'Timelines: Writings And Conversations' By Bonnie Marranca Out From PAJ Publications

PAJ Publications, one of TCG's partner publishers, has announced the publication of Timelines: Writings and Conversations by Bonnie Marranca.

The new volume of essays and conversations by arts critic Bonnie Marranca, featuring her work of the last dozen years, turns to subjects that include the catastrophic imagination, cultural history, performance and drawing, landscape and writing, as well issues of beauty, emotion, and the spiritual in art.

Thinking about the artist in the world and the nature of artistic process, she extends her longtime interests in theatre, visual arts, media, dance, and drama to the work of Joan Jonas, Caryl Churchill, Meredith Monk, Raimund Hoghe, Dick Higgins, Etel Adnan, and others in the thirty-four pieces in the volume.

A chapter entitled "Editorial I," focuses on the author's long-time editorship of PAJ Publications and views on criticism and education. "Writing in the Landscape," explores new text and image approaches to short-form critical writing. There are also personal reflections on the recent loss of Carolee Schneemann, Maria Irene Fornés, and Sam Shepard.

"Over the years I have been drawn to Bonnie Marranca's writings and to her sensibilities, which are always exquisitely informed, personally engaged, theoretically penetrating, and poetically illuminating. Her new book of reflections and conversations is a welcome arrival at this moment of great social and political change. The breadth of her interests originates in the cultural life of New York City and then spreads out into the world. She tosses a wide net across the cultural waters, giving us access to her conversations with and musings about some of the most compelling artists of the past several decades." -Anne Bogart

From the Preface: "This contemporary moment calls out for artistic forces to rethink their ways of working and organizing and valuing. In terms of the theatre culture, now is the time for a fearless awakening of contemporary practices, eliciting new models of writing and performing. If drama, the mainstay of the theatrical repertoire, is predicated on the search for truth, to explore what that means in an era that has disavowed its very idea opens up a resounding field of inquiry. Looked at from another perspective, the forced absence of all live arts provokes new equations of online performance and spectatorship that are certain to impact their evolution. What depths of the human imagination lie in wait in darkened theatres?"

Bonnie Marranca is founding publisher and editor of the Obie-Award winning PAJ Publications and PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art. (1976- ) She is the author of Performance Histories, Ecologies of Theatre, and Theatrewritings. Her edited volumes of plays, essays, and interviews include Conversations with Meredith Monk, New Europe: plays from the continent, Plays for the End of the Century, and The Theatre of Images, a seminal work on American Theatre. Her writings have been translated into two-dozen languages. She is Professor Emerita of Theatre at The New School/Lang College of Liberal Arts.