Lang College-Arts Division

J ohn Jesurun has been working in New York for more than two decades as a playwright, director, and media artist, in Deep Sleep, Snow, and Slight Return creating theatre productions that incorporate video and film in live performance, and, in Faust and Philoctetes, revisioning classics. At the same time he has written and staged more than sixty episodes of his long-running Chang in a Void Moon, which he calls a "living film serial." A pioneer in the use of media in theatrical performance, Jesurun has explored theatrical styles that extend from storytelling to drama to music theatre and computer-based theatre through his ongoing challenge to the "reality" of performance space.

The editor and publisher of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art gives an overview of the founding and evolution of the journal, which celebrated its fortieth year in 2016, focusing on the transformations of the theatre, and their impact on publishing, from its early days to the present. PAJ, as it is known, began at a time when the experimental theatre was in the early days of its development, and the journal helped to define and shape contemporary performance vocabularies. Now, four decades later, PAJ is participating in the writing of performance history. The essay addresses the continuing limitations of the two histories of performance: one in theatre and one in visual arts, and its impact on historical research.

In addition, considerable attention is given to changes in the larger role of critical writing and scholarship in the field and the turn toward specialization and theory. The author is critical of the inbred nature of scholarship and research methods now in evidence, and the remoteness of theoretical writing from the larger intellectual world. The essay also highlights the need to recognize that there are artworks that are subtler and contemplative and that not all writing about performance needs cast it in political terms of resistance or intervention.

Practical topics such as editorial approach, submissions, commissioning and working with authors is given detailed attention. With regard to journal publications, the situation of too many of the same subjects or artists covered in multiple journals, self-censorship and the lack of investigative reporting are highlighted as of some concern.  The essay establishes the importance of maintaining a journal as a public voice in an age of increasing attacks on media and journalism, alongside the effects of digitization and the loss of print media.

T he Wooster Group brings together the intertextual, the intercultural, and intermedia in a new de nition of the liber mundi. This theatre chooses all species of texts from the cultural heritage, then stages their dissemination in new spaces and environments, generating a multiplicity of narratives and images. This is the legacy of John Cage's "library of sounds" and of Rauschenberg's mixedmedia works. As an aesthetic strategy it takes for granted that in using the archives of art and culture as a database the issue is not one of ownership, but of distribution. Viewed in another light, the deterritorialization process of this kind of theatre, if extended into the world of cyberspace, changes the very nature of the way we think of art and authorship, composition and interpretation, and the notion of boundaries between art forms, art and everyday life, one culture and another, the created and the ready-made. This approach highlights process-the artwork and the work of art. It is more and more apparent that the postwar American avant-garde model, based on the cutting up, quoting, redistribution, and recontextualization of the world archive of accumulated texts, images, and sounds pre gured the digital mode of perceiving space and time and meaning. This is the new design of information. BOOKS Inside House/Lights is Gertrude Stein's Dr. Faustus Lights the Lights, inside Nayatt School is T. S. Eliot's The Cocktail Party, inside Point Judith is Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night and Jim Strahs's The Rig; Thornton Wilder's Our Town is the center of Route 1 and 9 (The Last Act); The Crucible shapes L.S.D. Brace Up! stages Chekhov's Three Sisters and fragments of Brace Up itself appear in Fish Story. Then there are the lms, the paintings, the songs, the dances, the television shows. All of them fragments-replacing, restructuring, recreating, pushing the frame. The text of Frank Dell's Temptation of Saint Antony, includes a long compilation of writings and other media: the Flaubert classic, Lafcadio Hearn's "Argument" which prefaced 2 j PAJ 74 his early translation of the French text, material by Lenny Bruce who was sometimes known as Frank Dell, books on magic and spiritualism, original writing by Jim Strahs (the Group's in-house playwright), and scenes based on Ingmar Bergman's lm The Magician. The frantic voice of Dell at the end of the text explodes, "the the books in the library the the they run they play they see radical things." Foucault characterized Flaubert's work as "the book of books," a fanciful library of books that can be "taken up, fragmented, displaced, combined, distanced by dreamy thought.. . ." It is this French tradition, and the later English-language examples of Joyce and Pound and Burroughs, that are the antecedents for the Wooster Group's textual and rhetorical styles. Even as it breaks open and reconstitutes literary material, the Wooster Group staging still exudes a modernist belief in the signi cance of art as a "language" within a work. Books read, books open, books turned inside out, texts cut apart, turned upside down; books on the oor, words spilling underfoot. The trilogy, the epilogue, parts one and two, parentheses, exclamation point, a work-in-progress. Pull a quote from here, take that paragraph, take out the whole section, cut the play apart, redo it, retranslate, show it on video, record it, perform it live, do it all at once. Collage is the aesthetic strategy at play. This is texture rather than text; theatre "pieces," precisely. The Wooster Group are not beloved readers. They are browsers who skim the pages of books, randomly collected. They like the sound of words rather than their meaning. They are more interested in passages than in writing. This is the contemporary style of readingscattered, naive, non-linear. Texts that can be interrupted. A book that can be opened to any page.