: theatre and the possibility of divine encounter. I participated in theatre from a very young age, mostly as a performer, and began an extensive exploration into various world religions from the time I was in high school. It began with encountering myths from diverse cultures and flowed outwards from there, as I eagerly acquainted myself with the many ways humans engage with the sacred. All the while I also had the good fortune to grow up in Texas in the nineties, when major arts funding and important artists were readily available. The Alley Theatre cultivated a relationship with Robert Wilson, and I learned from watching his Hamlet: A Monologue about what
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallPortrait of the Critic as a Young Seeker2024-09-29text/htmlen-USPortrait of the Critic as a Young Seeker2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®134462026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Adrienne Kennedy’s Life Writing
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938367
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I still struggle to articulate fully what a profound sense of loss I felt, not being able to participate in the ritual of theatregoing during the era of mandated physical distancing. As much of my writing in the pages of PAJ over the years reflects, I derive tremendous joy and fulfillment from the experience of attending live performance events. Indeed, I have come to regard it as essential to my overall sense of well-being. Spending a seemingly endless number of days conducting my professional, personal, and social life in virtual spaces only served to underscore just how impossible it is to replicate the thrill of engaging in acts of collective spectatorship, despite the valiant efforts that many artists around
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallAdrienne Kennedy’s Life Writing2024-09-29text/htmlen-USAdrienne Kennedy’s Life Writing2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®197762026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Editing Artists
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938368
<p></p>
I had planned to respond to PAJ’s prompt for this issue by writing about my intimate year with incomparable women artists in their eighties. But then someone sent me “The Art of Editing No. 1,” a 1994 interview with Robert Gottlieb and a collection of famous writers he edited, talking about their writer-editor relationship. This redirected me, and I began thinking about my glancing blows with critics over the years. Not blows as in, I knocked out critics who wrote mean things (wouldn’t every artist reading this want to read that story!). But rather, glancing blows as in my brushes with conversion, and Bonnie Marranca’s role in my development as an artist-critic.I first met Robert Gottlieb in the elevator at the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallEditing Artists2024-09-29text/htmlen-USEditing Artists2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®160182026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Time and Again
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938369
<p></p>
I was about five years old when I organized some of the neighborhood children to put on a show in our garage on Harrison Street in Paducah, Kentucky. Many years later, I started writing for PAJ. A lot of history happened in between, personal history and world history. I have spent much of that time trying to tell myself the right story about the world and me, including thinking about how stories are told, how languages operate, and what we can call truth.I don’t remember much about that first show, except that I took some care directing the neighborhood kids, explaining when and how to enter and exit the garage. I was keen to use the elevated storage area at the back of the garage as an alternate playing area, from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallTime and Again2024-09-29text/htmlen-USTime and Again2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®160842026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29How to Write, or How to Return Home
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938370
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At what point in one’s lifetime does one retire from performance and decide that it might be better to withdraw from the stage, from rehearsals, from choreographing and designing the next piece? Is retiring from a professional career a kind of retreat or simply a relocation? And how would I begin to narrate the changes that affect me, and perhaps all the others that I experienced throughout this life in the theatre and in teaching performance to younger art students?If the following appears to be autobiographical, it is in fact intimately related as well to a reflection on many years of writing about performance. I joined PAJ as a contributing editor in 1985, while teaching theatre studies at Yale University, just
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallHow to Write, or How to Return Home2024-09-29text/htmlen-USHow to Write, or How to Return Home2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®321672026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Walking with Intention: Janine Antoni’s Ear-Shaped Labyrinth
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938371
<p></p>
Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Paleozoic Era, the land where the Tallgrass prairie now grows was buried under the Permian Sea. Shells and invertebrate fossils at times reemerge to remind us of a geological period that the land has not forgotten. This prairie, which once populated 150 million acres of North America, now covers less than four percent of the continent.During the early nineteenth and into the early twentieth century, the American Tallgrass prairie was still a vast and diverse ecosystem, second only to the Amazonian rainforest. It provided excellent cropland soil for farmer-settlers as well as a rich landscape for large and small domestic animals to forage. But as a result of over
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallWalking with Intention: Janine Antoni’s Ear-Shaped Labyrinth2024-09-29text/htmlen-USWalking with Intention: Janine Antoni’s Ear-Shaped Labyrinth2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®183022026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Drawings from (Un)Easy Rider
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938372
<p></p>
The idea for (Un)Easy Rider first came to us during the pandemic.Suddenly, after making and performing most of our work overseas for the past fifteen years, in vain wishing for more time at home, we were finally fatally stuck here. Back in the U.S. of A with all its conspiracy theories and Clorox. In the headspace we occupied during this liminal time, it was not at all difficult to imagine that the type of work we had been doing and the way that we had been doing it was simply not going to be possible anymore. We had been citizens of the world and now we were not. We were Americans in America now, with no real idea what that meant for us—alienated as we were politically, also socially (locked in, unable to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallDrawings from (Un)Easy Rider2024-09-29text/htmlen-USDrawings from (Un)Easy Rider2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®135832026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Life in Translation: Being Elfriede Jelinek
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938373
<p></p>
For clarification: The title is not a statement of megalomania, but the reference to the film Being John Malkovich. You will remember the plot: Craig, an unemployed puppeteer accidentally discovers a small hidden door behind a filing cabinet, that leads directly into the head of Malkovich. Through a tunnel he gets sucked into the actor’s head.Something like that happened to me when I began to translate Elfriede Jelinek, albeit not directly, but gradually. Very gradually. My small hidden door was not a filing cabinet but the announcement of her receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004. It’s a long story, which I will briefly summarize as it connects to my relationship with PAJ that dates back to 1980, with
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallLife in Translation: Being Elfriede Jelinek2024-09-29text/htmlen-USLife in Translation: Being Elfriede Jelinek2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®193372026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Sun
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938374
<p></p>
What’s that, racing through space, it couldn’t be me! Let’s take a look, the tide ripples below, there are mountains too, yes, everything below me, it is me, I am it! Busy old fool, unruly Sun. The journey is laid out for me, although the route is not my doing. I am a fixed star, is something finally moving down there? Earth: Movement! I work my way through thuds of thunder, throwing flames. Every flamethrower looks old next to me. I am the mother, from whose hands whole countries receive death. It is the mother’s mission, that she must kill and gets killed by her daughter who incites someone else to the murder, because she is not up to it. She doubts herself. And the next one standing in a stupid line no longer
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallSun2024-09-29text/htmlen-USSun2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®520102026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Portable Theatre: The Paperback Stage
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938375
<p></p>
You think again of a theatre that would fit within your life. Your daughter’s early bedtime, the nightmares that have started to wake her in the dark hours. You think of the difficulty of it all, the coming and the going at the same time and place. Years ago, you began sketching hypotheses for imaginary performance when you couldn’t make it to the real thing and when the actual event so often left you wanting more. You think too of being at home and locking down. How you’ve found yourself turning to those more portable media—the drawing, the print, the photograph, the page—looking for ways these stills can cross back over into live time. You think of those who cannot cover the price at the door, those who cannot
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallPortable Theatre: The Paperback Stage2024-09-29text/htmlen-USPortable Theatre: The Paperback Stage2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®174222026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29VR Environments
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938376
<p></p>
The rise of Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed-Reality, and 360-degree storytelling in art and performance contexts necessitates new embodied “languages” as audiences/users are challenged to navigate and become immersed in mediated worlds. Commercial content-creation of immersive, interactive games narrative often rely on tropes of violence and shooting. But as visual artists and theatre practitioners explore these mediums, they are imagining and producing VR environments that offer alternate modes within these platforms, what I am calling “strategies of resistance” to more commercial exploits. I have spent the last five years trying out as much VR as I could, from pruning Bonsai trees to a Squid Game VR game, to a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallVR Environments2024-09-29text/htmlen-USVR Environments2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®272412026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Art and Media Symbiosis
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938377
<p></p>
Whatever the future of AI, the symbiosis between media is guaranteed to broker unprecedented breakthroughs in art and consciousness. A too familiar sight in restaurants or at dinner tables—smart phones next to the silverware if not in hand. Screens have become our new umbilical. Art and sociality continue to confront the compulsivity of the digital Rubicon. Broadcast mania and online obsessions accelerate as institutions undergo high-stakes crises challenging political stability and interpersonal relations. Though technology may be all consuming, art initiates breakthroughs in perception and cognition. Internet and social media have increased symbiotic co-dependence, enabling artists to bypass gatekeepers, agents
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallArt and Media Symbiosis2024-09-29text/htmlen-USArt and Media Symbiosis2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®289582026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Performance Art and the Novel
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938378
<p></p>
In The Red and the Black (1830), Stendhal employed to great effect the painting St. William of Aquitaine (1620) by the Italian painter Guercino; in The Idiot (1868), Fyodor Dostoevsky used Holbein’s Christ in the Tomb (1521) to address the idea of kenosis, or the divine emptying, as one of the central themes of his novel; and Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–1927) can be seen as an art catalogue dotted by the works of painters that range from Rembrandt and Velázquez to Gustave Moreau and James Whistler. The integration of painting into the novel did not only update the literary device of ekphrasis that goes back to Homer but produced a sub-genre that used painting to question and transform the novel’s
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallPerformance Art and the Novel2024-09-29text/htmlen-USPerformance Art and the Novel2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®314872026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29Editing, A Life
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/938379
<p></p>
Dear PAJ Reader:Over the years, I’ve written extensively in these pages about the founding of PAJ, in 1976, emphasizing our long commitment to interdisciplinary work, criticism, and artists’ writings. Now, it is time to tell you that I have decided to end my editorship of the journal, which will cease publication with this issue, PAJ 138. Working with many of the great theatre and literary minds, experiencing the work of the most influential contemporary artists, helping writers to establish an individual voice, and simply having the great good fortune of a public forum, the opportunity of editing the journal has given me a life of tremendous joy and enrichment. To a certain extent, I feel that PAJ’s work is done
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-11T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/149/image/coversmallEditing, A Life2024-09-29text/htmlen-USEditing, A Life2024-09-292024TWOProject MUSE®86382026-05-11T00:00:00-05:002024-09-29